Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2001 13:48:36 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org> Cc: "G. Adam Stanislav" <adam@whizkidtech.net>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Gender in non-Indo-European languages (was: Gender in Indo-European languages) Message-ID: <20010211134836.C75244@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <xzpy9ve8vub.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no>; from des@ofug.org on Sat, Feb 10, 2001 at 03:18:52PM %2B0100 References: <20010209095838.E11145@wantadilla.lemis.com> <3A81DDC9.EF6D7D84@originative.co.uk> <3.0.6.32.20010207223155.009d42a0@mail85.pair.com> <20010208110159.E2429@lpt.ens.fr> <xzpzofxffa2.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no> <20010209095838.E11145@wantadilla.lemis.com> <20010209114704.A62359@lpt.ens.fr> <3.0.6.32.20010209085026.009e28e0@mail85.pair.com> <20010210101652.Q16260@wantadilla.lemis.com> <xzpy9ve8vub.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Saturday, 10 February 2001 at 15:18:52 +0100, Dag-Erling Smorgrav wrote: > Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> writes: >>> Slovak does not need to say he, she, etc. Instead, it just uses the >>> verb in the third person, and implies the appropriate pronoun. >> This is typical of the slavonic languages, of course. > > Ooh, that reminds me. > > Finnish doesn't have gender. At all. It's been a long time and I don't > have my TY at hand, but as I recall there are two third person > singular pronouns - one for animate and one for inanimate objects. And > in daily speech, the pronoun is usually contracted or even dropped - > "Minä olen norjalainen" (I am Norwegian) is abbreviated to "Mä olen > norjalainen" or even "Olen norjalainen". The interrogative form is > indicated by a verb suffix, so there's no need for any pronoun there > either even though there's no change in intonation: "Oletko sinä > norjalainen?" (are you Norwegian?) can be abbreviated to "Oletko > norjalainen?" because the -ko ending distinguishes it from the > affirmative "(sinä) olet norjalainen" (you are Norwegian). Hmm. This is interesting. Finnish isn't Indo-European, of course, and the original speakers of the Finno-Ugric languages came from North-East Asia. In Chinese, a question is indicated by a -ma at the end of the sentence, and in Malay it's indicated by -ka. Both of these languages also have no gender, though there are some different words for males and females of recognizable species. I wonder how it works in Hungarian and Turkish. Greg -- Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20010211134836.C75244>