Date: Sun, 6 Jan 2002 07:35:33 +0100 From: Cliff Sarginson <cliff@raggedclown.net> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: The BSD daemon Message-ID: <20020106063533.GB1003@raggedclown.net> In-Reply-To: <200201051947.g05JlX602925@fac13.ds.psu.edu> References: <200201041523.g04FNr478167@lurza.secnetix.de> <200201051947.g05JlX602925@fac13.ds.psu.edu>
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On Sat, Jan 05, 2002 at 02:47:32PM -0500, dochawk@psu.edu wrote: > Oliver orated, > > > > And by the way, it isn't "his". According to Kirk, it > > is neither male nor female. I don't know why people keep > > thinking it's a male. There's nothing that supports that > > assumption. ;-) > Mmm, try speaking Dutch. A company is referred to as "she" A train as "he".. etc.. The problem is that there are (used to be) in languages male, female and neutral nouns. The mistake is to think these designations have anything to do with gender, they often do not. They are technical grammatical terms. Dutch used to have male/female/neuter nouns. The male/female ones got rolled into one. So there are two words in Dutch for "the" .. "de" and "het". "De" usually being for what used to be feminine/masculine nouns, "het" for the others. There are some arcane rules for working out whether a "de" or "het" should be used, one of the most interesting is that Dutch makes a great use of diminutives, by adding "tje" or "je" to the end of a noun it makes the object "smaller", or cuter :). Sometimes however it makes it a completely different word altogether, e.g. "telefoon" = "telephone" but a "telefoontje" which should mean "a small telephone" means in fact "a telephone call". Now all diminutives are "het" words, even if what they make diminutive is a "de" word. So the masculine feminine neuter thing is all nonsense when you see the word "het meisje", since the -je, makes it a diminutive it has to take the neutral "the" which is "het". A "meisje" is a young girl. :) I even had a question about FreeBSD but I have forgotten what it was now.. -- Regards Cliff To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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