On Friday, December 7, 2001, at 06:13 , laokou wrote:
> From: "Anton Sherwood"
>
>> Many languages use the same word for `he' and `she'. (Finnish and
>> Swahili come to mind.)
>
> And Hungarian.
>
Korean too. :-)
>> It's not a "mistake", merely an extreme example
>> of the simple fact that different languages classify the universe
>> differently.
>
<puzzled look> In what sense is it "extreme"? (Just curious for a
clarification.) In Korean it gets even better/worse: the "3rd person
pronoun" in Korean really is a demonstrative. <G>
> I think so. Some turn o' the century holier-than-thou Westerner somewhere
> said something to the effect, "Chinese is so primitive, it doesn't even
> have
> words to distinguish 'he' and 'she'." Whereupon the Chinese did an "I'll
> show you!" and whipped up pronouns that put the Eurolangs to shame:
>
<laugh>
> Are there others? The point is, they're all pronounced "ta1", usage of
> these
> characters is far from standard among the populace, and everyone seems to
> be
> getting along just fine, thank you very much.
>
> There's also "ni3" with the "woman" radical for a feminine "you", but this
> usage seems to be almost exclusive to treacly love songs (Hey, baby, you
> hurt me real bad.....; I can't live without yooouuu)
ROTFL! A treacly-love-song pronoun...I wonder what other whimsipronouns
could be devised.
a saccharine country song pronoun
an angry heavy metal song pronoun
etc.
Yoon Ha Lee [requiescat@cityofveils.com]
http://pegasus.cityofveils.com
shin: (n.) A device for finding furniture in the dark.