Re: The pitfall of Chinese/Mandarin

On Sun, 9 Dec 2001, Andreas Johansson wrote:

> Tristan wrote:
> >Even I, a native English speaker who has never spoken a language without
> >he/she/it, mucks them up, as well as brother and sister (so I normally
> >fall back on `sibling')...
>
> That's another weirdity of learning English in school - they tell you that
> there simply is no direct translation of the Swedish word _syskon_
> "sibling", and that if you desperately need to translate ie you have to use
> "brother or sister" (unless you've got a feminist teacher - she would tell
> you to write "sisiter or brother"!:-)).
Well, if it's any consolation, `sibling' isn't the kind of word people
randomly learn like they do `brother' or `sister'---it's generally
specifically learnt.

Tristan

anstouh@yahoo.com.au

War doesn't prove who's right, just who's left.
                       - BSD Games' Fortune