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Re: Umlauts (was Re: Elves and Ill Bethisad)

From:Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Date:Wednesday, October 29, 2003, 12:49
Quoting John Cowan <cowan@...>:

> Jan van Steenbergen scripsit: > > > On the other hand, my grandmother used to be addressed as "Mevrouw de > > Voorzitter" ("Mrs. Chairman"), while the true feminine form would have > > been "voorzitster". > > English vacillates between "Madam Chairman" and "Madam Chair", depending > on whether women would rather be labeled male or inanimate.
This is fortunately no problem in Swedish, since the word for "chairperson" is _ordförande_, which, being a nominalized active participle, does not have different gender forms (not even a separate t-gender form, so it works for robots too!*). * It even works if we go by grammatical gender, according to which _robot_ is (non-fem, non-masc) n-gender! Andreas