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

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