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

Andreas Johansson wrote:

>Quoting Peter Bleackley <Peter.Bleackley@...>:
>
>
>
>>Staving Andreas Johansson:
>>
>>
>>
>>>Hm, I should find a fanatic feminist and ask her (for some reason, fanatic
>>>feminists are almost unfailingly female ...) what are her views on 'lects
>>>(like
>>>mine) that keep the fem~masc distinction on adjectives vs those who do not.
>>>There could be an interesting clash between different species of political
>>>correctness - downplaying gender differences vs allowing everyone to keep
>>>his/her native way of speaking. The way out would probably be that
>>>
>>>
>>"standard"
>>
>>
>>>usage keeps the distinction (altho less consistently than do I), and that
>>>anything that's standard or prescriptionist is necessarily bad. :)
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>At the risk of causing offence to people who are probably far too easily
>>offended anyway, I'd like to point out that fanatical feminists are bad
>>linguists in failing to realise that grammatical gender has nothing to do
>>with sex (except possibly in some of Herman Miller's rodent languages,
>>where practically everything seems to have something to do with sex).
>>
>>
>
>Actually, these adjective endings map pretty neatly to sex/gender. A word like
>_doktor_, in my 'lect, requires different agreement depending on whether it
>refers to a man or woman.
>
>                                                               Andreas
>
>
>
There was an interesting study i read about somewhere, where they took
the same words (eg bridge) and translated it into lots of different
languages which all had grammatical (masculine/femine) gender, but which
didn't necessarily assign the same gender to it. So for instance:

spanish: el puente
italian: il ponte
french: le pont
german: Brücke (feminine and I can't remember the feminine article in
german, I'm just looking some of these up for examples sake)
russian: moct (m)
welsh: pont (f)

Okay, a slight overrepresentation of Indo European languages there, its
obvious most of the words are quite closely related... but at least
there's a mix of genders. Anyway, this study first found out what kind
of qualities speakers of a language associated with masculinity or
femininity, and then asked a (separate I think) group of people to
describe what qualities they thought each of the words they'd selected
had. They found that people tended to give qualities considered more
masculine to masculine words, and more feminine to feminine words... I
don't know if that's because there's method to deciding if a word is
masculine or feminine, or if its because the assignment is pretty random
but after a word has been assigned a gender that influences the thinking
of the speakers of such a language... whichever way, gender ideas and
grammatical gender are related even when you're talking about objects
which have no innate gender, like the bridge example above.

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