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

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

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