Re: Gender (was: LANGUAGE LAWS)
From: | Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...> |
Date: | Saturday, October 24, 1998, 5:28 |
Mathias M. Lassailly wrote:
> Of course it's consistent at the time it's created. It's never
> whimsical then.
Maybe. But, I suspect that, except in cases where there is a residue
("left-over") gender, or one that can ratinally divide everything in the
world (e.g., animate/inanimate or human/non-human), that there are some
nouns that are arbitrarily placed in one gender or another, of course,
since we've never been able to witness a gender system being born, we
can't know for sure.
--
"It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father
was hanged." - Irish proverb
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