Re: Gender

Christophe wrote:
>
>En réponse à Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>:
>
> >
> > On a tangential note, in Swedish _människa_ "human" is female by
> > default.
>
>That's a strange one! A former neuter that was reanalysed as feminine due
>to
>the ending?
I THINK it's originally _man_ "man (=male human)" with a feminine ending.
Perhaps Daniel or BP knows for sure. It's, BTW, usually sortened to _mänska_
(["mEn%xa] in my 'lect).

>
> > For some possibly good reason, feminists never complain about that
> > one.
> >
>
>Which proves that they are not as much feminists as they are anti-
>masculinists :))) . If they were really for the equality of both sexes,
>they
>would also complain about this one. BTW, does Swedish have a neuter gender?
No, we've got two neuter genders. Arguably, feminine and masculine aren't
proper genders but merely subgroups of the n-gender. There is a vague
tendency for t-gender words to be inanimate and for n-gender words to be
animate, but there are any number of exceptions.

                                             Andreas

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