Gender (was: Homosexuality etc.)

Christophe Grandsire scripsit:

> The only examples I could find are animal nouns which don't change for
> gender of the animal (or does German have pairs of nouns for all
> animals?).
I don't think it does, any more than English or French does.  But the
question of occupational nouns is more interesting.  German has a whole
series of gender-marked pairs like Lehrer/Lehrerin, but not everywhere:
we have Ingenieur, but not *Ingenieurin, AFAIK.  (If this example is
wrong or obsolete, pick another.)  So if one refers to a woman as "der
Ingenieur", the formal rules demand the pronoun "er" be used, and I
think this is just about the point where Germans rebel even in writing.
Evidently the Maggels are more consistent.

--
John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com
"The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own
skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among
other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague."  --Edsger Dijkstra

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