Re: Genders (was Re: Láadan and woman's speak
| From: | Jarkko Hietaniemi <jhi@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Sunday, June 4, 2000, 18:58 |
|---|
On Sun, Jun 04, 2000 at 01:27:00PM -0400, Nik Taylor wrote:
> Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote:
> > Okay, allow me to quibble a bit: "no grammatical gender correlating
> > with the physical gender".
>
> Gender in linguistics doesn't mean biological sex, in most of the
> European languages it roughly corresponds to sex (which is how gender
> came to be used for biological sex), but that doesn't apply everywhere.
I know that...e.g. in French and German the connection is stronger
(but very complex; the classic example being that 'girl' is a neuter,
because of a diminutive suffix), whereas in e.g. English and Swedish
the connection is gone, the different articles (and in Swedish also
the plular forms) serving only pronunciation, (and in Swedish often
certain endings requiring certain article and the corresponding
declination).
--
$jhi++; # http://www.iki.fi/jhi/
# There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'.
# It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen