Re: French (was Re: Re: Optimum number of symbols)

En réponse à Michael Poxon <m.poxon@...>:

> I think part of the confusion here is using the terms 'masculine' and
> 'feminine', again a hangover from classical grammar. No French person
> thinks
> of a chair as being feminine (in the 'womanly' sense).
No, but it can be used (as some comedians do in their sketches) and has been
used to link in a way or another women with feminine words and men with
masculine words, or make fun out of the "discrepancies" that such a view can
create (like for instance the fact that the bra or the lipstick are masculine
in French, while the car, the motorbike and tie are feminine :)) - I must say
it was a hilarious sketch. French comedians are slowly losing this humour of
the play on words and I find that extremely bad :((( -). So there is a
tendency, due to the fact that people always want to make connections and build
structures where they don't exist (reminds me of a sketch of my favourite
comedian Muriel Robin called "le Dictionnaire", or how to make people laugh to
death for ten minutes by just opening a dictionary and read :))) ).

> Ships are still feminine in English (and incidentally, I have never
> heard
> any other plural form of ox other than oxen) because the old sailors
> felt
> themselves to be as 'bonded' to their ships as to their wives!
Strangely enough, I have already decided that in Maggel, a language full of
excentricities, ships will be masculine, and that the word "captain" will
actually be a compound meaning "ship's wife" and keeping the gender of the
word "wife" :)))) , that's to say feminine, even though most captains are
male :)) . Note that Maggel has three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter,
and unlike most gendered languages doesn't have a straightforward way to change
the gender of a noun, even if it refers to humans, but also is very strong on
keeping the grammatical gender when it clashes with the natural gender, even
with the use of pronouns :))) .

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.