Re: Homosexuality and gender identity

En réponse à John Cowan :


>Okay, that sounds basically the same as Standard German.
Except that Standard German has a pretty strong connection between natural
and grammatical gender (for instance, pronouns will refer to the natural
gender of a person, not the grammatical gender of the noun used to refer to
that person. For instance, even a "mädchen" is "sie" in Standard German,
not "es"! :) ).

Also, even this "mädchen" example that people always pull out of their hat
to say how illogical German gender is is about as right as the "ghoti"
example to prove English's "illogical" orthography. It just shows those
people don't know enough about the language. "Mädchen" is neuter only
because it has the "-chen" diminutive ending which makes a word mandatorily
neuter (like its extremely commonly used Dutch equivalent -je :) ). But if
you take simple roots rather than compounds, their grammatical gender is
always the same as the natural gender, *when the referrent does have
gender* (when it doesn't, like objects and abstractions, gender is more or
less arbitrary. But so it is in English). True exceptions (and I don't
count the "mädchen" thing as an exception) are quite rare actually.

That said, Maggel does fit the popular view of gender in Standard German,
except that it's even worse :) .

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.

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