En réponse à Henrik Theiling :
>Hi!
>
>Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> writes:
> > that person. For instance, even a "mädchen" is "sie" in Standard German,
> > not "es"! :) ).
>
>Only for younger people. It changed towards that pronoun in the last
>two decades or so.
Ah, OK. I only know how it was explained in my Teach Yourself German :)) .
>Yes, exactly. One of the very, very few words that really has a
>different gender is 'Weib', the old word for 'woman', which is neuter.
>Nowadays that's derogatory. Actually, I could not come up with
>another good example.
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?).
And even then, I don't consider it really an exception as for human beings
the sex of only a few animals does matter.
>Also, I would not count the examples of derogatory words that often
>use the opposite gender either to exactly be insulting (e.g. towards
>gay people) or simple because a word with a different gender in used
>(e.g. 'Schwein' (neuter) - 'pig') to refer to humans.
Indeed. We have here a transfer of use of a noun.
> > But if you take simple roots rather than compounds, their
> > grammatical gender is always the same as the natural gender,
>
>No, that's too strong for my taste. Gender *is* grammatical in German
>instead of logical.
Never said anything else.
> You should use 'usually' in that sentence. It is
>not strange at all to refer to humans using words with non-fitting
>gender.
But as you said, it's usually words that originally refer to something
else, or rare things like ""Mädchen" or "Weib".
Christophe Grandsire.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.