Re: Homosexuality and gender identity

Quoting Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>:

> 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.
I usually reach for _Weib_ when I need an example for this. Is there any
explanation for this one to be found?

                                                   Andreas

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