Re: Genders (Forgive me for this :) )

artabanos@mail.utexas.edu writes:
>Why *should* English have any morphological marking of gender on nouns?
>Why *should* any language mark *anything* morphologically?  (Chinese
>comes pretty close to not doing the latter)
>
>(Not trying to be aggressive here -- just trying to uproot that person's
>basic assumptions about the way language works)
Well, she herself said she didn't know much about languages, so i guess it
didn't occur to her that any given language doesn't need gender to
function.  I must say, I used to wonder why the romance languages needed
gender, until I found out their histories.






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