Re: The Birds and the Bees of Gender

On 3-30-99, Steg B. wrote: "Isn't the singular of cattle "cow/bull"?"

If humour isn't marked, forgive me, but the plural of cow is cows and the
plural of bull, bulls. Cattle is the term for a collective, ie. a group of
said animals. In this case the collective is treated like a plural noun.
"The cattle are moving north." This is the same as people. The plural of
man and woman is men and women, respectively. The collective noun is
people, which was often treated as the suppletive plural of person. Person,
people. Nowadays I hear 'persons' as a way to make a nongendered plural of
h. sapiens, as opposed to the collective noun people. Weird. This is
different from words like 'mob [of kangaroo]' because there can be mobs,
clutches, etc. but not peoples, at least not in that abstract sense. You do
hear 'peoples of the world,' but that is the use of the word people similar
to mob or clutch, a group of x animals. This latter use may be as old or
older than the nonplural collective form; I'm not sure. But the two are
clearly distinct uses.

This is weird, but not as weird as Akkadian, where abstract terms have
collective forms that change gender and number all the time. Like
'strength,' which is treated like a collective but takes many forms -
singular m. emu:qum, f. emuqtum, m. pl. emu:qu:, f. emu:qa:tum. You can use
any of these forms as the term for strength; there is no correlation with
gender and number for any external reference. It's just personal preference!

BB
Brian Betty, Front Desk
Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders
http://www.glad.org
Tel. (617) 426-1350