Re: Epicene pronoun in english?

When I learned Ancient Greek at school, we were
teached the following canonic example:

*Ta zoa trekhei* (omega in zoa)

meaning 'the animals run', or 'are running'.

What's interesting is that 'zoa' in a neuter 3p, and
trekhei a 3s.

This sentence was used in college folklore as a
crypted warning, meaning that there were supervisors
around, so you'd better keep quiet.

--- "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...> wrote:
> Joe wrote:
> > Really?  That seems a very odd situation.  No
> wonder you Americans have
> > all this fun trying to invent epicene pronouns.
> You would never use
> > 'is'.  Just as you use 'are' for 'you', and not
> 'art', you use 'are' for
> > 'they'.
>
> No, we use "is" all the time -- though, as with
> y'all, it's normally
> a clitic.  The problem is that number agreement is
> just not very well
> understood in the English speaking world.  It's not
> that Americans use
> morphological number and Brits use semantic number:
> we both say "the
> United States *is*", afterall.
>
>
=====
Philippe Caquant

"Le langage est source de malentendus."
(Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Search - Find what you’re looking for faster
http://search.yahoo.com