Re: Nauradi

2008/11/24 Yahya Abdal-Aziz <yahya@...>

> Strictly speaking, Malay (and its close cousin Indonesian) is a language
> "without unique word[s] for bull and cow".  It does have _noun phrases_
> with those meanings, but they are rarely used:
>
> "lembu" - cow, bull, calf or cattle
> "lembu betina" - cow = cattle + female (of animals)
> "lembu jantan" - bull = cattle + male (of animals)
>
Vietnamese is similar. It does have words specifically for male are female
things, but only when it feels like it. :-) For elder siblings it has (I'm
leaving out the diacritics, or it will most probably screw up horribly)
"anh" for brother and "chi" for sister. For younger siblings it's "em" for
both sexes. Differentiating can be done by saying "male younger sibling"
("em trai") or "female younger sibling" ("em gai"). For cows and bulls the
last applies: "bo" is cattle, "bo duc" is a bull, "bo cai" is a cow. For
grandparents the first applies: "ong" is grandfather, "ba" is grandmother,
no genderless word, "grandparents" is "ong ba". When it comes to pronouns:
in normal speech they are not used, but family relations and the like are
used instead (ong, ba, anh, chi, em, ong ba...), in literary and in
derogatory language pronouns *are* used, and there it has the ordinary
difference for sex.

Greets
David

--
Idustvok va yentelkvil gifpir, puk gifpir, ivan kitil.