Re: Genders

From: "H. S. Teoh

> Strictly speaking, Mandarin doesn't actually have grammatical gender at
> all. I suspect the only place grammatical gender actually appears is in
> *written* feminine pronouns, as I said before... AFAIK it doesn't happen
> anywhere else. But IIRC, I've actually seen written pronouns "inflected"
> (if you call it that) for ... umm... whaddya call it? Written differently
> when it refers to God. In fact, that's how the "feminine" written pronouns
> are: e.g., "ta1" (nasal, dunno what's the right notation) is written with
> two parts; the "feminine" written form just replaces the "human/man" part
> on the left with the logograph of "female"; and similarly, a part derived
> from God(?) becomes the replacement in the written pronouns referring to
> deity. But AFAIK, this makes absolutely no difference in pronunciation at
> all, and so basically only exists in writing.
My take on this has been that somewhere a Euro missionary said, "Oh dear,
the Chinese can't grammatically distinguish between masculine and feminine,
pooh pooh. How backward." Whereupon those Chinese who care about such things
had to scramble to show that, indeed, Chinese *was* as sophisticated as the
Eurolangs and wildly overcompensated. For "ta1", you can have:

ta1  person radical  he (originally the catch-all character)
ta1  woman radical  she
ta1   cow radical  it (ref. to animals)
ta1  revelation radical  He (ref. to God)
ta1   roof radical (different character from above)  it  used as a "dummy"
value; rarely used, though translationese uses it more frequently.

"Ni3", "you" can exhibit a similar distinction between "you, masc.", "you,
fem." and "You, God". Less seldom used than "ta1", though "you, fem." seems
to occur in the lyrics of many Cantopop love ballads.

Kou