Re: History of French

From: Brian M. Scott (b.scott_at_csuohio.edu)
Date: 09/23/04 

Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 16:23:54 -0400

On Thu, 23 Sep 2004 21:31:26 +0200, Mxsmanic
<mxsmanic@hotmail.com> wrote in
<news:4496l0pqvul42hmg2l4k9ghi7vvd3sc8n7@4ax.com> in
sci.lang:

> Brian M. Scott writes:

>> Neither are the Continental Germanic languages, which have
>> either masculine, feminine, and neuter (e.g., German,
>> Nynorsk) or neuter and non-neuter (e.g., Dutch, Swedish).

> So?

You're still trying to hide from your own words by removing
context, I see. Or are you just too stupid to learn to use
a newsreader properly?

You made a claim that the use of gendered pronouns to refer
to objects that have no sex was sexist. Paul asked whether
this applied to the majority of IE languages in which more
than half of all nouns are either masculine or feminine.
You responded:

   If a language has no neuter gender, then obviously
   everything must be a "he" or a "she." But English is
   not in that category.
   
I foolishly expected you to have the minimal intelligence
necessary to infer from my comment that German, for
instance, uses gendered pronouns to refer to objects that
have no sex and to clarify whether your claim applied to
German. (If you can't even make that simple inference, it's
no wonder that poetry and serious scholarship are beyond
you.)

Since I'm here, I'll point out that contrary to your
apparent belief, it is not the case that in French
everything is a 'he' or a 'she': you're confusing
grammatical gender with sexual gender.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Gender in language
    ... or taking a semantic analogue and using the gender of that, ... But masculine and feminine are not especially marked in German. ... I’ve only seen das Baguette in the wild, ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: gender in indo-european languages
    ... >> My German immigrant girlfriend once told me that her immigrant ... >> particular gender, ... > to use masculine when writing and neuter when talking. ... > Ukrainian, the word is feminine. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Gender in language (was Re: way-OT: regularity of german v. english [was: <snip>])
    ... >>yeah, or a fork being feminine, spoon being masculine, and knife being ... >>neuter in german. ... But in German they can be plain perverse: ...
    (Debian-User)
  • Re: Not really that OT Spanish Language teaching DVDs etc
    ... In most Indo-European-based languages, ... (Thus, in German, the word for 'girl', is gramatically not ... feminine, but neuter). ... But if you try talking to native people and you use the wrong gender, ...
    (rec.outdoors.fishing.fly)
  • Re: gender in indo-european languages
    ... > nouns being masculine or feminine (or neuter where applicable) in the ... My German immigrant girlfriend once told me that her immigrant ... family assigned a gender to English words that they incorporated ...
    (sci.lang)
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