Re: "Gender-free masculine pronoun"? Absurd. [was: Re: Crossposting[was:Re: Traditional gender-free "he" [was: Re: "16 and 276 are 292"?No. [was:Re: Lack of vocabulary in English?]]]]

From: Jacques Guy (jguy_at_alphalink.com.au)
Date: 03/16/05 

Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2005 19:04:10 +1000

Carmen L. Abruzzi wrote:

> Eventually I found that he would respond, while lazing on the living
> room floor, to the question "where's a tail?" (appopriately intoned) by
> waving his tail in the air for a few seconds, seeming to have
> understood, and even enjoyed responding to, the question.

> But I soon found that he would react in the same way to the question
> "who's in jail?".

That is perfectly natural, and is to be expected. The two utterances
are acoustically close.

Koreans have trouble hearing the difference between French
"poisson", "boisson" and "poison" (fish, drink, poison).
And you'd expect a cat to distinguish between "tail" and
"jail", and between "who's in" and "where's a"?

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