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

From: Peter T. Daniels (grammatim_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 03/22/05 

Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 12:58:52 GMT

Claude Beaudouin wrote:
>
> Wow. What a discussion.
>
> In my limited language education, my professors explained that
> linguistic/grammatical gender is separate and unrelated to biological
> gender. But maybe today they would not be considered PC.
>
> Imagine if we start discussing the injustices and appropriateness of the
> gender of nouns in the romance languages. Why is hand (la main) feminin
> and finger (le doigt) masculin in French? Think of all the possibilites
> for speculation and and analysis in newsgroups such as this one, for
> this example and thousands more one could devise.

It's much less of an issue in a language with grammatical gender, where
gender assignment is so easily seen to be arbitrary. In English, with
only vestigial grammatical gender, it becomes a problem. 

-- 
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@att.net

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