Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2001 10:00:58 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> Cc: Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org>, "G. Adam Stanislav" <adam@whizkidtech.net>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Gender in Indo-European languages (was: Laugh: [Fwd: Microsoft Security Bulletin MS01-008]) Message-ID: <20010209100058.F11145@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <20010208150641.A15166@lpt.ens.fr>; from rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in on Thu, Feb 08, 2001 at 03:06:41PM %2B0100 References: <3A81DDC9.EF6D7D84@originative.co.uk> <3.0.6.32.20010207223155.009d42a0@mail85.pair.com> <20010208110159.E2429@lpt.ens.fr> <xzpzofxffa2.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no> <20010208150641.A15166@lpt.ens.fr>
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On Thursday, 8 February 2001 at 15:06:41 +0100, Rahul Siddharthan wrote: > Dag-Erling Smorgrav said on Feb 8, 2001 at 14:57:57: >> BTW, Norwegian has a very useful word which means "the concerned >> person", which makes it relatively easy to construct gender-neutral >> phrases. The only way to do that in English is to "play the pronoun >> game", i.e. use (gender-neutral) plural forms instead of singular >> forms, which makes for some pretty corny sentences... > > And I learned of this amusing situation in French: the plural pronoun, > unlike in English, is gender-biased; it's "elles" only when the gender > of all parties is feminine, otherwise (for all-masculine or mixed) > it's "ils". So normally when you see "elles" you think the reference > is to women. But the word "personne" for person is feminine, so > legal documents often start off with "personnes" and continue with > "elles" even though there's no assumption that they're referring to > women; if you read such a thing from the middle, you may get > confused... This is a good example of what I said in my last message. In German legal contracts, the word for a company is "Gesellschaft", which is also feminine singular. The same considerations apply. Greg -- Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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