Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Thu, 8 Feb 2001 20:01:39 -0800 (PST)
From:      Jamie Bowden <ragnar@sysabend.org>
To:        Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
Cc:        Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org>, Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in>, "G. Adam Stanislav" <adam@whizkidtech.net>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Gender in Indo-European languages (was: Laugh: [Fwd: Microsoft Security Bulletin MS01-008])
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.10.10102081958130.43160-100000@moo.sysabend.org>
In-Reply-To: <20010209102117.G11145@wantadilla.lemis.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Fri, 9 Feb 2001, Greg Lehey wrote:

:On Thursday,  8 February 2001 at  9:26:51 -0800, Jamie Bowden wrote:

:> One can easily be gender neutral if one so chooses.

:One would sound somewhat stilted referring to ones possessions.

One's posessions would be referred to as 'it'.

:> The out of use thee, thine, and thou are all gender neutral pronouns
:> as well.

:"Thine" is a particular case of the possessive adjective "thy"
:(specifically, accusative).  In older days "thy" definitely had
:gender, though it's now degenerate.  "Thou" and "thee" are the same
:word in nominative and accusative respectively.  They're personal
:pronouns (second person singular), and I find it difficult to see how
:they would address the problem at hand any better than "you" and
:"your".

Ack, deprecated versions of you and yours.  I could swear Englash had
deprecated pronouns for referring to someone in a gender neutral fashion.

Jamie Bowden

-- 
"It was half way to Rivendell when the drugs began to take hold"
Hunter S Tolkien "Fear and Loathing in Barad Dur"
Iain Bowen <alaric@alaric.org.uk>




To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Pine.BSF.4.10.10102081958130.43160-100000>