Re: Adding insult to injury


"outsider" <outsider@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:iefic8$nch$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On 12/16/2010 9:39 PM, Ellen K. wrote:

"Chris Malcolm" <cam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:8mt7ocFfbfU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Doctors of foreign origin often remain confused about the correct
English usage of genders.

That's true with respect to grammatical genders, which vary widely
between languages, but I don't think there is any language which
expresses biological gender differently, i.e. in a way which could
cause any problems or confusion in an incompetently bilingual person.

--
Chris Malcolm


It's not that the speaker doesn't KNOW the correct gender, it's that
s/he uses (usually) "he" as the only third-person singular pronoun.
Which means this is probably NOT the cause of the OP's incorrect records.

Sorry to disagree on all points, but.

Take a trip to Chicago. Among the immigrants for whom English is a second
language you'll 90%+ of the time hear "she" as the universal pronoun. I had
the same experience in the New York City region with other ethnicities.

In Polish he = on and she = ona, so the differentiations are present in their
first language as they are for German. But as a practical matter the usage tends
to become conflated when the second language is used.

I've heard the same "error" from Hungarians, Southern Slavs, Russians,
and Austrians. Hungarian and Finnish don't differentiate the genders in
pronoun usage while Norwegian and Italian do. All the Slavic languages
seem to. The fact that with that underlying diversity in samples, my Chicago
and NYC experience is different from yours leads me to suspect that the
ethnic sample to which you were exposed is markedly smaller.

Vive la différence!


I know a lot of Austrians and have never known them to mix up their gender pronouns in English. Spanish speakers often use "he" as their only third-person singular pronoun.

.

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