Re: One plus and one minus

<jerry_friedman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:5aaf56c4-db7b-4223-b13f-1f71df4cd988@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Feb 14, 9:45 am, Cece <ceceliaarmstr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Feb 14, 6:24 am, "Peter Groves" <whate...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:



"Claude Weil" <cw...@xxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:RsSdnVrZL8gYFQvUnZ2dnUVZ8tqdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

English has three genders expressed by the singular personal subject
pronouns "he", "she", and "it", whereas French has only two: masculine
("il") and feminine ("elle").

However, unlike English, which has only "they" as a plural personal
subject pronoun for all genders, French has a masculine ("ils") and a
feminine ("elles") one.

--
cw...@xxxxxxx

You are onfusing grammatical gender with semantic gender reference.
English
does not have grammatical gender; it lost that feature about 1000 years
ago.

Peter Groves

Is English the only language with semantic gender? Every language I
know anything about has only two genders, except for German, which has
three that have nothing to do with sex (turnip = she; beautiful young
maiden = it), and English, in which grammatical gender is determined
by sex.

What's your definition of semantic gender? In French and Spanish, as
far as I can remember, all male beings are denoted by masculine words
and all female beings by feminine words. Does that count, or would
you say a neuter gender is also needed?

***Emily est un poète, mais son frère Jacques est une sentinelle. I would
imagine that all languages have some way of indicating semantic gender, even
Chinese (which doesn't infect), but the point is not to confuse that with
grammatical gender, which French has and Chinese doesn't. What constitutes
grammatical gender is concord, usually between noun and adjective (un bon
poète, une bonne sentinelle). When English had grammatical gender, BTW,
there were three words for 'woman': "wifmann" (masc.), "cwene" (fem.), and
"wyf" (neuter).
Peter Groves



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class lists the noun classes found
in various languages. Some have a class for men and maybe other
things, one for women and maybe other things, and one or more for
still other things. For instance, the classes in the Australian
language Dyirbal are

"I animate objects, men
II ? women, water, fire, violence
III ? edible fruit and vegetables
IV ? miscellaneous (includes things not classifiable in the first
three)"

Apparently the Fula language of West Africa has about 26 noun classes,
depending on dialect.

The article doesn't say whether any of these languages has the kind of
anomalies you mention for German.

The entertaining five-gender system in Polish is described at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_(language)#Nouns_and_adjectives

--
Jerry Friedman


.

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