Conference thebay::joyoflex

    In French we use 2 main genders, masculine and feminine. This
    matches nicely with the 2 main types of people that can be found in 
    the country: male and female.
    
    We enjoy having people of 2 different sexes. Nobody thinks it's
    an overly complicated constraint, and we want to continue that way.
    
    roger  :)

    I like genderless languages.  My mind refuses to believe that
    inanimate objects, like computers!, have a gender.  I can never
    remember if `ordinateur' (sp?) is male or female.
    
    Then there's the old joke:
    
    An American couple are having lunch in a French bistro when they discover
    a fly in their soup.  They hurriedly motion the waiter (aka lE gar�on)
    over to the table (aka lA table).  Pointing at the fly the guy says
    "Le fly (aka ?) est dans mon soupe!".  The waiter hautily drew
    back and sneered "lA fly" and walked away with the offending insect.
    
    Where upon the husband said, "Gee how could he tell it was a female fly?"

    Re Computers having Gender.
    
    In French, I think there is a rule of thumb that words ending in
    "eur" are normally feminine. Anyway, when in doubt, use the plural
    and avoid adjectives with gender.
    
    You have to be careful here though. Its not the object that has gender
    but the word. While I was in Germany, I watched an 
    American woman going through mental torture as Das Auto (neuter)
    and Der Wagen (masculine I think) both mean "car"
    and she couldnt understand how the same car could have two genders.
     
    Once you have mastered this concept the rest is easy(ier), though
    France "raises the stakes" by having the same word
    whose meaning changes depending on the gender (eg livre, critique),
    though this is probably less confusing than English where
    pronunciation of a word changes with the meaning (eg close).
     
    As a final aside, in French the gender of a noun pertaining to sexual
    organs is often the opposite of the sex to whom it belongs. eh?

    	Since mosses and ferns have an asexual generation alternating 
    with a male/female generation three genders might be more natural in
    damper climates, but German is really confusing. I am told that maidens
    are neuter, and butter changes sex as you go from North to South.
    
    	French is relatively easy. 52% of words are feminine, so if you get
    right the few that you remember, and use feminine for the rest (and
    other tricks as in .3) you can get a fairly high success rate.
    
    	I was intrigued by one statement in .3, so I checked a dictionary,
    and 9 out of 12 French words for sexual organs had gender opposite to
    sex, so using this rule in conjunction with the others should give you a
    very high gender accuracy in French.

Yes, yes, but what good is it all? Why do languages evolve in which there
are artificial and confusing aspects? (Oops! I don't want to start talking
about aspects of verbs!) English seems to get along just fine without
gendered nouns.

As a friend of mine once said, "Bloody foreigners, they have a different
word for *everything*!"

Perry

    It's all quite straightforward: gender doesn't correlate with sex.
    Gender is to do with words; sex is to do with animate things.
    
    Languages _do_ evolve to get rid of linguistical complexity. 
    
    Examples:
     
    case: in Classical Latin nouns had six cases, in Vulgar Latin spoken in
    Gaul they had - or are commonly guessed to have had - two [which have
    given `fossilized' pairs (with no consistent semantic connection) like
    gars/gar�on,  bers/baron, copain/compagnon, pois/poisson (did you know
    that porpoise means `pig-fish'?)], in modern-day French nouns have only
    one - although I'm sure Roger can come up with an exception or two.
    
    irregularities: words that were stressed or inflected irregularly
    in Classical Latin (like c�thedra [unusual stress] or canis - dog, 
    with the accusative canem, not irregular but 3rd declension so
    unnecessarily complex for Vulgar Latin) have given Sp. cadera
    (stressed on the second syllable) and Pg. c�o (which suggests
    some intermediate -um form). It's interesting that the 3rd declension
    plural `canes' gave Pg. c�es - so maybe this canis example is shaky -
    this stuff came to mind more easily back in the early '70s)
    
    Languages simplify as they evolve, but (like all organisms) slowly. 
    And artificial constructs like Esperanto don't change this fact.
    
    I don't know in detail about Esperanto, but I believe that while
    keeping gender (because so many of the languages that contributed
    to it had gender) it ironed it out. Whereas in Latin some -us
    words are feminine and some -a words are masculine, in Esperanto
    (I think) you can always tell just by looking at a word what part
    of speech it is and (if it's a noun) what gender.
    
    b

    I think I read it in Casanova's memoirs -- as a child he was asked
    (in Latin) why the sex organs (cunnus, mentula) have the opposite
    gender of their owners, and he answered (in Latin) that the slave
    takes the name of the master.

    A friend of mine who was spending a year in the Netherlands during
    college had a solution to the gender problem -- always use the
    diminutive, which is always neuter.  This is why the common German
    words for girl are neuter -- they're diminutives.  Does this rule
    (diminutive always neuter) apply to all Germanic languages that
    have a neuter gender?  Any non-Germanic languages?    

re .6

>    Languages _do_ evolve to get rid of linguistical complexity. 

	Bob, surely you don't mean that simplification is the
	only, or even the main goal of language evolution ?

	To follow on your Latin/French example, you know well
	that French is very different, and in some respects far
	more complex, than Latin was at any stage. For example,
	French has articles (le, la, les, au, du etc...), while
	these were not developed in Latin. French also has a more
	complex conjugation sytem, particularly since the auxiliary
	"avoir" is used; Latin conjugations were straightforward
	in comparison.

	Do we need more examples ? Of course English has dropped
	many of the Indo-European features of Saxon, such as
	declensions of nouns and adjectives, proper conjugations,
	genders of nouns etc ... But at the same time, English 
	has developed the progressive present tense (the -ing form)
	which is practically unknown to the German cousin, and to 
	most other European languages.

	While language evolve, some complexity goes away, and some
	new complexity is added ... 

	By the way, I don't see why languages should evolve
	"like species" or "like organisms". They evolve like
	languages ! But a general theory � la Darwin is not
	available for languages, and I doubt if it is feasible
	at all.
	I wish I had more time to discuss things like that.

	roger

	ps. In English, the word "ship", which designates an
	inanimate object, is feminine, is that true ? 
	So don't tell me that English is a genderless language.
	It's a language with 2 genders: neutral and feminine. :)

    Re .8: ships (and sometimes cars) are referred to as being feminine,
    but this is merely a nautical convention. Strictly speaking they
    are neuter.

    Re .8
    
    Agreed. Simplification isn't the only result of the evolution
    of languages (I don't think `goal' is the right word - it suggests
    that someone or something is in charge of the evolution);
    simplification is just one of the things that happen when
    language evolves, increased - or newly introduced - complexity
    is another.
    
    Two examples that are clearer and more obvious than the ones
    I gave in .6 are these:
    
    adverbs -
    
         whereas in Classical Latin the way to form an adverb was to take
         the adjective, knock off the ending (which involved knowing where
         the root ended and the ending began), replace the adjectival
         ending with the appropriate adverbial one (there were a handful of
         regular ones and many irreglarities) and then do any morphological
         tidying up that the newly formed word called for - eliding vowels,
         or whatever, in Vulgar Latin a much easier trick was used: take
         the feminine of the adjective and add MENTE. Originally, this made
         obvious sense - `placida mente' meaning "with a placid mind"; but
         soon the trick caught on and any old feminine adjective might get
         MENTE tacked on. Hence (Fr.) `-ment' and the other, more
         widespread adverbial ending in Romance languages, `-mente'
         (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, surely many others). In Portuguese
         (and maybe in Spanish too, I forget) you can still string a number
         of feminine adjectives together and add `-mente' just to the last
         one, to make a whole big adverb.
    
    plurals:
    
         whereas in Classical Latin, forming a plural involved changing
         an ending (and all the difficulties that involved), most Romance
         languages adopted the trick of just adding an `-s'.  Of course,
         what happens to that `s' can lead to Byzantine complications;
         but the _grammar_ of the new language was vastly simplified.
         This trick was a little less widely adopted than the `-mente' one
         - in Italian (at least, in the Tuscan form that was adopted as
         the national standard) still has a different ending for a plural.
         
    On Roger's last point, I don't have what I wrote in front of me now,
    but I suspect that the misunderstanding is partly due to some
    complexity that English glosses over but French doesn't. The example we
    used to use at school -
         
         je l'aime comme fr�re - I love him since he is my brother
         je l'aime en tant que fr�re - I love him only to the extent 
               			       that might be expected of a 
         			       brother 
         je l'aime comme un fr�re - I love him as though he were a
         			    brother
    
    (I may have got the meanings mixed up, but all three are there; and we
    - English - often get away with `I love him like a brother' and leave
    the context to sort out the ambiguity.) Similarly, languages evolve in
    a way that reflects the fact that they are organ_ic_, not in the way
    typical of animate organisms.
         
    Must go - no more time.
         
    b

Re: .8

>	By the way, I don't see why languages should evolve
>	"like species" or "like organisms". They evolve like
>	languages ! But a general theory ` la Darwin is not
>	available for languages, and I doubt if it is feasible
>	at all.

There is a fair amount of work in the linguistic communicty on language
evolution, and quite a bit of regularity of evolution has been discovered.
While there is no simple, general statement in the way we normally think
of Darwin's, there are those who know a lot about it.

	- Win

	re .9

	OK, "ship" is neuter, but the corresponding pronoun
	is feminine (she/her). Now, that's complication to me :)
	
	In French the gender of a noun is consistent, except
	for "amour", "d�lice" and "orgue" (these 3 words are 
	masculine when singular, and feminine when plural).

	re .10

	These are interesting examples indeed. The first adverb in 
	-mente appears in the "Glose de Reichenau", a 9th century document 
	which shows a text in Latin with a French (or rather Roman) 
	translation, and acted like a sort of Rosette stone. "Singulariter" 
	translated to "solamente" which is now "seulement".

	One may also be intrigued by the complex French negation 
	"ne...pas" which contrasts with the other Romance languages 
	where the negation is monosyllabic (ne, no, n�o etc...). The 
	French one was "ne" until 16th century when the new form
	appeared as a generalisation of the case: "il ne marche pas"
	(he doesn't walk one step). Very curious. See also "il ne
	boit goutte", "il ne mange mie" etc...
	Sometimes people really make an effort to make things more 
	difficult than they were before.

	Back to the "gender" discussion, it's worth noting that in 
	Japanese, for example, not only the nouns have no gender, but 
	they also have no plural as we know it; the verbs have no 
	conjugations, and in fact no real "tenses" as we know them.

	They do very well without all that occidental nonsense.
	
	re .11

	Indeed, lots of specialists since Saussure time would love 
	to come up with a general theory of language evolution, and
	perhaps we'll see one. Andr� Martinet, my teacher of Linguistics 
	(back in my Sorbonnic time) used to dream of this, and he was not 
	the only one. 
	
	roger	

�	One may also be intrigued by the complex French negation 
�	"ne...pas" which contrasts with the other Romance languages 
�	where the negation is monosyllabic (ne, no, n�o etc...). The 
�	French one was "ne" until 16th century when the new form
�	appeared as a generalisation of the case: "il ne marche pas"
�	(he doesn't walk one step). Very curious. See also "il ne
�	boit goutte", "il ne mange mie" etc...
    
    Three  further observations (ratholes?):
    
    1. I hadn't met `il ne mange mie'. I suppose `mie' means `crumb'?
       The Italian negative particle (equivalent of `rien', as in "Je
       ne regrette rien") is `mica' (crumb). `Rien' itself is derived
       from the Latin `res' - "I don't regret a thing" - but that's
       another rathole.
    
    2. Catalan for `je ne sais pas' is - forgive the transliteration,
       I've know idea how to write Catalan - "zhyo no sey pas"; and
       Catalan certainly isn't on the wane. Obviously there are languages
       that are perfectly happy with that sort of negative.
    
    3. The (continental) Portuguese negative answer to `queres?' is not 
       plain `n�o' but `n�o quero'.
    
    None of this has anything to do with gender, but it's fun anyway.
    
    b
    

�	One may also be intrigued by the complex French negation 
�	"ne...pas" which contrasts with the other Romance languages 
�	where the negation is monosyllabic (ne, no, n�o etc...). The 
�	French one was "ne" until 16th century when the new form
�	appeared as a generalisation of the case: "il ne marche pas"
�	(he doesn't walk one step). Very curious. See also "il ne
�	boit goutte", "il ne mange mie" etc...
    
    Three  further observations (ratholes?):
    
    1. I hadn't met `il ne mange mie'. I suppose `mie' means `crumb' -
       tho' isn't that `miette'? The Italian negative particle (equivalent 
       of `rien', as in "Je ne regrette rien") is `mica' (crumb). 
       `Rien' itself is derived from the Latin `res' - "I don't regret 
       a thing" - but that's another rathole.
    
    2. Catalan for `je ne sais pas' is - forgive the transliteration,
       I've know idea how to write Catalan - "zhyo no sey pas"; and
       Catalan certainly isn't on the wane. Obviously there are languages
       that are perfectly happy with that sort of negative.
    
    3. The (continental) Portuguese negative answer to `queres?' is not 
       plain `n�o' but `n�o quero'. Nothing monosyllabic about that.
    
    None of this has anything to do with gender, but it's fun anyway.
    
    b
    

    Re: <<< Note 674.14 by MARVIN::KNOWLES "Running old protocol" >>>

    Getting back to the subject of gender, is it not true that "je ne
    sais pas" is, in fact, the masculine form, translating literally as
    "I couldn't say, Pa"? When the declaration is directed to a member of
    the fair sex, should it not be the feminine form - "je ne sais ma"?
    
    Bill

Just passing through ... re .0

>Why is it that many languages have developed the notion of gender? English
>seems to be in the minority; most languages appear to require that adjectives
>agree with the gender of the modified noun. Often the gender of a noun is
>not intuitively obvious.

English lost its gender as a result of the original English, which sounded a lot
more like German, being merged with the ancient Norse. It got too tough with all
those endings so they stopped bothering. The Norman influence came much later,
and was focused more on infusing new words. This is why English has so many
different words for the same thing.

/petes

    Re: .12
    
    Japanese grammar came by way of Korea. Korean most assuredly does have
    tenses and conjugations, and although I only learned enough Japanese to
    travel on my own throughout Japan, unless I am gravely mistaken
    Japanese followed the Korean model in this respect as well. It is
    Chinese that doesn't have tenses as we know them.  This makes verbs
    simpler on one level, but also baffling to natives of tense-oriented
    languages (for example, Chinese concept of action that stresses the 
    continuing aspect vs the ending aspect - whether this action occurs in
    the past, the present, or the future).
    
    As for the complexity of Korean (and Japanese) verbs, the conjugations
    include a staggering variety of infixes and suffixes related to the
    status, gender, age, etc of the speaker and the one spoken too. 
    They make "tu" and "vous" look like child's play.  Sometimes the entire
    verb - not just the endings - is different. For example, to say "I
    sleep" or "I eat" requires an entirely different verb that "You sleep"
    or "you eat" (if "you" is a person of higher status).
    
    Kit 

I also know enough Japanese to be dangerous.

There are two tenses in Japanese -- the past and the non-past.  So you could 
have statements that would translate something like:

	Yesterday, I watered the lawn.
	Today, I water the lawn.
	Tomorrow, I water the lawn.

Also *adjectives* can have tense.  For example, the verb "desu" (pronounced 
dess) means, loosely translated "is"; "deshita" means "was".  "Oishii" is the 
present form of "delicious"; "oishkatta" is the past form of "delicious".  If 
you ate a meal last night, and it was delicious, you can either say:

	Oishii deshita

or 

	Oishkatta desu.
 
but not

	Oishkatta deshita.

Another difference between Japanese and American is how negative questions are 
handled.  For example, if an American is asked "You don't understand?", the 
American will answer "No" if s/he doesn't understand.   However, if a Japanese 
is asked "Wakarimasenka?  (You don't understand)", they will answer "Hai, 
wakarimasen (yes, I don't understand), if they don't understand.  Kind of 
like, "Yes we have no bananas".

Clay

Korean doesn't have infixes and suffixes per se.  What it does have is a lot of
particles that get added to the verb depending on things like tense, mood, 
honorifics, presumption, etc.  Because of this characteristic, Korean is classed
as an agglutinative language.

There are three types of distinction in status that you have to be aware of.  
The difference between yourself and the person to whom you are speaking will 
determine you choice of verbs.  Even if you are speaking to someone who is 
"lower" than you, if you speak in reference to anyone higher than you, you must 
use the honorific form.  Furthermore, if you are referring to yourself in 
conversation to someone "higher" than you, you must change the word you use.

In Korean, there are different words for older brother or older sister depending 
on what gender you happen to be.  There are different words for you mother's
sister versus your father's sister.  These words change as they get married and
start having kids.  It all has to do with the importance of the group and one's
position in it.  You are made painfully aware of where you stand in relation to
someone else.  Still, I find it very interesting.

Whether Japanese is related to Korean or not is a question that hasn't really
been adequately answered.  Some linguists classify Korean and Japanese as part
of the Altaic language family, but I believe most still consider them to be
independent, genetically unrelated languages.

Wook

    
    Re: -1
    
>    Even if you are speaking to someone who is  "lower" than you, if you
>    speak in reference to anyone higher than you, you must  use the
>    honorific form.  Furthermore, if you are referring to yourself in 
>    conversation to someone "higher" than you, you must change the word you
>    use.
                                
    I think that's a little misleading. In saying to a child "Invite your
    teacher to have supper with us tonight", you would use the familiar and
    least polite form of "invite", because you're speaking to the child.
    You would use the honorific word for eat, because you're referring
    indirectly to the teacher.  The child, of course, would use all
    honorifics in actually inviting the teacher.
    
    Wow - we sure got far from gender.  At least Korean doesn't go down
    that rathole.  I agree that gender in words seems unnecessary and
    confusing. For us native English speakers, this gender issue seems to
    be associated primarily with romance languages, thanks to the baleful
    influence of Latin.  German and Russian, too, right?  How about others?
    
    Kit

    Gender goes back to the Indo-European roots.
    
    As far as I remember from my college days, I-E had two genders
    about 4000 BC, corresponding to Latin and Greek (etc.) masculine
    and feminine.  A third, corresponding to neuter, was added by
    treating the feminine plural as a singular of a new gender and
    creating a new plural form.
    
    Other languages (not in the I-E family) have various numbers of
    genders/classes, ranging from none (e.g Turkish) to huge numbers
    (Sawhili has a number of classes in the teens, I believe).
    
    I can only speculate on why languages like genders--perhaps it
    allows listeners to link modifiers to objects more easily in
    languages where word order can vary (e.g. "Oh, that adjective is
    plural class 4, so it must refer to the previous plural class
    4 noun.  And this clause is singular class 2, so it must be
    refering to a noun I haven't heard yet").
    
    			-John Bishop

Russian does indeed carry gender. Several word forms actually have
four: masculine, feminine, neuter, and masculine animate.

"I eat our table" = Ya est nash stol (nash = possessive accusative masc. of 
'our'), but
"I eat our cat" = Ya est nashevo kota (nashevo = poss. acc. mascc. animate
of 'our'. Also note that kot (cat) take the masc. acc. animate suffix -a 
while stol (table) does not. (You could leave the personal pronoun Ya out
since it's implied in the conjugation of the verb.)

Do other languages make a distinction like this?

I wonder if interchangeable word order came before or after the concept
of word gender? My guess is that it occurred much later than gender-fied
nouns.

-Perry

     Hittite has two; a "common" gender that subsumes both
    masculine and feminine, and a neuter.
    -John

>     Hittite has two; a "common" gender that subsumes both
>    masculine and feminine, and a neuter.
>    -John

Come on!  Somebody dare this guy to prove it!

(obligatory smiley face goes here)



good bluff, though

Re: .22

Note please that "Ya est" should read "Ya esh" in each case as "esh"
is the first-person singular form of the verb. ("Est" is the third
person singular.)

-Perry

Gendered nouns and adjectives (as in French, German etc...)
are very useful because:

   1) They're nice.

	Nouns like "fleur", "Blume", "Frau", "femme" are feminine
	in Latin, French, German, Italian etc... etc...

	That's the way it must be. Ask any flower, or any woman.

	Do you like to think that a noun like "flower" is neuter ? 
	A neutral rose ? Yeech. Roses are feminine in all 
	civilised languages.

   2) They bother the English
	
	Usually they pick the wrong gender, and it makes them
	furious to fail where any 3-years old native is perfectly
	comfortable.

	In English, correct me if I'm wrong, all adjectives are invariable, 
	all the time.

	Simplification you say ? Nope. I call that rationalisation � la 
	Pol Pot. Go ahead with that kind of "evolution", folks. Soon English
	will be as simple and efficient as Neanderthalian. 
	A dozen words, a few gestures: what else you need ? Everything
	else is unnecessary and confusing. Our ancestors were doing
	very well without the modern complication.


Seriously now, genders don't need any justification. 
If you want language features to be justified, then tell me how 
the English irregular verbal forms are necessary and efficient.

If on the other hand, you only want to better understand how nouns
are classified in a foreign language, then you have to learn that
language, in depth, for many years. The gender classification
has very deep cultural roots. Has to do with the way a culture sees the
world, and sees itself. You won't get the answer from Joyoflex.

 roger

    
   >         A neutral rose ? Yeech. Roses are feminine in all
   >         civilised languages.
    
    
    yeah, yeah.
    
    But a rosebush is masculine. Ingrained civility or sexism?
    
    Richard. 
    

    Re: .26
    
	"In English, correct me if I'm wrong, all adjectives are invariable"
    
    "Blond/blonde" is one exception to this rule.
    
Lew Lasher

    I, for one, have never made the "Blond/Blonde" distinction; neither
    have I ever seen it used. I can think of no places where such
    distinction would occur, for me.
    
    Oh well,
    
    R|tch^d 

    Yes there is gender, of a sort for English adjectives ... 
    
    A woman is beautiful or pretty ....
    
    A man is handsome
    
    Rarely do you handsome woman or a pretty man!
    

RE: Note 674.30 by KAOFS::S_BROOK "Here today and here again tomorrow" >>>
    
>   Rarely do you handsome woman or a pretty man!
    
        Gotta disagree.

        Perhaps not "pretty man" but the term "pretty boy" comes to
        mind... as in the gangster Pretty boy Floyd.

        However, there was an era when it was common to say that "she
        is a very handsome woman". 19th or turn of the century? USA that
        is.

        	Mike

    
    Did you ever hear of a "macho" woman?
    

Mike,

>        19th or turn of the century? USA that
>        is.

when did you have the turn of the century?

:-)

Arie

    Re: <<< Note 674.32 by GRNDAD::STONE ">>>--He-went-that-a-way-->" >>>

>   Did you ever hear of a "macho" woman?
    
    I thought that _macho_ was Spanish for _male_ and that (naturally)
    _macha_ meant _female_.
    
    Is _macha_ used colloquially the same way _macho_ is used? How about
    _machisma_? If so, what do they imply?? I can guess at the answers as
    well as anyone, but has anyone personally heard these usages?
    
    Bill

    �Is _macha_ used colloquially the same way _macho_ is used? 
    
    Maybe in some language or other. Not in Spanish.
    
    �							How about
    �_machisma_? 
    
    Ditto: `-ismo' in the equivalent of English `-ism'; it makes an
    adjective (regardless of gender) into a (masculine) noun. There
    is another ending that does a similar job that happens to be
    feminine (`-eza', like French `-esse'). This doesn't give anyone
    using Spanish carte blanche to coin `words' like *macheza.
    [I suspect there's a simple generative rule - like `adjectives
    that end in a vowel drop the vowel and add -ismo; adjectives
    that end in a consonant add -eza', but I've never heard or
    seen it and haven't tested it thoroughly - so don't quote me.)
    
    �    I thought that _macho_ was Spanish for _male_ and that (naturally)
    �_macha_ meant _female_.
    
    The opposite of `macho' that I've seen/heard is `hembra' (derived
    from `femina' - but that's a long story and you had to be there.
    Compare, if you will, homine[m] > hombre. The "f > h" shift is
    mixed up with medieval politics - the Houses of Castile ("h") and 
    Aragon ("f"). Trivium of the day: the emblem adopted by Ferdinand
    and Isabella was a fennel leaf, because the initial letter of
    the word for fennel was h/f in Castilian/Aragonese). 
    
    Whereas `macho' is an adjective (that can be used as a noun) `hembra'
    is a noun, so you can't stick an ending on it to make it even more
    substantive than it already is.
    
    b
    
    
    

re .26:

>	Nouns like "fleur", "Blume", "Frau", "femme" are feminine
>	in Latin, French, German, Italian etc... etc...
>
>	That's the way it must be. Ask any flower, or any woman.

    All the (common) German words for girl are neuter.

    Re .36
    
    Yes. Sex is something to do with biology. Gender is something to with
    grammar.  There's often - but not always - an overlap.
    
    b

RE -1

>    All the (common) German words for girl are neuter.

Is this fair? :-) You're referring to "M�dchen" or "M�del", I guess.

Both mean "little woman". All those words, ending with "-chen" or "-lein" (or
"-(e)l(e)", in some dialects), meaning "little", are neuter.
(of course there must be exceptions. Let a German speak up please ;-))

So you don't want a female "Blume"? Take a neutral "Bl�mchen"! :-)

Arie

	re .36

	You're right, and the same goes for roses. There are "neutral
	roses" indeed, and they may be poetic, as in:
	
		R�slein, R�slein, R�slein rot
		R�slein auf der Heiden
	
	(Who wrote that ? Goethe ?)

	I was only joking with this woman/flower demonstration. It was a 
	reaction to the anglo-centrist "genders are useless" argument.

	Actually I agree with Bob that there's no relationship between
	sex and gender. The ambiguity comes from the grammatical terms
	"masculine" and "feminine". Replace them by "Gender A" and "Gender B" 
	etc ... and the confusion disappears (but many good jokes 
	disappear as well).

	In Swedish, there's only "masculine" and "real", so I'm told.
	Now that's something.
	
	 roger

    Re: .39
    
    > ...there's no relationship between sex and gender.  The ambiguity
    > comes from the grammatical terms "masculine" and "feminine".  Replace
    > them with "Gender A" and "Gender B" etc... and the confusion
    > disappears.
    
    You're in very best of company with that view; Fowler writes:
    
    	_gender_...is a grammatical term only.  To talk of _persons_
    	or _creatures of the masculine_ or _feminine gender_,
    	meaning _of the male or female sex, is either a jocularity
    	(permissable or not according to context) or a blunder.
    
    
    But isn't there an historical connection?  If several languages use
    "masculine" and "feminine" to refer to gender, then that seems like
    more than an accident.  Can any language history experts out there
    clarify this?
    
    Bernie

    Re: <<< Note 674.40 by SSDEVO::GOLDSTEIN >>>

>        You're in very best of company with that view; Fowler writes:
>    
>    	_gender_...is a grammatical term only.  To talk of _persons_
>    	or _creatures of the masculine_ or _feminine gender_,
>    	meaning _of the male or female sex, is either a jocularity
>    	(permissable or not according to context) or a blunder.
    
    My Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary gives the first definition of
    _gender_ as ...  1: SEX <black divinities of the feminine ~ --
    Charles Dickens>.
    
    So Mr Fowler was nose-to-nose with Messrs Webster and Dickens. Too bad
    they aren't around to treat us to some lexical fireworks.

    This afterthought has just risen up from the mists of time. I remember
    it from a lecture 15 years ago, which _to_me_ feels like a long time.
    
    _To_us_ (mostly native speakers of English), gender is something that
    has to be learnt and understood. _To_natural_language_ gender is some-
    thing that was around long before the first grammarian reared his
    tendentious head (I'm not sure of the date; but the Port Royal grammar
    - the first full and formal statement of the `rules' of a language -
    was only written four or five hundred years ago, if that). For
    centuries before that, languages with `gender' had been applying rules
    of usage.  People made adjectival endings agree with nouns without
    learning about what they were doing. `Gender', before formal grammars,
    might as well have been `fishpaste' or `piximunkasplid'.
    
    That's the way it is today: for the most part, people whose first
    language uses gender just get it right - a French child learns to say
    `belle dame' rather than `beau dame' rather like an English child
    learns to say `an egg' rather than `a egg'. There _are_ rules, if you
    look for them; but native speakers often don't have to learn them.
    
    I've often wondered what sense of (grammatical) gender a native
    speaker of a language that uses gender has (before the trappings
    of academical learning start muscling in).  The only time I spent
    months speaking (almost) nothing but Spanish, I don't remember
    _thinking_ about gender much - the words came out, sometimes the
    agreements were right and sometimes they were wrong. The success
    rate got better as time went on, but not (I suspect) because I 
    learnt more about the right genders; what I leant more about was 
    the appropriate way to say things.
    
    Hmm. I'm not sure where this argument leads (if anywhere). But I
    suspect that gender isn't really the big deal that we anglophones
    think it is.
    
    b

    For some reason, Asians, even those who are moderately fluent in
    English, still seem to use "he", "his", etc., for both male and
    female third-persons.
    
    Even more strangely, this includes a lot of Japanese people, and
    the Japanese language has separate words for male and female
    third-person pronouns (although this is a relatively recent
    invention, maybe only around 500 years or so).
    
    Anyway, English still has enough gender that mistakes are possible.

    Re: .26, .28, .29
    
    This morning's National Public Radio Sunday word-puzzle asked what
    English adjective changes form depending on gender.  Unless anyone
    else's got an idea, I'd say that blond/blonde is the answer.
    
Lew Lasher

    >Unless anyone else's got an idea, I'd say that blond/blonde is the answer.
    
    Why so hesitant?  You've obviously got an answer, even if other have
    ideas... such as, let's say,  "pregnant"  :-)
    
    Also fiance/fiancee, which is really supposed to be an adjective
    (derived from a verb, in the same manner as can be done in English).
    And this is often abused as a noun, just like blond/blonde, only
    more frequently :-)
    
    How about, princely/princessly?

    G'day,
    
     Ummm err What about Male and female?
    
    As in He is a male duck, she is a female duck?
    
    
    derek
    

    Isn't "duck" female already?  Forgot what the male version is called.
    
    What's sauce for the bird is sauce for the bird of gender[*].
    [* Formerly called female bird, a term which is now politically incorrect.
        Previously called gendered bird, but you'd better not point out the
        lexical similarity to any engendered member of the species.]
    
    Some sauces are exceptions, for example:
       He's sweaty, she's glowing.

    	I am not sure male/female or manly/womanly/personly count since
    they are probably not (in origin) the same word, no more than
    husband/wife, except that they bear a superficial resemblance to having
    the same root. One of my dictionaries claims as roots the Latin
    "masculus" and "femina" for "male" and "female". The Oxford dictionary
    gets diverted into explaining the concept of a female screw and gives
    no origin (at least in the fairly small version that I have).
    
    	I am less certain about blond/blonde. The French dictionary makes
    it clear that the word is both an adjective and a noun (in French), and
    both as an adjective and a noun has both masculine and feminine forms.
    So in French you can say "il a cheveux blonds" or "elle a cheveux
    blonds" (masculine plural since hair are masculine, whoever wears them,
    and where the adjective has to follow the noun), but you can also say 
    "il est blond" or "elle est blonde", using it as a noun. Contrast this with
    "elle est professeur", where "professeur" is definitely a masculine
    noun, and doesn't have a feminine form or a corresponding adjective.
    Since the English usage is obviously taken from the French, when we say
    "he is blond" or "she is blonde" we are probably borrowing the noun
    rather than the adjective, and it is more akin to saying "he is
    president" than saying "he is pink".

    Dave,
    
    If as you suggest, we have borrowed the term from the French, could you
    or other Francophones please clarify the precise difference in
    semantics between ;
    
    		"Il est blond"
    
    		   .AND.
    
    		"Il est un blond"
    
    The second case is obvious.  Does the first embrace the second? 
    Always?  Sometimes?  If sometimes (as I suspect), then what is it that
    determines the exact semantics - Intonation?
    
    /Chris.
    

    	With the "un" it is undoubtably a noun. It is categorising him
    rather than describing him. It is difficult to make the distinction
    with "blond", but "il est un Fran�ais" might be applied to someone with
    slanted eyes, yellow skin, and not speaking a word of French, though
    the tone would certainly imply "mais pas un vrai". Without the "un" it
    is more or less saying "he's one of us".
    
    	Since the French are lazy with their speaking just as much as the
    English you are likely to hear "elle est prof", and whether the "un"
    and/or the "esseur" are just missed I would leave to a real
    Francophone. The dictionary only permits a masculine form, though,
    unlike masseur/masseuse, or, since it is close in the dictionary,
    massier/massi�re.
    
    	I hope this confuses everyone, and completely ratholes the topic
    ;-)

    Re: .47
    
    Animals sweat.
    Men perspire.
    Women glow.

    Re .50
    >"Il est blond"
    >"Il est un blond"
    >The second case is obvious.
    
    As long as it doesn't mean something like "He is a Danish" (or other
    talking pastry as the case may be).
    
    >Does the first embrace the second?
    
    Only if they're differently gender-oriented.

    >Only if they're differently gender-oriented.
    
    P.S.  That means differently oriented, which is different from being
    oriented towards different gender.  Just in case anyone might have
    misread the original statement.

    Last week I was driving a van full of DEC Consultant Engineers thru the
    NJ back country on the way to a customer visit, and we passed a sign
    announcing 
    
    "Danish Home for the Aged".
    
    Without missing a beat I opined: 
    
    (-: "Well, I've heard of day-old bakeries, but THAT is ridiculous." :-)
    
    True story.  Lord only knows why I humiliate myself by telling you this...
    

    >"Danish Home for the Aged".
    
    Well, I've heard of the chronologically gifted person of gender
    who lived in a shoe [though it was different in the days when
    nursery rhymes weren't politically corrupt]
    
    ... which makes THAT even MORE ridiculous!