Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: FatDomDaddy
First of all gender is linguistic word used for grammar classification.
Yeah. Around where I live, cats and streets are "she", while doors and dogs are "he", and trees and houses are "it", for instance. It's rather arbitrary in that sense. As a native speaker, I can "hear" which gender a word is, though I'm not familiar with the rules that govern it. The rules are clearly based on the sound of the word, though, and not what the word refers to. Someone figured calling this feature in Germanic languages "gender" because queen (woman) and man (man) happen to be in different groups. In turn, this leads to the absurd notion that Swahili has 8 genders (with 8 pronouns, just like "he", "she" and "it"). The only reason English has the words "he" and "she" is that it used to have the same sort of pattern, but lost it later on. The gender distinction in language will probably be lost in time.
Personally, I would've preferred a strictly indexing system (i.e. pronouns as arbitrary backreference slots) instead of one based on grouping and grammatical agreement, but I guess it's understandable that humanity didn't ask me when inventing language. I wasn't born, after all. Otherwise, they would surely have asked, since I'm the superman. (Didn't we establish this in the crying thread?)
IWYW,
— Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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RE: Federal judge rules state must provide sex reassign... - 
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