Posts by Chris Waugh
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It occurs to me that I was a bit hasty in that last comment. It may be worth pointing out that there is no real connection between grammatical gender and natural gender. Therefore I think it safe to say there's no connection between grammatical gender and either gendered language or sexism.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Stephen Judd,
Agreed, and I had been pondering the example of French this morning. Only two genders in 3rd person, masculine and feminine, and that's both grammatical gender and sex. So all nouns are either masculine or feminine. Does it stop sexism in France? Never been there myself, but I suspect not. After all, in 3rd person plural when you have a mixed group of people, you use the masculine - and as my high school French teacher said, that applies even if the group is one man and twenty women.
On the plus side, as one of my university French lecturers pointed out, it's really easy to remember the gender of 'problem' - all men are problems, therefore it's '**le** problème'.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Emma Hart,
people find ‘thou’ really formal
I blame the churches and their use of 'thou' to refer to God. Seems somehow odd to be referring to the Deity so informally when said Deity can smite at any given moment...
Language is basically awesome.
No argument from me there.
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grr.... somehow managed to be not logged in anymore when I hit post. Try again...
Singular they actually has a much longer, more illustrious pedigree than the prescriptivists would have us believe. Which is not to argue against coining new words, just to remind us that on this and quite a few other points we have been misled by loudmouths who have decided their pet peeves are going to be inviolable rules of English grammar, when no such rules have ever existed.
As for "re-introducing a second-person plural", we never lost it. It's the 2nd person singular 'thou' that we dropped. I can't figure out why, it was very useful, and French, German and Russian managed to keep its cognates 'tu', 'du' and 'ты'.
This is one advantage of Chinese - 他、她、它 are the equivalents of 'he', 'she' and 'it', but are all pronounced 'tā' in Mandarin, so a gender-neutral pronoun for people is irrelevant. But in writing, when gender-neutrality is desirable, you can just type 'ta' and leave it to readers to decide which character is appropriate.
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Capture: Roamin' Holiday, in reply to Gudrun Gisela,
Very seriously cute child.
Not sure about the parents yet, but time will tell.
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Capture: Roamin' Holiday, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
This one's been posing since 3 months and already has a bit of modelling experience...
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Didn't catch any insects, but I did find a little cookie monster...
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I wasn't overly impressed with Laurence Fearnley's The Hut Builder as a whole, but that middle section where the narrator is stuck halfway up Mt Cook with a conscientious objector for several days was brilliant. Before that I didn't really know much more than that there were a few Conscientious Objectors and that they weren't overly popular.
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My parents found this in the Salvation Army archive, Mum brought me a copy when she came over here last October. That's her father, first trombone on the left, on his way to Gaudalcanal. He served there on ambulances then AA artillery, then worked his way up Italy to Trieste on a mobile artillery piece. I remember him telling me all kinds of crazy stories about the bizarre, strange or just silly things they got up to in their spare time, but then his eyes would go far away and he'd say, "War is hell, Chris, war is hell."
We’re so lucky to have avoided all that.
Absolutely.
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to nzlemming,
Or perhaps a blind lawyer rabbit.... or a Uighur rabbit.... or a nail house rabbit....
