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From: keesan@bbncca.ARPA (Morris M. Keesan)
Newsgroups: net.nlang,net.women
Subject: Re: Gender-specific neuter pronouns
Message-ID: <1285@bbncca.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 23-Jan-85 18:48:47 EST
Article-I.D.: bbncca.1285
Posted: Wed Jan 23 18:48:47 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 24-Jan-85 08:26:56 EST
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Xref: watmath net.nlang:2474 net.women:4223

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From: rob@ptsfa.UUCP (Rob Bernardo)
Subject: Re: Gender-specific responses to s/he

> Something similar happened in French. In a few cases, the older nominative
> and accusative cases of the same noun in Old French gave rise to two
> separate nouns of Modern French. The nominative form of the word for
> 'man' gave rise to the Modern French word for 'one' (generic person):
> 
> case	Latin 	->	Old French ->	Mod French	Mod French meaning
> 
> nom.	homo	->	om	->	on		one (the generic person)
> acc.	hominem	->	homme	->	homme		man
>--

Note, however, that "homo" is the Latin noun for "human", and not for
"male human".  English speakers tend to forget this vocabulary distinction,
since our word "man" means both.  The Latin for "man" meaning "male human" is
"vir".
-- 
			    Morris M. Keesan
			    {decvax,linus,ihnp4,wivax,wjh12,ima}!bbncca!keesan
			    keesan @ BBN-UNIX.ARPA