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From: kwh@bentley.UUCP (KW Heuer)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: He and She
Message-ID: <642@bentley.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 16-Mar-86 16:15:39 EST
Article-I.D.: bentley.642
Posted: Sun Mar 16 16:15:39 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 19-Mar-86 00:48:41 EST
References: <555@cisden.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Liberty Corner
Lines: 40

In article <555@cisden.UUCP> cisden!john (John Woolley) writes:
>There are two issues here, which we ought to separate:  which particular
>nouns ought to be or are perceived as being in which categories?  and, Is
>it somehow inappropriate to use masculine pronouns for actually gender-
>neutral nouns?

Good point!  Let's keep those issues separate!

>As a side question, which maybe someone can answer, what do radicals do in
>languages like French, where almost every noun and adjective has specific
>gender, or Hebrew, where even the verbs do?  We think we got problems ...

I think that in most languages, "gender" and "sex" are distinct entities.
In Germany I once purchased a comic book in which Spiderman "die Spinne"
fought some thug whose name was translated "Killerfaust".  Both characters
were male, but were consistently given the feminine pronoun.

I find it rather surprising that virtually all languages have noun genders.
(A previous posting claimed that Hungarian does not.)  The only case where
"he gave it to her" is unambiguous is when there is exactly one male, one
female, and one neuter object present; in other cases one must infer from
additional information (which the author, seeing the ambiguity, normally
provides).  I can imagine a language which uses age or race rather than sex
to determine the proper pronoun; in such a language there would be analagous
cases where the pronoun information fully disambiguates the sentence, but
I doubt anybody would suggest that such pronouns be added to any language.

I've heard that the deaf-mute finger-speech uses a notation which assigns
one pronoun to each entity in the discussion, and refers to that entity by
pointing to its assigned area in the space around the speaker.  (Which to
me sounds an awful lot like register allocation on a computer.)  I believe
there is no gender information present; the best translation may be "the
party of the first part", etc.  Can somebody confirm/deny this?

What about languages that were designed rather than evolved?  What do the
pronouns mean in Esperanto?  Some years ago I heard about "Loglan", which
was supposed to be a "logically" designed language (hence the name).  Has
anybody else heard of it?

Karl W. Z. Heuer (ihnp4!bentley!kwh), The Walking Lint