On Friday 05 October 2007, Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas wrote: > I know that you have a real issue against this Spanish idiosyncrasy :) > OTOH, I think that the way English among others pretend that sex should not > be named at all is pretty stupid. Like the politically correct language, or > Janet Jackson's boob affaire. LOL. > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l64KTLIcIAM
It *is* an amusing contrast. In Spanish, one man in the company of ten million women is enough to put the entire conversation into the masculine (nosotros), and everything is fundamentally sexist, and male/masculine-dominated, and nobody cares. Yet in English we trip all over ourselves for lack of gender-indeterminate pronouns (neuter is a gender, so "it" is not gender-indeterminate) and come up with ridiculous linguistic gymnastics like "he or she" or "his or her" and so on, or the disputed "they" and "their" used in an indeterminate way. It truly is madness. > More seriusly, Latin can't be blamed alone for your gender nightmare. In > Spanish, as in all Romance languages, the grammatical gender of inanimate > entities is quite arbitrary, and often different from that used in sister > languages. Too true, too true. I'm impressed you brought French and Portuguese into this. I wouldn't have thought you'd know anything of French. Why would anyone want to anyway? Miserable language, French. Miserable. (You listening, Guillaume? Yves? Heh heh heh.) -- D. Michael McIntyre ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Rosegarden-devel mailing list [email protected] - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel
