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From: | Wol's lists |
Subject: | Re: [OT] Grammatic gender |
Date: | Wed, 15 Nov 2017 22:32:43 +0000 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.4.0 |
On 15/11/17 20:32, David Kastrup wrote:
David Wright <address@hidden> writes:On Wed 15 Nov 2017 at 11:56:07 (-0500), Kieren MacMillan wrote:Hi Simon,
A duchess has gender, but I don't see that the word "duchess" has grammatical gender. How is that expressed?"The duchess ate her lunch" as opposed to "The duchess ate its lunch"? German: "Das Mädchen aß seine Mahlzeit.".
Except that "her" refers to the person, not the noun ... Mind you, I would feel happy with the following: The cat ate its lunch (indeterminate gender) The tom ate its lunch (we know it's male because it's a tom) The queen ate its lunch (we know it's female because it's a queen)But I suspect that's because we rarely use "tom" or "queen", and your mind substitutes the indeterminate "cat".
But again, personification, not grammar. To me that feels slightly weird - as far as I am concerned the sun is "it".It may seem so, because the articles for all three genders are the same, but words are referred to by ‘he’, ‘she’, or ‘it’. In English the sun is male, the moon femaleI've spoken English my entire life, and I have literally never heard an exchange like: Q: Is the sun up yet? A: Yes — he rose an hour ago.Neither have I, though there is the song "The sun has got his hat on". Again, personification, not grammar."Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines And often is his gold complexion dimm'd" Sonnet 18 by Shakespeare.
Cheers, Wol
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