On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 10:54:24PM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote: > On Wed, 2003-10-22 at 20:47, Erik Steffl wrote: > > Nori Heikkinen wrote: > > > on Sun, 19 Oct 2003 12:38:45PM -0700, Erik Steffl insinuated: > > ... > > >> of course, you can create various complex and ambiguous sentences in > > >>english, the point is that you can take few forms of sentences and > > >>have a working language (that's pretty much what BASIC (talking > > >>about programming language) is). > > > > > > you can do that in both languages. > > > > let's say you have a function called isRed(x) (returns true if x is > > red). Now how would you call this function in german? it would never be > > in agreement with all possible x (grammatically). not sure if this is > > the best example - perhaps in this case it would be acceptable to use > > istRot, regardless of gender of x. point is you would run into problems > > like this trying to use german, you would very rarely come up with > > problems of this nature in english... > > Being a native speaker of American, I've always wondered > - What is the purpose of "gender" in grammar/language? > - Is it only the European/Latinate languages that have the gender > concept? > - Why English doesn't have gender, since it's predecessor, German, > does have gender?
I'd imagine that specifying gender in terms is done in order to keep up with gender-based rules that are inherent in some languages. (Though this does lead you to a chicken-or-egg paradox.) Though IANAL(inguist). I'm sure that there's a more scientific explanation for it, but this is the first thing I could come up with. :) -- Alex Malinovich Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY! Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the pgp.net keyservers. Key ID: A6D24837 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
