On Fri, 14 Jan 2000, Janus wrote:
> At 12:49 AM 01/14/2000 +0100, you wrote:
> >
> >So what would you like? "Its" wouldn't be nice to both genders, I suppose.
> >But inventing a "fourth" gender which means both real genders isn't
> >feasible, too? You would confuse us non-native English speakers and we'd
> >probably turn to Esperanto instead :-).
> >
>
> It could be worse, Nils. In Canada, we have two official languages, and
> the non-English one has gendered and numbered nouns embedded. For a while,
Well, gendered and numbered pronouns are standard for almost any language
I know except English. What's funny is that French (your 'non-English'
language, yes it has a name :-) doesn't have a neuter one.
> university feminists were pushing "per" as the gender neutral pronoun.
> (That died a natural death.)
>
> Still, I like the Finnish approach to the perceived threat of messy old
> English (the ultimate pidgen language, btw) taking over the world. There
> is a move afoot up there to reconver that position for Latin....
Unlikely to succeed. Can you imagine a <put your favourite modern music
style here> song in Latin? Probably not.
> Janus
> Dum vivimus.....
... discimus.
Nils
--
Nils Philippsen / Berliner Straße 39 / D-71229 Leonberg // +49.7152.209647
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regarded as a criminal offence. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra
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