On Wed 15 Nov 2017 at 11:56:07 (-0500), Kieren MacMillan wrote: > Hi Simon, > > > On Nov 14, 2017, at 5:47 PM, Simon Albrecht <simon.albre...@mail.de> wrote: > > > >> Again, here English is very unusual because words do not have a gender > >> (the objects they refer to may, but that's different ... :-) > > > > How would that be true? > > See, e.g., <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender>: > Although Old English had grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and > neuter; as in Modern German), modern English is not considered to have them > and aside from a handful of nouns such as "god" and "goddess", "duke" and > "duchess", "tiger" and "tigress", and "waiter" and "waitress", gender is > found almost exclusively in pronouns and titles.
A duchess has gender, but I don't see that the word "duchess" has grammatical gender. How is that expressed? > > 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 female > > I'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. Cheers, David. _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
