David Wright <lily...@lionunicorn.co.uk> writes: > 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?
"The duchess ate her lunch" as opposed to "The duchess ate its lunch"? German: "Das Mädchen aß seine Mahlzeit.". >> > 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. "Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines And often is his gold complexion dimm'd" Sonnet 18 by Shakespeare. -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
