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From: n7420257@henson.cc.wwu.edu (Paul Tholfsen)
Subject: Re: Gender in the world's languages
Message-ID: <1994Dec18.000850.7221@henson.cc.wwu.edu>
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Date: Sun, 18 Dec 1994 00:08:50 GMT
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In article <3cslm6$jd3@newshost.lanl.gov> tanmoy@qcd.lanl.gov (Tanmoy Bhattacharya) writes:


>|> Further, my sense is that we have inherited the whole idea from ancient  
>|> grammarians who were not asserting that _concepts_ had gender but rather
>|> merely using a kind of mnemonic device to recognize that there was a finite
>|> number of ways in which nouns in Greek or Latin were declined.

I think confusion often arises from the dual use in English of the word
"gender" to mean either "sex" or "grammatical classification".  Some
languages have numerous genders (masculine animate, feminine animate, young
animate, long shape, liquid, etc...).  Indo European languages, I believe,
have reduced this to one, two or three genders, from possibly considerably
more in PIE.  Thus, there's nothing inherently masculine or feminine about
the sun, moon, tables or water.































