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From: deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: SF & Language - Minimums
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References: <01bc265a$a239f270$275ee8cd@sal9000> <332c8711.3021574@news.mindspring.com> <E7B7BB.ADK@midway.uchicago.edu> <3331ACC1.6BF@scruznet.com>
Date: Fri, 21 Mar 1997 17:35:09 GMT
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(Please follow-up to sci.lang only.)

In article <3331ACC1.6BF@scruznet.com>,
Mike Wright  <darwin@scruznet.com> wrote:
>Daniel von Brighoff wrote:
>> 
>> Off hand, I can't think of *any* East Asian language with pronomial gender
>> distinctions.
>
>Do Japanese and Korean count as East Asian?

Of course.  But do your examples count as pronouns?

>Japanese has "kare" (he/him) and "kanojo" (she/her).
>Korean has "namcha" (he/him) and "yoza" (she/her). (Don't trust my
>Korean romanization - I just called my daughter-in-law and wrote down
>what I thought I heard over the phone.)

I think another poster has done a good job of replying to the Japanese
example.  As for the Korean, "namcha" (Yale /namca/) and "yoza" (Yale
/yeca/) are simply the common nouns for "man" (cf. Mand. nanzi) and
"woman" (cf. n"uzi) respectively.  When you absolutely want to make
gender distinctions in the third person, you can use these words with the
deictic /ku/, but they aren't pronouns and they aren't mandatory.  /ku/ by
itself represents a third person reference and the following noun sounds
unnecessary in most cases.

>Both languages also rely heavily on gender-free terms that translate to
>"this person" or "that person", which are a bit more formal or polite.

Exactly.  The plain words for "that person" are /ku i/ and /ku salam/.
The formal is /ku pun/ (although you would be more likely to use a title
if you were being really respectful) and the vulgar is /ku nom/ (m.) or
/ku nyen/ (f.).  (In really insulting language, /ko nom/ and /ko nyen/.)

Recently, the term /ku nye/ "that woman" (probably a loan translation of
/kano-jo/) has been introduced, possibly by and some authors use this
consistently in place of /ku/ for female reference.  So you could say that
*written* Korean is developing a gender distinction, but whether it will
become universal in speech remains to be seen.  (Does your daughter-in-law
use it at all?)



-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
