Newsgroups: sci.lang
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From: groos@ifspm.unizh.ch (Malgorzata Roos)
Subject: Gender of personified Death
Message-ID: <1995May17.121518.14224@rzu-news.unizh.ch>
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Organization: University of Zurich, Switzerland
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Date: Wed, 17 May 1995 12:15:18 GMT
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A recent thread in sci.lang discussed about father tongue and
motherland.
I wonder about the gender usually attributed to Death in fairy tales,
popular drama, and also in pictures on cards used for fortune telling.
My first language is Polish, which like most slavonic languages
treats Death as a fem. word/person; when I got confronted with 
German "Gevatter Tod", I was much surprised at seeing that other
languages/cultures treat Death as masc.;
Can fellow netters please tell me how other languages treat this
subject?
I'm *not* interested in purely *grammatical gender* alone, but also
implications on how people imagine Death - as a man or as woman.

Malgorzata Roos, Zurich
groos@amath.unizh.ch
