Active Users:295 Time:21/05/2024 08:45:45 AM
The really fun part is when grammatical gender doesn't match the sex even for humans. - Edit 1

Before modification by Legolas at 22/06/2015 10:30:42 PM


View original postAlso, his thesis ignored the distinction between gender and sex, which is curious, because I suspect he is sufficiently familiar with foreign languages to be well aware of it. In a sense, one could argue the difference between APPEARANCE or USAGE and NATURE is exactly the difference. To take an example many Americans would recognize, "el pollo" is Spanish for "the chicken" and "la gallina" for "the hen." Of course, a hen is both a chicken and one of the female variety, but if one were to reference a hen generically in Spanish as a chicken it would NOT be correct to say, "la pollo," because the word "pollo" is NEVER of feminine gender even though hens are EXCLUSIVELY SO. By accident or design, the term transGENDER is precisely accurate.

Especially in German, where both Mädchen (girl) and Fräulein (Miss) are grammatically neutral, and consequently the only correct way of referring to them is with "es" ("it". My own Dutch is similar but a little more flexible and tends to go with the sensible but grammatically incoherent alternative of referring to them with a feminine pronoun.

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