On Thu, 20 Feb 2003, David Silberstein wrote: > http://www.hungarotips.com/hungarian/b/elso.html > > 1. Personal pronouns in the Hungarian language are: > > én / I te, ön / you õ / he, she, it [1] > mi / we ti, önök / you õk / they > > As you can see, there is only one word (õ) used to indicate the 3rd > person singular, regardless of gender. There is simply no way to > indicate using the basic pronoun alone whether you're referring to a > male or a female. > > I would imagine that there are ways of phrasing things which do in > fact distinguish gender, but you would have to do so explicitly. So, > as a (clumsy) example of an possible literal translation from the > Hungarian: "T. Domotor is a famous ethnologist. It has written many > books and papers on Hungarian folklore. Its contributions to the > field of ethnology are outstanding. It is a woman". Just a comment that while Hungarian is grammatically genderless, having no gendered pronouns isn't sufficient. Pronouns are relatively infrequent in Italian ("she has" => "has"), for example, but the articles have gender ("a" -> "a(female)"), and profession names too. Language manage without the most basic stuff sometimes - I never learned how to say "yes" in Latin and believe the Romans made do with "It is so". Some languages have a way of saying "yes" to a question phrased expecting a negative without English's ambiguity. Makes the Babel story almost believable. Anyway, it seems to me that the "gya" discussion in _TPG_ was incomplete.