On Fri, 21 Feb 2003, David Silberstein wrote: > On Fri, 21 Feb 2003, Philip Hart wrote: > > >On Thu, 20 Feb 2003, David Silberstein wrote: > > >> http://www.hungarotips.com/hungarian/b/elso.html > >> > > > >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. > > If you look at the page above, you'll see that articles aren't > gendered either. Not sure about profession names, although a quick > check on the English-Hungarian website shows that "hero" -> 'hõs', > while "heroine" -> 'hõsnõ', so maybe that is a way to distinguish. What I meant to indicate above was that a) Hungarian is described as grammatically genderless (along with other languages I don't know squat about either like Turkish) by which I meant "doesn't indicate gender with grammar" i.e. agreeing with your premise about Hungarian but b) that there's a long list of things one needs to look at to confirm this for say single-3rd-person-singular-pronoun Dragaeran - adjectives, nouns, articles, and verb(al)s, and for that matter other exotic grammatical structures, and for that matter tone and hand gestures and whatnot that might not get written down, and for that matter politeness structures that would distinguish gender but only if you knew which forms were male, etc. etc. etc. As Dragearan languages evolved from human language(s) I would wildly speculate that a) (at least one of) the latter had gender (well, ok, unless all the original settlers were Hungarians, Turks, and Chinese [anyone overturn my vague idea that gender isn't written in Chinese?] who didn't use anything else as a common tongue) and that b) somewhere along the line they decided to go genderless. Or c) the settlers spoke some not-yet-developed genderless language. And d) that human groups with different languages (and "racial" features - aren't Lyorn's typically dark, for example?) were used to develop different Houses, which have radically different languages.