On Fri, 21 Feb 2003, Philip Hart wrote:
#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.
That's grammatical gender, not biological sex. There may be separate
words or genders for male and female practitioners of a given
profession, or there may not-- and it may depend on the particular
profession-name. I'm not talking specifically about Italian here, but in
general about languages with grammatical gender. -- Well, let's see.
Cassell's Italian Dictionary, copyright 1958 - 1967. "dentista", plural
"dentisti", masculine noun, 'dentist'. I'd have to ask an
Italian-speaker whether a female dentist is "una dentista", with a
feminine article, or whether that is just WRONG WRONG WRONG.
# 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".
Yeah. How in hell do English-speakers manage to say "He's gone" without
the absolutely vital grammatical distinctions between the degrees of
certainty implied by "I saw him leave", "I saw him put his coat on and
then I heard the door open and close", "Somebody told me he'd left", and
"I haven't seen him for an hour"? No joke: there are languages where
you can't avoid these distinctions any more than you can avoid verb
tense or biological pronoun gender in English.
-- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and
Philological Busybody
a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel