On Fri, 21 Feb 2003, Mark A Mandel wrote:
> 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.
Well, we don't need to go to Italian (which the way I speak it doesn't
allow "una dentista" - a further complication is that the article often
gets dropped with professions - "I'm a dentist" => "Sono dentista") since
English has (had) actor/actress etc, but probably never
"dentist/dentistess". I speak German pretty well and can report that
profession nouns do as a rule indicate (slightly incompletely) gender -
der Physiker (masc. sing.), die Physikerin (fem. sing.), die Physiker
(masc. or mixed pl.), die Physikerinnen (fem. pl.) - these are
nominatives. Anyway, this is getting afield from "gya"...