For the interest of David Silberstein, Philip Hart and others that care: I reposed the question to my grandfather regarding gender-specific pronouns in the Hungarian language. This time, however, instead of asking in person or by telephone, I e-mailed him, thereby obtaining a response in writing. (Now I can't mess up his words again!) I have copied his e-mail below for anyone interested, though I think much of this was already said by David Silberstein in his response to my post requesting his knowledge on the subject. _______________________________________________________________________ >P.M.C.T. wrote: <snip> > >I remember our little conversation about gender specific pronouns, or the >lack thereof, in the Magyar language. Actually Hungarian does not >differentiate between male and female genders in pronoun usage, but there >is differentiation between personal pronouns and impersonal referring to >inanimate objects. For example: >In English, there is gender differentiation in the third person singular >pronouns, such as "he" "she" and "it". The Hungarian equivalents are "o" >(with an umlaut, that looks like the double quote mark -"-, on top) for >"he" and "she", and "az" for "it". >The result is that in Hungarian there is no feminist controversy, as we >have in English, for using a male oriented pronoun for gender- >neutral reference to people in the singular who in the context could be >either male or female. In English we are attempting to overcome this >controversy by using, incorrectly, I might add, the plural pronoun "they" >instead of "he" for this generic singlular reference. >Does this make sense to you? > >By the way, you did not ask but here is another related item. In English >while the words "man" and "woman" refer to the male and female persons, >respectively, "man" is also used as a gender-neutral identifier of human >beings. In Hungarian there are three words for these references. > >"ferfi" (with a single quote mark -'- on top ot the e) means "man" in >gender-specific sense, > >"no" (with a double quote mark -"- on top of the o) means "woman", and > >"ember" means "man" in a generic sense, or more loosely, "human". > >Here again, the language does not interfere with the women's movement. [... and then bunch of personal stuff that has no bearing on this message board...] _________________________________________________________________ MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus