Dear all,
I was just about to ask you to stop this discussion because it seemed so
"unimportant" or at least I could not stick to it. And then comes this
mail, continuing with "sex" in words etc. I continue:
Welcome to Finland - we have no sex with words. We have only nouns, no
"she" or "he" but "it" i.e. "se" about things. What we nowadays do have,
is the men's names as they have come from English. I must think hard
before I choose some fictitious name like George or Dick, because somebody
may understand me wrong. Now we even have some Finnish names that behave
like Dick.
Warm regards to everyone, regardless of gender,
Raija
> Dear all on objects:
>
> Just add some confused clarity:
>
> For nouns, English possesses the rare quality of neutral or indefinite
> gender. In Portuguese and in most of the neo Latin languages that is a
> rare
> situation so here it goes:
> Objecto (object) is masculine.
> Coisa (thing) is feminine.
> You never say “objecta” as a feminine noun but you can say it as a verb
> form like when someone is “objecting your honour”.
> You can say coiso (masculine of coisa), which normally refers to the
> male’s
> sex or to an object that you don’t know the name (that “coiso” between the
> carburettor and the sparkplugs).
> Designing things, in neo Latin is equivalent to populate the earth with
> males and females while in the Saxon world is equivalent to populate the
> world with “its” (the word that the Knights of Ni couldn’t hear)
> The trouble is even bigger when you notice that gender is not stable among
> the neo Latin languages. A tree is masculine in Italy and feminine in
> Portugal and Spain. An orange is masculine in Italy and feminine in
> Portugal. A car (machina) is feminine in Italy and masculine in Portugal
> (carro). While in Portugal streets are flooded with people inside coarse
> chaps, in Italy people move inside crazy galls.
> Maybe that’s why we never achieve the power of total abstraction. We
> always
> have sex (gender) on our minds.
>
> Best,
>
> Eduardo
>
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