Gender in Pronouns
Martina Luise Pachali 
Tue, 13 Oct 1998 16:29:16 -0400


Saul Epstein wrote:
>The chief advantage to the first solution seems to be that it allows
>greater precision. The chief advantage to the second solution seems to
>be that we don't have to adopt any surface changes, only a change in
>the way the surface is understood.<

Definitely, the first version would work better, if there has to be any
grammatical gender at all. I know several Terran languages (e,g. Finnish =
or
Japanese) that do very well without. And  distinguishing between sentient=

and non-sentient would make much more sense. Finnish does it this way, an=
d
it works fine. If for some reason you need to be offensive, you just use
the non-sentient pronons for a person...

T'Pel