Re: Gender in Pronouns
Martina Luise Pachali 
Thu, 15 Oct 1998 15:43:47 -0400


Sorik wrote:
>Japanese sort of has gender pronouns, at least in the written language. =
 =

>In the kanji for "Younger sister", "oler sister", and some others that =

>label a person as some form of female, there is the kanji for "woman", =

>so there is still gender labeling, just not "he", "she" and so forth.  =

>Also, when you say "Peter studies Japanese", and then you say, "Eats =

>fruit", you are very strongly implying "He eats fruit".

>Sorik

Japanese does in fact has gendered pronouns and specific form that imply
gender, but it completely lacks *grammatical* gender, that is what I mean=
t
to say. In Finnish, too, you can suggest gender by appending the suffix
-tar/-t=E4r to many words that describe persons. Opettaja is a teacher,
opettajatar clearly denotes a female teacher. Still, having a word for
woman doesn't mean that you have grammatical gender; and that both
languages definitely do not have. The female teacher ist still "h=E4n" (t=
he
most basic "sentient" pronoun), as is her male colleague, as opposed to t=
he
dog or the blackboard, which are "se". You prove it yourself in your
Japanese example. "Eats fruit" clearly implies that someone eats a fruit,=

and, a male person having been mentioned shortly before, we *translate*
"*He* eats a fruit", but that is just our implication. The words are the
same whether the student is male or female. No grammatical gender. I coul=
d
spell it all out in Japanese (or in Finnish) for you if you want to, but
I'm sure you get my point without that. And what we were originally
discussing was grammatical gender in Vulcan, not whether it's possible to=

say that a person is male or female.

T'Pel