🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug4.203501.10085@bnr.ca> Peter Marko <pmarko@bnr.ca> writes:
>>In article <EUGENE.92Jul25231756@ra.cs.umb.edu> eugene@cs.umb.edu
>(Eugene 
>>O'Neil) writes:
>>
>>I think it's a bummer that English (and most languages) lack a
>>gender neutral singular pronoun.  (Finnish has one!)  I don't know
>
>Hungarian, a distant relative of Finnish, has only one singular pronoun
>(it is gender-neutral, of course).  Both languages belong to the
>Finno-Ugric group (but to different branches).
>
>I wonder if there are other languages with gender-neutral pronouns.

Most, if not all, of the manual languages lack gender marking more or
less entirely.  American Sign Language does have morphemes that are
roughly "male" and "female" (forehead tab and chin or cheek tabs
respectively), but they are only used in male/female human
relationship nouns -- man/woman, son/daughter, aunt/uncle,
boyfriend/girlfriend, etc.  There is no gender agreement for verbs,
and all pronouns are unmarked.  Most of the languages descended from
Old French Sign Language probably share this trait.

I believe I saw that Taiwanese Sign Language (or perhaps it was Hong
Kong Sign Language) does mark gender, but I'm not sure if the pronouns
are marked.  It seemed to be considered an anomaly in this regard.

Evan Kirshenbaum
    HP Laboratories
    3500 Deer Creek Road, Building 26U
    Palo Alto, CA  94304

    kirshenbaum@hplabs.hp.com
    (415)857-7572