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Article #3008Re: Gender and grammar
From: Harlan Messinger
Date: Thu, 04 Nov 1999 00:00
Date: Thu, 04 Nov 1999 00:00
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Kalen <paradox@intelligencia.com> wrote in message news:3821EFE6.940B3968@intelligencia.com... > "D. Edward Gund v. Brighoff" wrote: > > A better question is "What purposes do these sorts of classes serve?" > > And why did they call it "gender" (especially in languages where > there are 12 of them!) Because the original meaning of "gender" wasn't "sex"! It comes from the French "genre", meaning "kind", "type", or (English has borrowed the word) "genre". It came into English with these meanings. It came to be used as a synonym for "sex", but also to describe classes of words belonging to a language.
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X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: fe7be,443b37a738556546 X-Google-Attributes: gidfe7be,public X-Google-Thread: 10a20a,e892391024e276b4 X-Google-Attributes: gid10a20a,public From: "Harlan Messinger" <zzzhmessinger@erols.com> Subject: Re: Gender and grammar Date: 1999/11/04 Message-ID: <7vsu1g$83u$1@autumn.news.rcn.net> X-Deja-AN: 544551061 References: <QlyR3.11153$14.428309@typ12.nn.bcandid.com> <3820E4A7.401CE648@dtn.ntl.com> <JBhU3.118$813.2277@uchinews> <EojU3.764$yF6.5671@newsfeed.slurp.net> <MPjU3.125$813.2356@uchinews> <3821EFE6.940B3968@intelligencia.com> X-Priority: 3 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2314.1300 X-Complaints-To: abuse@rcn.com X-Trace: jglXPQm78sxggOK6qbeOIbj/m6wY1ztKKQNxoI72hvz75Si3ZNatUg== X-MSMail-Priority: Normal NNTP-Posting-Date: 4 Nov 1999 21:32:32 GMT Newsgroups: sci.lang,bit.listserv.autism