Celebrating the “great and powerful”
June 6 — also the birthday of the famous Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin — was for the first time celebrated as the Day of the Russian Language, thanks to the UN decision which proclaimed special...
View ArticleSo what comes first: chicken or egg?
In an earlier posting, I mentioned that grandmothers and grandfathers sounds better in that order. And so does ladies and gentlemen, Mom and Dad and many other so-called binomials (i.e., collocations...
View ArticleGender vs. Noun Class: same or different?
Some familiar Indo-European languages like German, French and Russian have gender systems: in those languages nouns belong to one of two or three classes (or types). Typically, such gender systems are...
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The human and the frog
[the author thanks Olga Kagan for inspiration] Imagine a bewitched frog, waiting to be kissed in order to turn back into a human. Given a choice between a prince and a princess, who will the enchanted...
View ArticleMore on sex, gender and translation
As mentioned in yesterday’s post, the grammatical gender system of one’s language has a strong effect on how one personifies non-human characters. For example, whether an enchanted frog you kiss will...
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Fruit, vegetable, boy, girl…
It may appear from the previous post that gender is “lost in translation” only when a literary text is translated from a language with no grammatical gender system into a language that does have one,...
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I love you!
As linguists, we often tell our students — without giving it a second thought — that all languages are equally grammatically complex. As Guy Deutcher puts it in his Through the Language Glass, “equal...
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Google Translates Gender
[Thanks to David Pesetsky for inspiring this post] The topics of Google Translate and of translating gender have been discussed in this blog before. I have argued that Google Translate fails to...
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“Hen” said, “hen” said
In many Western countries concerns are raised about gender-specific language. The French hurry to get rid of mademoiselle. The Swedes are not far behind in wanting to get rid of ‘him’ and ‘her’. It has...
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“Yo” said, “yo” said…
A recent LotW post discussed a newly introduced gender-neutral third person Swedish pronoun hen. It appears that a similar gender-neutral pronoun is developing naturally in a local dialect of American...
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