callas@eris.DEC (This space intentionally blank) (01/30/85)
Harrumph, harrumph. Then I'd expect that 'homo' would be of neuter gender, which Latin provides, but it's male. The "default sex" in Latin is male, just as in every language I ever heard of. (If there are exceptions, does this coincide with a less male-supremacist culture?) You can "Harrumph" all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that "homo" means "human" and "vir" means "adult male." What gender a language uses for a word often bears little resemblance to what the word means. In French, the word for 'ovary' is masculine. Getting back to Latin, the word "virtus," from which we get 'virtue,' means "The qualities of being manly." However, it is a feminine word. If I may pick a nit, "homo" is not male, it is masculine. Words do not have sex, they have gender. This applies to many other things. For example, clothes. A skirt (at least in our culture) is feminine. It is not female. But apparently contracts written in archaic French refer to "personnes", which is of course feminine in French. And then to keep the gender straight, so to speak, the contract refers to these persons as "elles" [they, female] later on. How would modern French handle this? --John Purbrick The same way. Plural 'they' in legal documuments is "elles." Jon Callas ...decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-eris!callas