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