naming of plants

Hans Callebaut hcalleba@yahoo.com
Sat, 09 Jan 2016 12:22:39 PST
Not to go too far off-topic, but both Maedchen and Fraeulein are diminutives, which are always neutral.

-----Original Message-----
From: "Garak" <garak@code-garak.de>
Sent: ‎1/‎9/‎2016 10:45 AM
To: "Pacific Bulb Society" <pbs@lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [pbs] naming of plants

Am 09.01.2016 um 17:38 schrieb penstemon:
> German has oddities too. “Das Maedchen und das Kind.”
> Bob
I understand the problem with "das Mädchen", it's odd to use a neutral 
word for her. It's the same with "das Fräulein". I'm really happy that 
the latter one dies out, I find it discriminating that the female 
address says if she's married (Frau) or not (Fräulein), but the the male 
(Herr) does not. How about Ms/Mrs in English? Is it still used that much?
"Das Kind" isn't really odd - it could be a boy or a girl, so neutral is 
ok for me. But the gender of words really gets odd for some words that 
show regional variation: both "die Butter" and "der Butter" is 
officially ok, the latter one is south-eastern style (sounds horrible to 
me, but one can't change the Bavarians....) Then there's "der Teller" 
and "das Teller" (the plate) and several others, with each and  every 
one having a different regional distribution... But don't worry, we 
usually don't expect non-natives to get this part of our grammar right. 
If you want to impress Germans, you can use sun and moon correctly - for 
us, the sun is female (die Sonne), and the moon is male (der Mond) - 
that puzzles most English native speakers I've met...

Am 09.01.2016 um 17:57 schrieb John Weagle:
> Last night we had a brief Arabic lesson, the staggering number of pronouns especially for you - formal, informal, male, female, mixed duos - and how bewildering the writing of each is.
This sounds highly interesting and may be useful to better understand 
the islamic culture - especially in the field of gender interaction, 
where I'd guess lie most misunderstandings.

-- 
Martin
----------------------------------------------
Southern Germany
Likely zone 7a


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