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Adam Walker scripsit:
> And I can blame my Chinese student's difficulty in remembering the
> borrow/lend or he/she distinction on ambiguous Chinese, but that doesn't
> aid their learning, or make the distinction less difficult to remember
> in use.
Which more usually gets misapplied, "he" or "she"?
Gaelic-speaking Scottish Highlanders used to be caricatured as using
"she" indiscriminately for "he", "she", and "it" when speaking English
(Walter Scott's books are full of this, e.g.). However, I suspect the
truth is that they might tend to say "she" for "it" (Gaelic has no
neuter gender or pronoun, and English-speakers already use "she" for "it"
in certain critical cases like ships), but I doubt that anyone ever said
"she" for "he", since that distinction, applied to human beings, is
exactly the same in the two languages.
--
John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@hidden.email
To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all. There
are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language
that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful.
--_The Hobbit_