Cathy Friedmann wrote:

"EvelynVogtGamble(Divamanque)" wrote in message
...


Rona Yuthasastrakosol wrote:

"Magic Mood Jeep©" wrote in message
news:ubs2b.258074$uu5.59071@sccrnsc04...
Uhm, duh!

I only used the words "it" and "thing" to define that *he* wasn't a
human
and does NOT understand the human language & it's meaning, only the
sounds
that *he* will learn to know as what we use when we vocalize to *him*.

snip

In many languages, such as English, animals *are* 'it' and 'things'
since
they are not human. Prescriptively, you were perfectly correct to use
'it'
to describe Weeble. Cat Protector seems to have little but cats in his
social circle, hence the desire to anthropomorphize them.

How is it "anthropomorphizing" to assign an animal its proper gender?
Dogs and cats are not humans, true, but they are fellow mammals, thus
members of a bi-sexual species. Name just ONE language where individual
living creatures are not referred to by gender! (Certain NOT English,
as you claim, nor French, German, Italian, Spanish.....)

I don't know about German, but hey, in French (& I think Spanish & probably
Italian) even inanimate objects are assigned a gender! ;-P

In Spanish and Italian, definitely - German is a bit more complicated,
because you have masculine, feminine AND neuter nouns (but not ALL
inanimate things are automatically classed as neuter, as they are in
English).