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Abandoned Kitten - Day 2: Weeble Poops!!!



 
 
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  #1  
Old August 25th 03, 10:13 PM
Cathy Friedmann
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Default Abandoned Kitten - Day 2: Weeble Poops!!!


"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

Cathy

--
"Staccato signals of constant information..."
("The Boy in the Bubble") Paul Simon


  #2  
Old August 26th 03, 12:44 AM
Rona Yuthasastrakosol
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Default

piggy-backing since I never got the original

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

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.....)



Two languages, other than English (prescriptively), that I have first-hand
knowledge of are Thai and Japanese. Neither uses he/she pronouns to refer
to animals.

As I said in my previous post, *prescriptively*, English is one of the
languages that uses 'it' for non-humans. *Descriptively*, few people use
'it' except when refering to those animals of which the sex is unknown (for
example, a dog on the street--"There's a dog! Where did it come from?").
Prescriptive and descriptive English can be two very different things.
Linguistically speaking, neither usage is incorrect. The descriptive usage
of he/she in English can probably be traced back to whenever pets became
widely owned, or perhaps even to wide-spread animal domestication. Humans
did not always have domesticated animals and very likely thought of animals
in very different terms from how we do now.

On that note, the use of he/she to describe animals is often used when the
writer/speaker considers the animals to have some personality of its own.
'It' is more likely used when the writer/speaker has no emotional attachment
to the animal. (That's where the anthropomorphism comes in--the attachment
of personality to an animal--though yes, I do think my cat has a very
distinct personality even though 'personality' is a word that is
*prescriptively* to be used for humans, only--note the root of the word
'person'.)

That being said, I think one of the problems with language is that we
(humans) tend to be very ethnocentric. If you were to look at cultures that
did not value animals as pets, you would probably find more languages that
do not use he/she to refer to animals (or perhaps use he/she for some but
not for others). Just because one culture values cats and dogs, doesn't
mean all cultures do (hence the use of dogs and cats as food in some Asian
cultures). Not all languages even have pronouns, or define pronouns the
same way English does. Of course languages will differentiate between male
and female (sex) but it does not follow that they will be the same with
he/she/it usage.

rona





  #3  
Old August 26th 03, 03:31 AM
Cheryl
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In ,
Cathy Friedmann composed with style:

That was pretty thorough. ;-) (And interesting.)

Wasn't it? I don't mean to stereotype, but I often find Asians are
more well-versed in the English language than some of us who only have
the one language. (forgive me, Rona, if Asian isn't your
ethnicity).



  #4  
Old August 26th 03, 05:30 AM
EvelynVogtGamble(Divamanque)
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Default



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).
  #5  
Old August 26th 03, 05:34 AM
EvelynVogtGamble(Divamanque)
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Default



Rona Yuthasastrakosol wrote:

piggy-backing since I never got the original

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

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.....)



Two languages, other than English (prescriptively), that I have first-hand
knowledge of are Thai and Japanese. Neither uses he/she pronouns to refer
to animals.

As I said in my previous post, *prescriptively*, English is one of the
languages that uses 'it' for non-humans.


Actually, that's not true, unless the animal's gender is unknown. (And
a "human" is an "it", too, when gender is unspecified.)

*Descriptively*, few people use
'it' except when refering to those animals of which the sex is unknown (for
example, a dog on the street--"There's a dog! Where did it come from?").
Prescriptive and descriptive English can be two very different things.
Linguistically speaking, neither usage is incorrect. The descriptive usage
of he/she in English can probably be traced back to whenever pets became
widely owned, or perhaps even to wide-spread animal domestication. Humans
did not always have domesticated animals and very likely thought of animals
in very different terms from how we do now.

On that note, the use of he/she to describe animals is often used when the
writer/speaker considers the animals to have some personality of its own.
'It' is more likely used when the writer/speaker has no emotional attachment
to the animal. (That's where the anthropomorphism comes in--the attachment
of personality to an animal--though yes, I do think my cat has a very
distinct personality even though 'personality' is a word that is
*prescriptively* to be used for humans, only--note the root of the word
'person'.)

That being said, I think one of the problems with language is that we
(humans) tend to be very ethnocentric. If you were to look at cultures that
did not value animals as pets, you would probably find more languages that
do not use he/she to refer to animals (or perhaps use he/she for some but
not for others). Just because one culture values cats and dogs, doesn't
mean all cultures do (hence the use of dogs and cats as food in some Asian
cultures). Not all languages even have pronouns, or define pronouns the
same way English does. Of course languages will differentiate between male
and female (sex) but it does not follow that they will be the same with
he/she/it usage.

rona

  #6  
Old August 26th 03, 05:23 PM
David Yehudah
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Check your dictionary. :-) Given the expected response beforehand, *I*
wouldn't presume to take the chance of having my head handed to me on a
plate. However, it is a bit chancy (even to be PC) to disagree with
Webster. ducks and runs and hides

wrote:

(And if anyone writes to say nasal voice, "English *does* have a gender-
neutral third-person singular pronoun: 'he'" I'll bap *him* on the head,
all claws out! "He" ain't neutral!)


Joyce


  #7  
Old August 26th 03, 06:16 PM
Marina
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wrote

Finnish makes no difference between he and she, they are all hn.


(Sorry, Marina, I had to delete the letter in the above word that isn't
part of the ASCII character set, because otherwise this message wouldn't
post!)

I sure wish English had a word like that! Not that I would want to banish
"he" and "she" - if you're talking about a specific individual and you

know
his/her gender, then use the appropriate pronoun. But there really should
be third person singular pronoun that *doesn't* specify gender, for all
those times you're talking about hypothetical persons (such as when I just
did it 3 lines above, when I wrote "his/her gender"), or when you are

talking
about someone specific but you don't know "their" gender.

(And if anyone writes to say nasal voice, "English *does* have a gender-
neutral third-person singular pronoun: 'he'" I'll bap *him* on the head,
all claws out! "He" ain't neutral!)

There really should be a word that's truly neutral, so we, in our quest
for accuracy and fairness, aren't forced into awkward constructions or
grammatical incorrectness.


Tell me about it! This is a problem I face every day as I translate from
Finnish to English. For every han (I'll write it like this, though han in
turn means he in Swedish ;o), I have to change the wording or put in a
clumsy "he or she", "he/she" or "s/he". Not to mention the "him- or
herselves", "his or hers" etc.

--
Marina

  #8  
Old August 26th 03, 07:09 PM
CK
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Default

Marina wrote:
"EvelynVogtGamble(Divamanque)" wrote
In that case, I wonder about Hungarian? (I've read that, despite
differences that make one unintelliglble to the other, Hungarian and
Finnish are related to each other, but not to any other European
language.)


That's true, except that Estonian also belong to the Fenno-Ugric family. I
don't know Hungarian, so don't know about the personal pronouns.


It just so happens that I have a small Hungarian-German-Hungarian
dictionary. I used to have a crush on a Hungarian boy at school and the
German is due to the fact that I went to the German school and that I
bought the dictionary on our school trip to Germany...

Well, anyway the dictionary shows that all three third singular personal
pronouns - he, she, it - are the same = ö (o with dots) - long dots
actually to make the vowel sound a bit longer. So apparently Hungarian
follows the pattern of neutral personal pronouns.

--
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Christine in Vantaa, Finland (Europe)
Email: christal63(at)yahoo(dot)com
Photos: http://photos.yahoo.com/christal63

  #9  
Old August 26th 03, 11:12 PM
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David Yehudah wrote:

Check your dictionary. :-)


Oh, I know. "He" is definitely the official neutral pronoun in the
English language, just as the word "man" means "human". But I'm
talking connotations here. When most people hear the words "he" or
"man", they think male, regardless of what the dictionary says. And
I think that's problematic. So do a lot of people, not just feminists.
Kids, for example, have a natural tendency to use the word "they" as
a singluar pronoun when they don't know the gender of the person
they're referring to. I certainly did as a kid - it just didn't make
sense to my child's logic to say "he" when the person in question
could be a she... Not that kids always have the best logic, but you
can't deny that it's natural.

Joyce
  #10  
Old August 27th 03, 12:48 AM
David Yehudah
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You're right, Joyce. In today's PC world using the correct term can be
confusing. As an American educated back in the pre-PC era, 1950's or so,
I grew up with 'he' as the gender neutral and am quite content with it.
However, I am not a woman (I seem to hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir
somewhere in the background singing the "Hallelujah" chorus, but that
could just be my imagination), so it doesn't strike me as being
deliberately unfair. Notice I say deliberately; it strikes me as being
the result of common usage rather than some evil plot to disenfranchise
women.

I don't think I've ever heard a sentence using 'he' as the gender
neutral form that confused me as to the sex of whoever was being
referred to. It seems to me that it is similar to the British habit of
saying 'one,' as in "One mustn't be too hasty, must one?" I have heard
'they' used to refer to one man when his gender was not in doubt. That
not only sounded contrived, it sounded ignorant.

To me it's a non issue, something some people have dragged out by the
short hairs and held up as an example of how men want to hog everything,
etc. It's a Cause; people pay it lip service to show they are Aware. Of
The Cause. People who are Aware of The Cause make me tired. 'He/she' is
awkward, 'they' (for the singular) sounds ignorant. 'He,' for all the
negative connotations PC people claim for it, is the correct term.
Everything else sounds contrived.

That said, I'll admit that whenever possible I cast a sentence in such a
way as to avoid that usage. When I was still teaching I taught my
students and even some of my fellow English professors to do it that
way. For example, the sentence, "If a student comes to class late, he'll
just have to take whatever seat is available," becomes "Any student who
come in late will have to take whatever seat is available." It's a
grammatically correct usage without offending anyone, except maybe late
arrivals. :-)

I sometimes think it's unfair the way people pick on English for this
usage, when most foreign languages are even worse. For example, in
Spanish the correct third person plural for a group of women is 'ellas.'
But if even one man intrudes on two million females, then the correct
term is 'ellos,' the masculine form, even though there may be only one
of him. Personally, I would take to my heels and advance smartly in the
other direction. The same is true in most Latinate languages, as well as
Hebrew, where 'aten' becomes 'atem.'

wrote:
David Yehudah wrote:

Check your dictionary. :-)


Oh, I know. "He" is definitely the official neutral pronoun in the
English language, just as the word "man" means "human". But I'm
talking connotations here. When most people hear the words "he" or
"man", they think male, regardless of what the dictionary says. And
I think that's problematic. So do a lot of people, not just feminists.
Kids, for example, have a natural tendency to use the word "they" as
a singluar pronoun when they don't know the gender of the person
they're referring to. I certainly did as a kid - it just didn't make
sense to my child's logic to say "he" when the person in question
could be a she... Not that kids always have the best logic, but you
can't deny that it's natural.

Joyce


 




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