weird trouble with English

I was writing on a friend’s wall, like the zombie facebooker I truly am, and it occured to me that the English language has no way to indicate the gender of a noun that has gender in real life but isn’t a pronoun. This does not mean we would give every noun a gender as it relates to parts of speech.

For example, there could be both a friend (who is male) and a friende (who is female). farmer, farmere. yes, I know some words won’t work like that, jerkface. Overseas, these gender-indicating spelling adjustments are made to pronouns, serving the gender of the word itself. for example:

car is a feminine noun in french. “his car” translates as “sa voiture”, even though the “his” in that sentence is a feminine word since voiture is feminine. when one rule won’t work (based mostly on spelling I think), they use another.

perhaps some words (like boss or president or doctor) should not take a gender-indicating ending. perhaps they could or should.

~ by Steve on April 22, 2008.