From araizen@newmail.net Fri May 05 07:40:28 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 19199 invoked from network); 5 May 2000 14:40:28 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m4.onelist.org with QMQP; 5 May 2000 14:40:28 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO out.newmail.net) (212.150.51.26) by mta1 with SMTP; 5 May 2000 14:40:27 -0000 Received: from default ([62.0.163.170]) by out.newmail.net ; Fri, 05 May 2000 17:41:42 +02:00 To: lojban@egroups.com Date: Fri, 5 May 2000 17:45:06 +0200 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: [lojban] genders of language names Reply-to: araizen@newmail.net Priority: normal In-reply-to: <39119707.52B1@math.bas.bg> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.11) Message-ID: <95757370401@out.newmail.net> From: "Adam Raizen" Hebrew also has genders, and both of the words for language are feminine ('safa' and 'lashon'). As a result, the name of almost every language is feminine and ends in '-it' (a feminine ending). However, Esperanto, Lojban, and Yiddish (among a few others, no doubt) all have an other-than-feminine ending, and so they look masculine. I don't think that there's a problem with using them as masculine words in Hebrew as long as you don't say the word 'language', and I think I've actually seen Esperanto used as masculine (and I've used Lojban as masculine whenever I've talked to myself about Lojban in Hebrew). In Lojban's case at least, you can easily turn it into an adjective if you want and say "ha-safa ha-lojbanit" for "the Lojban(ic) Language", but I wuldn't try to Hebraize it and call it "lojbanit" by itself. (I also wouldn't call it 'logit', 'logickese', 'logique' or whatever, so the gender of the phrase 'the logical language' is probably irrelevant.) co'o mi'e adam