From @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET  Fri Sep 17 13:32:20 1993
Received: from ELI.CS.YALE.EDU by NEBULA.SYSTEMSZ.CS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Fri, 17 Sep 1993 13:32:20 -0400
Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by eli.CS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Fri, 17 Sep 1993 13:32:14 -0400
Message-Id: <199309171732.AA06848@eli.CS.YALE.EDU>
Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2)    with BSMTP id 7227; Fri, 17 Sep 93 13:30:29 EDT
Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with  BSMTP id 3652; Fri, 17 Sep 93 13:33:42 EDT
Date:         Fri, 17 Sep 1993 18:31:56 BST
Reply-To: Richard Kennaway <jrk@SYS.UEA.AC.UK>
Sender: Lojban list <LOJBAN%CUVMB.bitnet@YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU>
From: Richard Kennaway <jrk@SYS.UEA.AC.UK>
Subject:      Re: clitoris
X-To:         lojban@cuvmb.columbia.edu
To: Erik Rauch <rauch>
Status: RO
X-Status: 

jimc writes:
>An aside: we often say that Chinese (Mandarin) has a gender-neutral 3rd
>person pronoun.  Well, sort of.  According to my wife, a native
>speaker, the spoken form is gender-neutral but the written form has an
>explicit male/female modifier included in the character, according to
>the sex of the referent!

According to Ramsay, "The Languages of China", the gender modifier is a
recent (this century) addition, a deliberate emulation of European
languages, and that previously one sign stood for he/she/it.

--                                  ____
Richard Kennaway                  __\_ /    School of Information Systems
Internet:  jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk      \  X/     University of East Anglia
uucp:  ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk    \/       Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K.