In Spanish, I believe that a child of unknown gender would be referred to in the masculine. As would a group of mixed gender, but now you are getting into something that is cultural in its use and not purely linguistic.
Breck -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.) Sent: Monday, August 05, 2013 10:23 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: COBOL ? - emulating recursive PERFORM statement In <[email protected]>, on 08/04/2013 at 02:34 PM, Gerhard Postpischil <[email protected]> said: >English has more homonyms than other languages I know, and it is >imprecise; it could be improved by introducing gender specific >articles That would open several other cans of worms. Also, genders don't translate well between languages. >(e.g., you cannot translate "the child" into Spanish without knowing >the child's gender, That sounds like a problem in Spanish; how do you refer to a child whose sex you do not know? -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT Atid/2 <http://patriot.net/~shmuel> We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress. (S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
