Philip Chee wrote:
On Sat, 14 Aug 2010 15:49:32 -0400, Paul B. Gallagher wrote:
The two most commonly used on Saturday Night Live to take advantage of
this are Pat (Patrick/Patricia) and Chris (Christopher/Christine).
And of course many foreign names, because we don't recognize them, could
be anything. A Korean will know instantly that Daehan and Minguk are
masculine and Miran and Obok are feminine, but no American would know...
Counter example "Hikaru" can be either and even native Japanese won't
know instantly.
Yes. I didn't mean to claim that all foreign names are of predictable
gender, merely that monolingual English speakers can't predict, even in
cases when a native speaker could.
I happen to be a translator and an amateur linguist, so I've taken an
interest in such things and can often guess right where a monolingual
could not. For example, I know that almost all Japanese names with the
-ko suffix are feminine (Keiko, Mitsuko, Etsuko, etc.), and that the
Russian "Sasha" is a nickname for either "Aleksandr" (masc.) or
"Aleksandra" (fem.), but hardly any ordinary people know that. Still, of
all the thousands of languages in the world, I only know bits and pieces
of a few popular ones, so I have my limits.
Since we've strayed quite a bit from the topic, I move we adjourn this
thread.
--
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
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