X-Received: by 10.68.222.167 with SMTP id qn7mr10411377pbc.1.1357624006302; Mon, 07 Jan 2013 21:46:46 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.50.135.66 with SMTP id pq2mr3043640igb.3.1357624006258; Mon, 07 Jan 2013 21:46:46 -0800 (PST) Path: csiph.com!newsfeed.hal-mli.net!feeder3.hal-mli.net!newsfeed.hal-mli.net!feeder1.hal-mli.net!nntp.club.cc.cmu.edu!newsfeed.news.ucla.edu!usenet.stanford.edu!f6no1965891pbd.1!news-out.google.com!6ni93041pbd.1!nntp.google.com!b8no11484725pbd.0!postnews.google.com!glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Date: Mon, 7 Jan 2013 21:46:46 -0800 (PST) In-Reply-To: Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com; posting-host=173.164.137.214; posting-account=CP-lKQoAAAAGtB5diOuGlDQk0jIwmH0T NNTP-Posting-Host: 173.164.137.214 References: <396e3ff0-2a44-4d8b-917c-3b9205a567a6@googlegroups.com> User-Agent: G2/1.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-ID: <2c3b1254-ef4e-4fee-b4eb-1eb6a1278bc6@googlegroups.com> Subject: Re: java software naming question From: Lew Injection-Date: Tue, 08 Jan 2013 05:46:46 +0000 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.java.programmer:21194 Roedy Green wrote: > Lew wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said : >> So how is that "obsessed with gender"? > > Consider the sentence. > He made a pot of Sumatran coffee. > She made a pot of Sumatran coffee. > > I am constrained by English to specify the flavour of genitals of the Well, you aren't, really, > coffee maker even though it is completely irrelevant to the process of > making coffee. That I call obsession with gender. and that really is an overblown interpretation. Do you deny there is a difference between males and females? So those sentences provide descriptive specificity. Oh, and they don't refer to genitalia; that's *your* obsession. If you want gender-neutrality the usual is to say "they". As in "There was one person there, and they made a pot of Sumatran coffee. So for at least half a millennium English has had a widely-accepted idiom for not specifying the gender of who made the coffee. Other languages make *every single noun* have a gender, not just ones that describe humans or other animals, who at least actually have gender in the real world, despite your attempt to suppress that. Again, the obsession is not in English, but in the beholder. > English has another obsession. I discovered it when I learned > Esperanto which is even more obsessed. TIME. You can't talk about Esperanto is an artificial language. > anything happening without specifying past, present, future. You can Again, that is not uncommon among languages. Can you use a verb without tense in French? > though say that something habitually happens, without specifying when. Urdu? > You can in Chinese. If tense is important to be explicit, you add some > adverb. E.g., I come tomorrow. Basque? > You notice Asian speakers, often say strange things like > my wife, he sick. > Frog die. > Please give 12 egg. So foreigners' difficulty with English is evidence that English has obsessions? > To them gender, tense, and plurality need not be specified. They are > implied. > > Esperanto is like English in its concern with precise tense, gender > and plurality. It has some other obsessions of its own, roughly > equivalent to direct/indirect object though it has many other uses. You realize that "obsession" is a psychological term, correct? Languages do not have psyches. > I suppose Mandarin might become the next interlanguage as English > fades. Bahasa Indonesia was an early attempt at an interlanguage What evidence do you have that English will fade? > devised by traders moving between thousands of islands. It is easy to > pronounce, and has a relatively simple grammar. Common among all Pidgins, which spring up everywhere, not just in Indonesia. > I don't know much about Mandarin other than the code I wrote at > http://mindprod.com/products.html#INWORDS to convert integers into > words, including Mandarin. It was the simplest of all languages I > tackled (Icelandic was the hairiest). I gather the difficulties are > pronunciation and the many many synonyms for the same word. > (Makes for great fun with puns). Thank you for sharing your linguistic expertise. -- Lew