Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club! On Thu, 27 Oct 2005 08:20:34 +0930, Greg Mayman wrote: > Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club! > On Wed, 26 Oct 2005 01:53:43 +0100, Bastiaan T.Edelman wrote: >> In the Dutch translation there is not even an 'ass' but a 'beast of >> burden'... no gender specified. > Two my modern English translations show "donkey" and "a man's voice". >> It spoke with a 'mensenstem', a human voice. > Yes, males were short-changed in the older language. "Man" could mean > either a male or a non-gender-specific human. No, it's just that western languages usually used a prefix that was softer for the masculine, or harder for the feminine, followed by an "-mn-" sound. Different things got dropped over time in different languages, ending up with a null prefix for the masculine in English. It's clearer in the accusative in Latin - hominem and feminam. But old words in English, like "leman", show that the "-mn-" part doesn't have to be male; leman means concubine or mistress. People who objected to "chairman" etc. as sexist failed to realise that, with a different prefix to the null prefix, the "-man" part had no assigned gender. "Chairwoman" was trying to jam two prefixes in where only one belonged. PML. GST+NPT=JOBS I.e., a Goods and Services Tax (or almost any other broad based production tax), with a Negative Payroll Tax, promotes employme t. See http://member.netlink.com.au/~peterl/publicns.html#AFRLET2 and the other items on that page for some reasons why. -- Arachne V1.77+/B~5 Arachne at FreeLists -- Arachne, The Web Browser/Suite for DOS and Linux --