Is vocabulary important?
A thought for the last day of the Old Year: gender and naming. We are very inconsistent in English, when it comes to marking roles, jobs and positions for gender: She’s a female nurse. King Elizabeth II is married to the Duchess of Edinburgh. He’s an actress. Marjorie is a literary translatress. The cat was saved from certain death by a firewoman. * The problem is there in other languages, too: In several languages, especially the Slav ones and French, you cannot even say “I went to the shops” without revealing your gender. Whilst in languages such as Finnish, “He went to the shops” and “She went to the shops” are absolutely identical. In French and Polish, “They went to the shops” reveals gender by way of the pronoun; not in English. Death or the sun personified is not always either a man or a woman consistently. Some languages even classify their inanimate nouns as masculine, feminine or neuter. Vocabulary is a funny business.
