More on sex, gender and translation

Aug 23, 2011 by

As mentioned in yesterday’s post, the grammatical gender system of one’s language has a strong effect on how one personifies non-human characters. For example, whether an enchanted frog you kiss will turn into Prince...

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The human and the frog

Aug 22, 2011 by

[the author thanks Olga Kagan for inspiration] Imagine a bewitched frog, waiting to be kissed in order to turn back into a human. Given a choice between a prince and a princess, who will the enchanted frog kiss? If you are an English...

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Gender vs. Noun Class: same or different?

Apr 8, 2011 by

Some familiar Indo-European languages like German, French and Russian have gender systems: in those languages nouns belong to one of two or three classes (or types). Typically, such gender systems are based on the natural gender/sex...

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So what comes first: chicken or egg?

Jun 17, 2010 by

In an earlier posting, I mentioned that grandmothers and grandfathers sounds better in that order. And so does ladies and gentlemen, Mom and Dad and many other so-called binomials (i.e., collocations of the form “X and/or...

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Celebrating the “great and powerful”

Jun 10, 2010 by

June 6 — also the birthday of the famous Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin — was for the first time celebrated as the Day of the Russian Language, thanks to the UN decision which proclaimed special holidays for all six...

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