Subject: Re: PART TWO: winning industrial-use of lisp: Re: Norvig's latest paper on Lisp From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2002 20:55:31 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3233681730964508@naggum.net> * Thomas Bushnell, BSG | One of the delights of reading Chaucer--Middle English--for me, is that in | that older language, "he" and "she" are normal pronouns for various inanimate | objects; a thing that we have only a few survivals of in Modern English, and | those are rapidly fading (ships, nations, etc.) Espen Vestre mentioned the curious concoction some Norwegians write (it is not spoken) called "New Norwegian" ("nynorsk"), and its users have this disturbing habit (grammatical rule, really) of referring to inanimate objects with their genderful pronouns. If "key" is masculine, you refer to your key as "he". If "spoon" is feminine, you refer to it as "she". This weirds me out. Real Norwegian does not even _have_ a feminine gender, but of course has feminine pronouns. Consequently, we have "den" for masculine and "det" for neutral grammatical gender, and "han" and "hun" respectively for sex. It does indeed make translation from "New" to real Norwegian difficult, but then again, the irrelevant minority who cannot bother to write real Norwegian is soon to be extinct, anyway, as "New Norwegian" is more likely to be English a few years from now. Case in point: at the New Norwegian national conferences they are more concerned with expressing their support for Palestinian terror than anything remotely related to their language, so it is not unlike the politically correct and equally radical gratuitous changes to English, except it was started a long time ago by a nutcase who protested the government's language and who was not stopped in time, and it has remained a protestor's language ever since. (And we are only 4.5 million people. It is such a goddamn waste, and yet it may explain something about my getting pissed off by people who are unable to deal with arbitrary decisions and just move on.) -- Guide to non-spammers: If you want to send me a business proposal, please be specific and do not put "business proposal" in the Subject header. If it is urgent, do not use the word "urgent". If you need an immediate answer, give me a reason, do not shout "for your immediate attention". Thank you.