Plateforme Level Extreme
Abonnement
Profil corporatif
Produits & Services
Support
Légal
English
Gender Neutral Pronouns
Message
De
01/09/2005 10:42:28
 
 
Information générale
Forum:
Politics
Catégorie:
Autre
Divers
Thread ID:
01044873
Message ID:
01045823
Vues:
18
AHh.. yes.. well, if you're talking about names ("proper nouns"), it's easy. Try to do it with general nouns (how do you say "house" without making it the feminine la casa?). It gets even worse with adjectives, (casa blanca), where both the noun and adjective are feminine.

>
>Actually, in most Latin countries we mostly don't care. I guess we didn't reach this level of political correctness obsession in general. Anyway, in Spanish you can perfectly write (in fact, it has been done several times) a whole story or a novel without declaring the main character gender.
>
>In any case, it is a matter of resources, will and skill. Georges Perec wrote a whole novel which is a lipogram, La Disparition. without using the letter "e".
>
>Here is a fragment of the excelent translation of Gilber Adair (the title became "A void") which managed to keep the lipogram:
>
>
>Noon rings out. A wasp, making an ominous sound, a sound akin to a klaxon or a tocsin, flits about. Augustus, who has had a bad night, sits up blinking and purblind. Oh what was that word (is his thought) that ran through my brain all night, that idiotic word that, hard as I'd try to pun it down, was always just an inch or two out of my grasp - fowl or foul or Vow or Voyal? - a word which, by association, brought into play an incongruous mass and magma of nouns, idioms, slogans and sayings, a confusing, amorphous outpouring which I sought in vain to control or turn off but which wound around my mind a whirlwind of a cord, a whiplash of a cord, a cord that would split again and again, would knit again and again, of words without communication or any possibility of combination, words without pronunciation, signification or transcription but out of which, notwithstanding, was brought forth a flux, a continuous, compact and lucid flow: an intuition, a vacillating frisson of illumination as
> if caught in a flash of lightning or in a mist abruptly rising to unshroud an obvious sign - but a sign, alas, that would last an instant only to vanish for good.
>

>
>Enjoy!
Craig Berntson
MCSD, Microsoft .Net MVP, Grape City Community Influencer
Précédent
Suivant
Répondre
Fil
Voir

Click here to load this message in the networking platform