Not to go too far off-topic, but both Maedchen and Fraeulein are diminutives, which are always neutral. -----Original Message----- From: "Garak" <garak@code-garak.de> Sent: 1/9/2016 10:45 AM To: "Pacific Bulb Society" <pbs@lists.ibiblio.org> Subject: Re: [pbs] naming of plants Am 09.01.2016 um 17:38 schrieb penstemon: > German has oddities too. “Das Maedchen und das Kind.” > Bob I understand the problem with "das Mädchen", it's odd to use a neutral word for her. It's the same with "das Fräulein". I'm really happy that the latter one dies out, I find it discriminating that the female address says if she's married (Frau) or not (Fräulein), but the the male (Herr) does not. How about Ms/Mrs in English? Is it still used that much? "Das Kind" isn't really odd - it could be a boy or a girl, so neutral is ok for me. But the gender of words really gets odd for some words that show regional variation: both "die Butter" and "der Butter" is officially ok, the latter one is south-eastern style (sounds horrible to me, but one can't change the Bavarians....) Then there's "der Teller" and "das Teller" (the plate) and several others, with each and every one having a different regional distribution... But don't worry, we usually don't expect non-natives to get this part of our grammar right. If you want to impress Germans, you can use sun and moon correctly - for us, the sun is female (die Sonne), and the moon is male (der Mond) - that puzzles most English native speakers I've met... Am 09.01.2016 um 17:57 schrieb John Weagle: > Last night we had a brief Arabic lesson, the staggering number of pronouns especially for you - formal, informal, male, female, mixed duos - and how bewildering the writing of each is. This sounds highly interesting and may be useful to better understand the islamic culture - especially in the field of gender interaction, where I'd guess lie most misunderstandings. -- Martin ---------------------------------------------- Southern Germany Likely zone 7a _______________________________________________ pbs mailing list pbs@lists.ibiblio.org http://pacificbulbsociety.org/list.php http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/