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. john On Jan 9, 2016, at 12:38 PM, penstemon <penstemon@Q.com> wrote: If language rules made any sense then I would write a neuter noun as das buch so as not to offend the ladies & gentlemen of nouns. ”Usage” or “convention” might be preferable to “rules”,when it comes to English. Most of the rules of English grammar, for instance, were made up by nineteenth-century academics. (Proscription of the “split infinitive” being an example.) German has oddities too. “Das Maedchen und das Kind.”