A Question about Gender

Polycarp66 at aol.com Polycarp66 at aol.com
Tue Jul 30 12:53:12 EDT 2002


In a message dated 7/30/2002 12:16:26 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
waldoslusher at yahoo.com writes:

How do we explain the idea of Gender being flexible in
words, such as PNEUMA, and at other times the Gender
denotes PERSON or THING.

Need help with this.
_______________

Waldo,

You can speak of gender in two respects:  GRAMMATICAL gender and PHYSICAL 
gender.  Sometimes they correspond (probably more often than not) and 
sometimes they don't.  This is not a peculiarity of Greek.  Other inflected 
languages share this.  In Latin the word for "sailor" is "nauta" which is 
feminine though I doubt many sailors in the Roman navy were female.  When 
speaking or writing, the gender of an adjective or pronoun will generally 
agree with the GRAMMATICAL gender.  When they don't agree in grammatical 
gender, it is referred to as a constructio ad sensum.  

gfsomsel



More information about the B-Greek mailing list