Gender in Pronouns

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sun Jun 9 09:54:58 EDT 2002


At 9:49 AM -0400 6/9/02, Harry W. Jones wrote:
>To All B-Greekers,
>
>According to Mounce, third person pronouns have gender. So that
>if we translated AUTHN we would tranlate it in a female
>sense as *she*. So my question fellow B-Greekers is, in these
>cases wouldn't Grammatical gender be the same as biological
>gender?

No, certainly not. AUTHN could readily refer back to any feminine noun such
as hH TRAPEZA or hH GEFURA or hH hODOS (do you need to see examples? I
could readily enough supply them from Greek texts, I think). I trust nobody
would want to argue that a "table," "bridge" or "road/path" is biologically
feminine.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
Most months:: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cwconrad at ioa.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/



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