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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 5/28/2019 1:32 PM, Will Martin
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:72832349-E681-483E-8A3C-000C8F818F62@mac.com">
<div class="">Unless you are planning on having sex with an alien,
why would you care if it were male or female or neither?</div>
</blockquote>
<p>To direct them to the correct bathroom?</p>
<p>To buy the right sort of clothing as a gift?</p>
<p>To correctly recommend either a urologist or gynecologist?</p>
<p>Any number of other reasons that might come up?<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:72832349-E681-483E-8A3C-000C8F818F62@mac.com">
<div class=""> Some trees are considered male and others of its
species female, but unless you are seeking fertile fruit, most
people never bother to figure out whether a tree is a he or a
she.</div>
</blockquote>
<p>Because in English trees are never <i>he</i> or <i>she;</i>
they're always <i>it,</i> regardless of their sexual properties.<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:72832349-E681-483E-8A3C-000C8F818F62@mac.com">
<div class="">Klingon doesn’t have sexually classified gender like
English does. Most languages don’t.</div>
</blockquote>
<p>English only has biological gender in its singular third-person
pronouns, it only applies to some cases of biological sex, and it
has no kind of gender agreement. The only way you could say that
most language don't have the sort of gender that English has is to
say that most languages have more extensive gender systems. Modern
English effectively has no gender.<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:72832349-E681-483E-8A3C-000C8F818F62@mac.com">
<div class=""> Gender can have all kinds of categorization
systems, like marking the difference between old words vs. newer
words borrowed from some other language. Klingon gender has to
do with marking the difference between beings capable of using
language, body parts, and everything else. Biological sex role
has nothing to do with it.</div>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:72832349-E681-483E-8A3C-000C8F818F62@mac.com">
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">So, in Klingon, you’d be less interested in noting
that it wasn’t male or female (since there is no “he” or “she”
or “it” to use as the pronoun when discussing the alien), but
instead, you’d be trying to figure out whether it used language.</div>
</blockquote>
<p>And yet there are still situations in which you want to express
the biological sex of someone or something, so there should be a
way to do it, and you should be able to discuss it.</p>
<p>(There are a couple of extreme cases of gender in English. For
instance, some maintain that the difference between <i>blond</i>
and <i>blonde</i> is as in French: the <i>-e</i> makes the
adjective feminine, and should be used when referring to blond(e)
women. Others maintain that this distinction belongs to French,
not English, and that <i>blond</i> should be used for all people
with this color hair.)</p>
<p>Back to the original question: sorry, I can't think of a better
way to say <i>neuter</i> than to say <b>be' 'oHbe'; loD 'oHbe'</b>
or variations thereof.<br>
</p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
SuStel
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://trimboli.name">http://trimboli.name</a></pre>
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