难道英语有阴性阳性？

lxchen2001 · 发表于 2016-12-6 02:18:58

看看这个vocabulary.com给出的languish释义：

To languish is to become pitiful or weak because you're sick, in love, or stuck somewhere. A prisoner might languish in jail, longing for her freedom.
Languish, like languid, is from the Latin word languere which means to "be weak or faint." Your houseplants might languish in a dark dry corner. A Romantic poet might languish on a velvet couch with the back of her hand to her forehead. People in operas love to languish: The main character in La Traviatta, Violetta, languishes from longing and eventually tuberculosis.

在德语、荷兰语等语言中，词汇有阳性阴性之分。可是英语没有，英语用单词来区别，比如prince/princess. 所以这三处用her觉得很奇怪，一般用his。因为主语是用的不定冠词A，而非The.

elusty · 发表于 2016-12-6 07:50:30

本帖最后由 elusty 于 2016-12-6 08:24 编辑

西方将男女平等流于表面化，用女性就没有人批评了。

搜索过程中，我发现了下面这个网站，和vocabulary.com内容一样，而且多了使用趋势：

http://www.dixinary.com/dictionary/languishing

这里有个专门讨论用her泛指的讨论：
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-men ... t-an-example-person

It is an attempt to be gender-inclusive or gender-neutral. It is a form of social-political signaling.  I don't think just men do this.

There are several ways of doing this, some of which are subtle, but others which bastardize the language and can cause confusion.

Make a bold statement by just using "her" everywhere.  This really draws attention, perhaps away from the author's main message.  Or maybe political correctness is the message?
Mix it up, sometimes using "he" and sometimes using "her".  This can be confusing because it might not be clear whether you are talking about one person or two different people.
Using a compound him/her (or her/him or "him or her". Outside of biological textbooks it should be clear that the author is not speaking about hermaphrodites, so confusion is minimized.  But it is ponderous.
Use a neutral impersonal pronoun, e.g., "one" or "the author".
But in some cases there is not a common neutral word to use.  Although you can use chairperson instead of chairman, what do you do for waiter versus waitress?  Believe it or not, the term "waitron" has been suggested as a gender-neutral replacement.  IMHO, that is silly.  It sounds like some sort of robot.
One could use grammatically incorrect constructs, like "The student put their calculator into their book bag".  This happens with some frequency.
As some have proposed, adopt a convention where male authors use "he/him/his" and female authors adopt "she/her/hers" in their examples.

当然，还有用their表示单数的奇怪情况：
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/06/he-or-she-versus-they/

用he or she, his or her
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/usage/he-or-she-versus-they