From: Gary Wiltshire 

On Fri, 27 Jun 2003 00:03:18 +0300, "Antti Kurenniemi"
 wrote:

>"Gary Wiltshire"  wrote in message
>news:pkfmfvcti1fic8k6upt5ide367lrg3kg4s{at}4ax.com...
>> >> English lacks a few important words, thus leading to all
the "neutral
>> >> language" nonsense. We lack a word for man in the
non-specific sense.
>And we
>> >> could do with a neutral 3rd person singular pronoun. S/he
and they are
>ugly.
>> >>
>> >> Alan
>> >>
>> >>
>> >s/h/it?
>> >
>> >Adam
>>
>> Finnish has two singular third person pronouns.  One is
>> animate and the other inanimate.
>
>"H„n" and "Se". Sometimes when reading something
that's been translated from
>English (or many other languages) it's easy to see where the translator
>wasn't paying attention: for example if there are two people doing
>something, a man and a woman, then in English you can say "he did this and
>then she said that..." - but if you translate it to Finnish, it will be
>" did this and then  did that", so you
don't actually know who did
>what. Happens a lot in cheap books (i.e. translated by less than
>professional translators).
>
>
>Antti Kurenniemi
>(but how the h*ll did you know that?)
>
I took a semester of Finnish, Mayan and someother stuff to satisfy a
non-Indo-European requirement for my grad work in slavic linguistics.

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