Talk:Portuguese/Contents/BPL1/Primeira lição

Untitled
This lesson is very long, so I minded splitting it in two. What do you think? --Lipe(talk) 22:15, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Grammatical Genders
Isn't it misleading to use English as an example of a language with grammatical genders, define a language with grammatical genders as "every single word [having] a specific gender," and then point out that only "he," "she," and "it" have genders in English?

On page 15 of Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, he says:

"The Kivunjo construction fits entirely inside the verb, which has seven prefixes and suffixes, two moods, and fourteen tenses; the verb agrees with its subject, its object, and its benefactive nouns, each of which comes in sixteen genders. (In case you are wondering, these "genders" do not pertain to thing like cross-dressers, transsexuals, hermaphrodites, androgynous people, and so on, as one reader of this chapter surmised.  To a linguist, the term gender retains its original meaning of "kind," as in the related words generic, genus, and genre.  The Bantu "genders" refer to kinds like humans, animals, extended objects, clusters of objects, and body parts.  It just happens that in many European languages the genders correspond to the sexes, at least in pronouns.  For this reason the linguistic term gender has been pressed into service by nonlinguists as a convenient label for sexual dimorphism; the more accurate term sex seems to now be reserved as the polite way to refer to copulation.)"

Is it okay to have that quote?

I think it is appropriate to introduce basic linguistics that clarify differences from the native language, English, to the new language, Portuguese, and should be done consistently.