Quote Originally Posted by Sylvain
Could you explain the link you see between the story and the language
in which it occured? As a native French speaker, I don't see any.
In French and other languages, to be gramatically correct, one must be concerned with the gender of nouns, whereas in English, one does not worry about the gender of nouns. As a native English speaker, when my classmates and I were learning French, we often noted that English must be "easier" to learn, as we did not have to memorize the gener of the nouns. Of course, it was easier, because we were native English speakers.

So, what struck me as being humerous in the story to which I responded was that while "skirt" is the noun for a feminine garmant, and "kilt" is the noun for a masculin garment, the definition of "kilt" offered was that it was a masculine "skirt." Thus for a language like English, where we do not formally have to deal with the gender of a noun, it is rather ironic how often we really do have to deal with the gender associated with a noun.

Rick