More weather, and Film Festival, and gender-neutral to boot!

[vilakins]

More storms; this is shaping up to be a bad winter. (And have I mentioned recently how I feel about winter?) The gales yesterday were too strong for brollies (I tried the trusty gustbuster but it almost carried me away) and I got worried when the power browned out while I was cooking dinner. This time it was the North Shore who lost power; we were OK for once. However this morning we found that a neighbour's tree had come down in the night and we had to cut the thing up and haul it off the driveway before we could get our cars out. Luckily it missed the fence and house.

[Edit] The wind was up to 200kph last night. I just heard it peeled the roof off an apartment building here and took out power over a lot of the North Island; 20,000 houses are still without power. The streets are full of broken branches and our driveway had rubbish down it including a recycle bin from at least the far side of the road. [worries as lives on a hill]

This is also the month when they hold the International Film Festival. Why, I ask every year, do they do that in the depths of winter when the last thing I want to do is go out in the wet and cold to share a cinema with lots of people who have colds but are damned well going to use their tickets anyway? Sigh. I've booked for five films anyway, including Paprika on the strength of the wonderful Tokyo Godfathers, and the Ghibli Studio's Tales from Earthsea, based on one of Le Guin's books (the third, I think). I shall console myself for being forced out in this weather with coffee from Stark's Bar. :-P

It's the 11th here and look: no gendered pronouns! :-D We should be glad that's all English has though: other languages have gendered adjectives and nouns, and in Hebrew even the verbs are.

Comments

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Yes, I know about Finnish. Every language should be like that, but I'm glad English is as neutral as it is. You can still conceal a character's gender in a story, and in job applications. :-)

[azdak.livejournal.com]

I love genders! I tired to learn Czech once, and that not only has three genders, it also subdivides the masculine gender into "animate" and "inanimate" (but this is a grammatical category so it doesn't exactly correspond to living/not living), and then subdivides the animate masculine according to whether the root consonant is "soft" or "hard". Then there are seven cases, all of which are marked by inflections carried directly on the noun, and of course the inflections vary by gender. You have to have mastered half the grammar book before you can say "Hello, Nic[INFL], what a nice[INFL] day{INFL]!"

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Eep. I'll stick with German. I love German.