Proper Pauper

I haven't blogged here in quite a while, it seems, and what better time to blog than just after your immediate discharge from employment?

On Thursday, my boss called me in private for a short meeting, opening with, "well, it's not good news!" Thus, "effective immediately" I was asked to leave. Why? "it's not relevant," he says. "Was it because of me, or my work ethics, or ...?"
"No, nothing like that."
O.K. ...

The weird thing is, I'm not feeling as emotional about it as I think most people would imagine I should be. I think this partially stems from the simple fact that I was planning of leaving the company soon anyways, but the other half is that I wasn't having fun working there. All the people I worked with there were either of extremely low intelligence/education, or otherwise pretentious with delusions of grandeur. (One is so full of herself that she feels it's beneath her to take public transportation, or go shopping at a normal mall.) Sadly, she lacks the pedigree and erudition worthy of such pride. (Assuming that such pride can ever be validated.)

Anyways, with (essentially) a bonus free week off from work, and since I've already finished my christmas shopping, there was really nothing left for me to do other than sink into a pit of hedonism. Which, for me, is video games, movies, books and piano. Quite possibly in that order, although not quite in that priority. (Sad, that even in entertainment, I don't do what I feel is more important.)

So, it was during this time (within the last 3 days), that a friend suggest that I watch the movie Deathnote, a Japanese film based on a manga series in which Death, as an entity is very real. He also wanted me to see it because the subtitles were "t3h sux0rz".

Within the first twenty seconds, I caught on to exactly what he was talking about. noun/verb case disagreements everywhere, and superfluous commentary from the hack-translator, who felt in the opening (where nothing was happening), that the rest of the world would just *have* to know about his sick obsession with female Japanese celebrities.

And that got me thinking about the whole legalicy and legitimacy of the industry of translation in general, and bittorrent. On the one hand, it's a free service provided "from fans, for fans". But what that also means is that, much like the ability for a professor to teach, the range of quality is extremely wide, with an average that sits lower than everyone would prefer.

But, unlike that classical story of engineering (the one behind the whole iron band/ring thing when one graduates in engineering), nobody's going to die from a poorly translated movie or book. And, unfortunately, that means that some people will just continue to abuse both the English language as well as the title of translator, ruining the experience of foreign media and translations in general.

But on the other hand, we're met with the alternative -- legal, proper translations that are usually over-priced, and ironically, partially because they have to compensate the amount of sales that they're losing to illegal distributions on the internet.

What is the moral consumer to do? Choose between an over-priced, yet perfectly legal issue, or an illegal, but justified copy? Personally, I've been maintaining a sort-of partial morality with this issue. Ever since my purchase of a PS2, anything game-related has been legal. Movies and manga, on the other hand, are still behind downloaded (and deleted) on my computer.

(On a side note, I'm suddenly extremely conscious of my use of the phrases "on the one hand" and "on the other hand".)

So basically, this is all to say that while the internet provides a nice, free alternative to expensive legitimacy, it also comes with a lack of standards that may ruin one's experience.

Aural Love

http://prankstgrup.com

the most hilarious set of pranks!! And also something I feel like doing all the time. ...maybe.

(it would explain why I'm always singing random songs, eh?)

Go enjoy. :)

"men"

Japanese men are incredibly feminine by North American standards, or so I've noticed.
Of course, this only applies to the current young generation, as the older generations are more traditional.

All japanese male youth have perfectly shaped eyebrows as a result of tweezing and waxing. They also take extremely good care of their skin, and carry handbags instead of backpacks because it's more convenient. It is also commonplace here to wax any leg and facial here, if you're a guy. Fashion is also significantly more feminine than in America, which is proving to be a most interesting experience for me.

And women are more-or-less the same.

Now to find me some Yakuza...

Sinophilia

Random observation. I was just thinking about languages and linguistics (which isn't too hard to believe when you consider that it's I who's doing the thinking) earlier today.

And I thought about language pairs and relative difficulty: e.g. English phonetics is hard for Japanese speakers, but Japanese logographs are difficult for English speakers. So it's a bit of a trade off, I guess.

Anyways, I was thinking how most people don't flinch when a person of asian descent speaks fluent English. And yet, most people are shocked when a person of european descent speaks Chinese. Is this an example of unidirectional racism? Or is just simply because most white people who bother to learn to speak Chinese also come with some of the hugest egos known to man? It's as if they need this extra ego as some sort of overcompensation for self-confidence or something.

But I guess, anyone who does anything outside of his demographic norm would carry some pride for being able to do something outside his expected experience at all. So in that sense, it's normal. Just damned annoying.

Equality

me: blahblahblah feminism.
her: you mean equal rights and opportunities.
me: why would you want to lower yourselves to our standards?

Poetry

Long discussion about morality with friend. Hopefully still friend. Distress = no grammar.

I really ought to learn when to keep my trap shut. Or in the words of Murasaki Shikibu, "in few people is discretion stronger than the desire to tell a good story".

*burrows back into the abyss of obscurity*

Freedom

Yay! Back in school, which normally would be a bad thing, but in this case, I'll be happy to finish my degree. :)
Aaaaand, it means no work. Yay.

Believe

Short, simple thought. I was recalling a conversation with a coworker on the subject of religion, it basically got broken down to the belief in God (or some other higher all-powerful deity).

The statement "I believe in God" implies that one is religious, tries to be good, do good, etc. Or at least, that seems to be the commonly accepted understanding among [North American] society. But let's think about this a little bit deeper. In the case that one believes in [the existence of] God, one must also believe in the devil, right?

In this system, the devil is in direct opposition to God. It would therefore logically necessitate that the devil has no doubt of God's existence. And yet, for the devil to be in direct opposite to God, he would also have to oppose everything God does and wishes.

Having said that, the statement "I believe in God" says nothing about how I am as a person, or whether I'm even moral. In short, in the context of religious discussion, it's practically a meaningless statement. (Well, not really, but it's pretty close.)

Me: Are you religious?
Coworker: well, I believe in God
Me: So?

Lent

Not that I've been regularly updating this site anyways, but yah. School work, deadlines, aspirations of graduating, etc. So I'm going to disappear from the online scene. ...sorta. Mostly from dA and here. ...and xanga. Maybe LJ. Hesitating about MSN; got some very informed contacts on me list...

Anyways, wish me luck on my translations and other outstanding projects. <3

Normal and Regular

I think ppl who only read this blog of mine might start to think that I'm becoming some sort of Grammar nazi. So, here's a post on some lighter, meaningless things in life.

It's always fun to spend a weekend away with a group of friends in a chalet in the dead of winter in the middle of nowhere without even going skiing on the skiing slopes on the mountain 50 metres away.
Seriously, though, it's always interesting to learn about how the differences in one's situation either help shape their character, or simply make them different without affecting anything.
For example:

Single children cannot brush their teeth while sharing a sink with someone else. I learned this when I was brushing my teeth (with the washroom door open) and my friend walked in. I motioned that he could share the sink, but he's like, "what? at the same time? but like, wouldn't it interfere...?"
I paused for a bit then asked, "are you an only child?"
"yeah..."
"Ah, that's why. Trust me, it's not too hard."
"Just the same, I think I'll wait 'til you're done."
And at the time, I knew to ask that because logically, only people without siblings [close to their age] would have any chance of having no experience with brushing their teeth with other people while sharing a sink. Not that it makes a marked difference in daily behaviour, but it just means that the maximum number of minutes that the washroom is used is raised because of those single children.

Some other minor things that I've learned is that people squeeze their toothpaste tubes differently. Guys tend to just grabble the middle (perhaps from habit of handling some other shaft-like object?) while girls tend to be more neat and push from the ends. Of course there are exceptions, and those exceptions are reflected in their personalities - the neater guys tend either to be the engineering type (maximize resources, efficiency, etc), and the 'exceptional' girls are the messy, raucous, random types.

Also, people pour their cereal differently. I haven't found any *real* difference here, but from what I've seen, most people keep the bag of cereal in the box as they pour into the bowl, but one person I've seen, at least, pulls the bag out. But another thing is that while some people cut it and then clip it (to preserve freshness?), others rip it open, then crumple it back in the box, while others fold it neatly, etc...

Some people need to wear slippers while on hardwood/tiled floors, while for others, socks are as good a barrier between the soles of their feet and the floor as any pair of slippers would be.

And boy, when you live with a group of post-teenagers, you REALLY learn who's a morning person, and who isn't.

Yah, no deep thoughts here, just some causual observations.

Know Knots!

It's always interesting to learn about historical examples of change in language, but to actually *witness* it? Some very exciting stuff. Either that or I haven't been around laymen enough. But in any case...

Around mid-december, 2005, was the first time I heard this curious linguistic phenomenon. "Will you be coming in my car, or no?"
Some very exciting stuff. It struck me as being unusual because the natural sentence would be, "Will you be coming in my car, or not?"

And since then, I've been encountering it more and more often, from my co-workers, from my churchmates, from random snippets of conversation that manage to waft into my ears on the public transit system, ... .

It's so queer, it's almost addictive! ...except that it's wrong. Nevermind this curious shift in conversational grammar, another thing I've learned is that "younger" adults (in their mid-thirties) are also extremely susceptible to these changes in colloquial speech.

And here's why it's wrong:
When one asks a yes/no question with a choice, the pivotal point, the ellipted part, is the verb. And one does not negate a verb with "no"; one negates it with "not".
e.g. "I did not go to the store today" instead of "I did no go ..."
Hence, it is illogical (and ungrammatical) to ask, "will you be coming or no?" because in full, the sentence would be, "will you be coming, or will you not be coming?"

Some have argued (pitifully and rather unsuccessfully) that the "... or no" is legitimate as an alternative ellipsis. They postulate that the "no" is the implied expletive in the expectent statement, "no, I will not be coming". But there are two main problems with this:
1. Lack of parallel structure. In the same way that it's wrong to say, "I hate fishing, going to school, and to take things out of trash cans", it is wrong to ask, "are you leaving or no?"
2. The converse is never expressed. If one is to advocate the legitimacy of this odious bastard "no", then one must also legitimise his sister "yes". And yet, consider the following sentence: "Are you not leaving or yes?"
Strange, isn't it.

But like the malicious tapeworm that's slowly devouring the flesh of your cute little kitten, the "no" bastard is devouring proper English speech. Will we ever find a cure? Unfortunately, there is no cure for idiocy.

...and here I feel the need to make some disclaimers. I am not saying that I equate speech with intelligence, although I do find that to be a very popular attitude within society (the reason why "smart people" always talk "smart", and the same reason why "dumb people" always think "big words" are the answer to remedy their speech). What I am saying is that I find it rather bothersome (and maybe on some level hilarious) that people with the pretense to pretend to be princely would make such howling errors as the one above. Also, I have known some very bright and intelligent people to have exceedingly poor speech. But seriously, what's the point? Yes, perhaps the attitute that one's speech reflects one station in life is outdated and wrong, but if you can't fight that current, why fail to it? Why would anybody want to be wrong? (whether morally, or grammatically)

...in short, use "not"!

Elipsed Era

Nobody uses the period properly anymore. As to my last post, I will concede that there is a necessary difference in style between a research paper and a blog. However, what I meant by it, is that the blog shouldn't be used as an excuse to propogate bad english. Since one's [public] blog is presumably written for oneself, and for one's friends, it is logical to assume that one would want one's friends to be able to understand one's blogs. I'm not expecting blogs to be of newspaper calibre (although I personally abhore newspapers and their alleged linguistic standard). However, I do feel that if everybody at least wrote in natural english and employed basic punctuation, the reader would have a significantly easier time understanding the author.

And now, to the period.

It's extraordinary to see more and more decadence in the world as I venture further and further in to the "real" world. All e-mails internal and external to my company employ equally bad grammar. For a business, this is particularly concerning to me, as I would expect those who have 15 years' experience to know a little better than writing unintelligible e-mails, and expect them to be used as a basis for a new project. Especially since we deal primarily with schools. Am I supposed to now believe that our contemporary educators are about as capable as their students? In which case, school truely is a waste of time.

Anyway, by bad grammar I don't even mean nit-picky things like "too" instead of "to", or "twenty" instead of "20" for quantifiers. I mean entire sentence fragments.

e.g. "...a few corrections. The proper spelling for S. Abraham, D. Dunlope, J. Sinclair, and L. Ming not I. Ming."

Good luck finding the verb in that sentence...

I especially like it when they don't bother with periods at all, and don't bother making new lines either to make up for it. Just a large "paragraph" of text. It gets particularly confusing when they choose to use the period to note a short form, but not the end of a sentence.

e.g. "[product name] was not done plz. fix soon"

It helps me go crazy at work, when I already have oodles to do. I suppose part of my pickiness stems from my STFU-personality. (Or, as my [psych-major] sister would say, my INTP-personality. Read more about me here.)

It's kinda extraordinary, really, to see the sort of errors that alleged native speakers of English would make when they've spent all their time in English-speaking nations, with fellow native English-speakers. I can understand that not everyone has an aptitude for language, and that I shouldn't expect all ESL'ers to eventually speak fluent English in five years' time, but how does one manage to muck up one's mother tongue? General idiocy, I'd like to believe.

So really, people, how hard is it? Simply write what you mean, and mean what you write! That's it! Unless, of course, you're maintaining a secret cryptic society in which you write in code, but if that were the case, why would you so openly make it known that you were writing in code?

"He who would keep a secret must keep it secret that he has a secret to keep."

To Write or to Rant?

I recently got "promoted" to Editor-in-Chief of my church's Uni/College Fellowship magazine. A magazine that I've yet to see published in the six months I've been in attendance. So this ought to be interesting. What have I done so far? Nothing. What am I do to? Possibly everything. Thankfully not, since we're a team, and most of the other people are survivors from the past publication (which should be coming out soon). And they'll take care of me... ...riiiight?

At work, due to my grammatical prowess, editing anything my company publishes has become yet another duty [not in my original job description] of mine. As a result, I've also been dubbed the Comma Splice King.

In school, I'm now editing and revising old drafts of papers that I desperately need to finish and submit in order to proceed to thesis phase of my degree. I'm also taking a course on English Grammar right now, which is extremely interesting and enlightening. Especially when I disagree with the TA's and have better reason to think what I do than the reasons they provide to think contrariwise.

So with all this theme and thought in English and editing, it should be no surprise that I would mentally edit anything that I read. Even my friends' blogs.

There is one particular friend who's known to write a lot. And since most people shy away from large bodies of text (an unfortunate side-effect of formal education) they tend to miss the fact that most of the text is superfluous and needlessly wordy.

Writing well involves many things. It includes a strong sense of grammar, a conscious awareness of lexical nuances, a general theme, coherent and cohesive thought and structure from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, audience awareness, etc.

My aforementioned friend possesses none of them. So late in his life has he taken an interest in reading and writing that he has unfortunately equated the colloquial with the natural. And I don't even mean 'tricky' things like knowing that "between him and me" is more correct than "between he and I". He doesn't recognise the error in replacing a past participle with a past tense as being incorrect in a perfective contruct. (e.g. "you have came" instead of "you have come", or "he had drank" instead of "he had drunk".) His sense of pronouns and prepositions are equally weak, which I suppose is to be expected when one's communication skills are entirely dependent on the extreme colloquialisms of what high-society would deign to call "low-society". One cannot produce a Shakespeare from a street urchin; a grammarian from a guttersnipe.

But my point here is not to harp about all my friend's linguistic failings. Rather, he serves as a convenient example of all that fails in our contemporary society. His failings in language are so numerous, he is practically an archtype for all that is wrong. And one of the most grevious ones is that of concision.

It is easy for most of us to spew pages and pages on a subject we feel passionately about. If we were to write about a person very dear to us, we could easily write twenty pages inside an hour. But most of it would probably be meaningless drivel. Because unless most of us are in that 0.00001% of the population who naturally and quickly organise their thoughts as to be able to write a coherent and cohesive twenty-page article on a dear friend, most of us would instead, be ranting.

My English professor related to us a story of Winston Churchill, who had written a ten-page letter to a friend. Upon receipt, the friend wrote back, saying, "your letter was extremely informative, but I don't know what to make of it," to which Churchill replied, "I'm sorry, but I didn't have the time to write a shorter letter".

The truth and the fact of the matter is, most of us cannot write. That most of us also hide behind the fact that our writings are in blogs and therefore shouldn't be subjected to the same scrutiny as published novels, only provokes me to say two things:

1. It is Published. If you've written it online, listed, and linked for anyone to find, it is published. That means the general public has access to them. It is only because of the foolish freedom afforded by the internet that the standard of language has been lowered to unintelligible proportions. We've managed to undo all the beauty and linguistic complexity that our ancestors have striven to refine and perfect. In short, we've managed to do in a century what China managed to do in a decade.

2. Excellence is acquired, not affected. Those who consistently write properly find it easier to write properly and only progress to become even more precise and articulate authors. Those who write whichever way they will, and only bother to write formally when the occassion rises, will find that their formal writing will be as impressive as a pianist who hadn't practised for his recital.

So you can hide behind your blogs and fears, begetting yet another generation of illiterate ignoramuses, or you could try to learn all that you can, and become a generation of adventurous authors. If you were given the choice, which would you choose: to rant or to write well?


Latin phrase of the day: pari passu
Means "at the same pace (or rate)". E.g.: "Despite the fact that he was my junior by many years, we progressed pari passu in our instruction of the violin".

Culture Backlash

Many of us (especially here in the free Americas) have been subject to such literary onslaughts as the semantical and linguistic nonsense that asian advertising would produce. These grammatical graffiti appear on all sorts of stationary, bed linen, knapsacks, T-shirts, posters, etc.

It really leaves the civilized (English-speaking) world to ask why they can't simply learn to write properly? And so the sesquipedalian gentry scoff at the foreigners' linguistic inferiority and the distorted culture they come to represent.

But fear not, all ye of mixed ancestry! For I, such as you, share blood that wells from both here and abroad. And at long last, I have discovered the backlash of this spoken slaughter. The aforementioned 'type' of language, as I've described it, I shall henceforth term "FoB English" (however unfairly).

There was a time when such orthographical errors were a curiosity among the general population, and a small source of entertainment for those of dual cultures. Now, the general public expect a certain degree of incorrect English in the Japanese stationary, or on packaged chinese foods.

But now, in our diverse strength, we have also found a diverse weakness. Intruding into a culture necessitates influencing it. Thus have we seen a generation of youth fancied and fascinated by the ancient eastern empires.

These same sesquipedalian gentry would now stoop so low as to learn the inferior tongues of servants. And apparently, the inferiority is infuriating because of its perceived unnecessary complications.

And now, throwing all sarcasm aside, I shall speak candidly. I've recently noticed a steadily growing fascination with the Japanese culture, its animated series, its language, etc. And so there are those who crudely gain some utility of its language without fully understanding it. They, I shall term "LMP" for "Language-Mutilating Puppets". And, like their arrogant counterparts across the sea, they openly and blithely write in this foreign tongue, in a vein only understandable to themselves, as they publish their aimless and ingrammatical rants online.

It is one thing to learn a language, and as both a linguist and a student of many tongues, I whole-heartedly encourage the genuine student who wishes to learn, understand and master the vast bounties of speech that the world has to offer.

However, it is quite another thing entirely to profess (however indirectly) that one carries thorough knowledge of a foreign tongue exclusively to an audience who know nothing about it.

Too often do I see (particularly on dA) artists who CLEARLY know nothing about the Japanese language, but who would cheaply attempt to earn the gaudy and false recognition in this virtual community for having some special and esoteric skill that many do not possess.

And, it is in the same, sad song as we've experienced here in the West. Non-grammatical forms galore, and plenty of errors. People who can't even read the language somehow have the fluency to think in that language when they draw their malformed pieces of 'art'.

Now, finally, we english-speakers have our revenge! They don't learn our language; we don't learn their language! It's only fair, really. And natural too, I suppose. Now that this 'anime' style is becoming so popular, and the Japanese suddenly seen as being a rich and deep language, we indignant english-speakers may finally wreck our vengance for the decades of grammatical grief. Writing meaningless drivel like, "bad today, because it I hate to go school."

...And it aggravates me to no end! ...Well, I suppose this is only a special extension of my general distaste for pretenders and pretensious persons. But in my beloved realm of art!?

So in conclusion, it is generally considered bad form to write in a language foreign to oneself, if one does it to effect an impression of an erudition most false and flimsy.

So, LMP, say I to thee: Ceasest thou thine endeavors and deceiving falsehoods most weak, for thy fluency is not yet come!


Latin phrase of the day: Ab initio
Used adverbially to mean "in the beginning". E.g.: "Some philosophers believe that man is not born with soul ab initio, but rather develop it through a series of trials and self-observations."

The "Nominal" Essay (Original)

For that one person who wanted to read the original: here it is (in slightly edited form).

Nouns are perhaps the most plentiful group of words in the English language, and one of the few grammatical categories that exist in all known, spoken, human languages. They are also the first class of words to be learned by infants.

Nouns can take the place of the subject, object and complement of a clause. As in perceived "primative" speech, the absence of verbs ields a strong, implicit sense of copula, thus equating two nouns, whence such famous examples as, "I Tarzan, you Jane".

Nouns can be separated into several categories (in a rather binary fashion). They are either proper or common, common nouns are either countable or non-count, and both types of common nouns are either concrete or abstract.

Proper nouns are those which we use to refer to very specific (and usually corporeal) things, such as individuals, locations, prototype mechanisms, etc. Examples include "Zeus," "Chicago," "Saturn," and "SPUTNIK-III".

Common nouns, on the other hand, refer to groups of things, such as species, tpes of land, groups of people, classes of manufactured items, etc. Examples include "hammer," "fox," "ocean," "country," "ghost," and "adverb".

The distinction between count and non-count common nouns lies in their ability to pluralize and take articles. As their names imply, count nouns can be counted (pluralized) while non-count nouns cannot.

In English, count nouns are most often pluralized by the appendage of the letter S. We can see this in words such as "words," "nouns," "trees," "planets". A small group of words also suffer orthographic change, as words which end with the letter "y" and are preceeded by a consonant. Thus, "fly" becomes "flies," and "story" becomes "stories". The converse is also true, in which words whose penultimate letters are vowels and end in the letter "y" retain the "y" and simply add an "s" as in "essays".

The other type of regular English pluralizer is the -es. This pluralizer is used for words which end with a /s/ or /z/, as well as the letter "x". Thus, "fox" and "bus" become "foxes" and "buses".

There are finally an even smaller group of words which are pluralized in neither of the two aforementioned ways. In this group, the general rule is to "pluralize as in its original language," in which the original language is indo-european in origin. This yields plural nouns such as "oxen," "cacti," "referenda," "geese" and "mice" from "ox," "cactus," "referendum," "goose" and "mouse".

Non-count nouns are either those which remain the same when pluralized, or require a sort of qualifier. Examples of the first type include "sheep," "cattle" and "beer". Examples of the latter include "water" and "money".

But whether these common nouns can be pluralized, they are also often dependent on special qualifiers to group them. Thus, "a muder of crows," "a school of fish," "a pride of lions" and "a pack of wolves".

Both count and non-count nouns are also semantically divided into "concrete" and "abstract". Concrete nouns are those which refer to real, nascent, and usually tangible things, while abtract nouns refer to imaginary, incoporeal things, such as "ideas," " thoughts" and "globalization".

While proper nouns cannot be counted, they may sometimes be used as a category, as in "all the Josephs in the world".

Nouns can also be qualified, as with determiners, adjectives and sometimes other nouns. The determiners most often give information on number (how many? sing/pl?) and also specify anaphorically or catephorically (eg. "the cat" or "a cat"). Adjectives give information aon the nature of the thing being refered to by the noun, whether it be colour, size, shape, age, æsthetic, etc., which in turn can be intensified by adverbs (eg. "the extremely grotesque boutique"). Some proper nouns may modify common nouns to specify type or brand. An example of this is "lecture hall".

Nouns also have case, a distinction that has virtually disappeared from English, due to its lack of inflection and declension. However, they are still evident in syntax-cognitive understanding, as well as the change in personal pronouns.

The nominative case, is simply the "subject," or more precisely, the case in which the noun is used in the subject. Thus, for copular verbs, both subject and complement are in the nominative. (eg. "It is I, Aladdin.")

The second case is the accusative, which is the noun which suffers the verb. In English grammar, this simply translates to the object. In pronouns, this is seen in the change from "I" to "me," or "he" to "him".

The third case is the dative, which is often the indirect object, and in English, even pronominal distinction is nonexistent. (Consider "I gave her away" and "I gave a cat to her".)

The fourth most common case is the genitive, in which possession is expressed. In English, this is found in using proper nouns to modify common nouns, eg: "Mary's lamb" or "John's eraser".

Another aspect of nouns is gender. While English does not have grammatical gender, as does German and French, there do exist a small set of words which do have semantic gender, most commonly in describing people and animals. Masculine nouns include "man," "boy," "bull," "stallion" and "rooster," while feminine nouns include "woman," "girl," "sow," "mare" and "hen". Most nouns, however, are neutral, and use the personal pronoun "it" or "they", depending on plurality.

A few neuter nouns, however, seem to become feminine when spoken by entusiastic (and/or inspired) males, giving rise to such statements as "she's a fast car," or "English, she was industrious during the 19th-century".

On the whole, nouns are one of the most fundamental and plentiful class of words. While they are an open class, they have a closed sub-class of pronouns. Over time, nouns are removed and added to the English lexicon to meet the need to name and describe new inventions, discoveries and ideas.


Incidentally, I got an "A+/A" on it, with the following comment: "Excellent. Also, beautiful handwriting." Ha-ha... My prof's so funny.