5 ms·
The bit about specifying the gender of one's neighbor sounds like the work of somebody who knows just enough to be really wrong. My French and German are weak,
by maw 16y ago
The bit about specifying the gender of one's neighbor sounds like the work of somebody who knows just enough to be really wrong.
My French and German are weak, but Spanish has vecino/vecina, and you can equivocate easily enough by saying that you spent the evening with "una persona que vive cerca", and I'd be very surprised if you can't do similar in French or German. ("Une personne qu'habite ne pas loin" in French?)
- mahmud 16y agoArabic: jaari(m)/jaarati(f) Somali: ninka dariskeenaa (m)/naagta dariskeenaa(f). Literally, "the man who is our neighbor", "the woman who is our neighbor". The somali is complicated because "neighbor" is never a singular person, always plural. The concept of a person living alone is unheard of, and people are usually suspicious of bachelors.
- maw 16y agoBut in Arabic and Somali is it possible to talk about people who live nearby while obscuring whether they're male or female?
- mahmud 16y agoYes, Arabic (juwaar/jiraan) and Somali (daris/jaar/jiraan) None of those words carry gender because they're plural. In the singular, Arabic uses the male "jaar" word for both genders. While the same word is plural in northern Somali, since, as mentioned, it has no singular word. Arabic also has the dual (jaaraan/jaarataan) our two neighbors (m/f)