[HPforGrownups] Blaise, Boy or Girl? And OT Rant On Language

[Rowena Grunnion-Ffitch]

No: HPFGUIDX 26789


--- heidi.h.tandy.c92 at alumni.upenn.edu wrote:

> Yael wrote: 
> In the Hebrew, every noun has a gender, and every
> verb that acts on that noun 
> had to be in the right form for the gender
> (basically, there are up to a few 
> dozen forms for each verb).When they
> translated:'Zabini, Blaise,' was made a 
> Slytherin.What literally came out was: 'Zabini,
> Blaise,' 
> was-a-female-who-became (one word) to-Slytherin.    
>     
> On that list, CJK has the Russian version, and
> reported that in the Russian 
> translation of PS/SS Blaise is also a girl. The
> translation of the Russian 
> version, according to CJK, says that "...as the
> female-last-one in the roll, 
> Blaise Zabini,was already female-going to the
> Slytherin table." 

   So basically what this means is translators assumed
Blaise was a girl. Would it be all right if I went on
thinking of him as a boy?
   You know sometimes I'm very grateful to be a native
English speaker - other languages sound so
*complicated* with their genders and tenses and God
knows what else.
   I understand once upon a time (c. 800-900) English
was much the same (genders, tenses etc.) and we have
the Danes to thank for the much easier language we
speak today. It seems that after the Vikings gave up
looting and pillaging and settled down in East Anglia
they, naturally enough, took Saxon wives who they
eventually had to communicate with, ('Pork for dinner
again!', 'Honey, could you bring me back some red
cloth from town?' and so forth). While Danish and Old
English were very similiar they were not identical and
these mixed couples produced a lingua franca with
simplified grammer that caught on big time and evolved
into modern English. For which I for one am profoundly
grateful.
   
   


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