[erlang-questions] Fwd: Erlang Job for $5000 in Saint-Petersburg

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 2/05/2012, at 6:50 AM, David Mercer wrote:
> 
> Almost?  Abandoned?  (1) I didn't know English ever had grammatical gender;
> (2) I didn't know there were still remnants of it around.  (Unless you're
> talking about referring to ships in the feminine third person, though I
> thought that was sailor tradition rather than grammar.)

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English

Bearing in mind that there's another thread discussing syntax,
you've got to love the last sentence of this paragraph:

	Gender in nouns was grammatical, as opposed to the
	natural gender that prevails in modern English.
	That is, the grammatical gender of a given noun did
	not necessarily correspond to its natural gender,
	even for nouns referring to people.  For example,
	sēo sunne (the Sun) was feminine, se mōna (the Moon)
	was masculine, and þat wīf "the woman/wife" was neuter.
	(Compare German cognates die Sonne, der Mond, das Weib.)
	Pronominal usage could reflect either natural or
	grammatical gender, when it conflicted.

Elsewhere in wikipedia,
	The pronoun "she" is sometimes used to refer to things
	which can contain people, such as countries, ships, or
	vehicles, or when referring to certain other machines.
I actually had certain dialects in mind.