On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 7:09 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.comwrote:
To top it off, Hindi has a form for inanimate objects.
Some Indian languages have genders for nouns, others don't. Hindi is one of those that has two genders: feminine and masculine nouns [1], including for inanimate objects [2].
What I would like to learn is if Bishanka has an opinion about being
addressed as a woman in her mother tongue.
My mother tongue is Bengali, which is genderless - it does not have 'gendered' nouns or other aspects of gender like Hindi. So a man and a woman are addressed in the same way in Bengali. This is what I grew up with, am used to, and what I like. But that's just my personal preference, not necessarily my opinion on how women should be addressed in their mother tongues. (I can't speak for other women on this; I imagine it would differ from woman to woman.)
Cheers Bishakha
[1] http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Hindi_1:2_Nouns_and_Adjectives [2] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Hindi_Lessons/Lesson_4