gender voice variants

[Yury Tarasievich]

Inflections /per se/ of the first person 
nouns/pronouns do not change a "mode" of text, 
at least in East Slavonics. "He" talks about 
self in same terms as "she" does. Only the 
inflections change.

More, without broader analysis, you might not 
even be able to identify the "gender" of 
narrator. E.g., sentences constructed on the 
lines of "пошла домой" or "делаю" might 
constitute a perfectly valid text, or part of 
dialogue. Or, e.g., the use of the first person 
nouns/pronouns does not identify the text as 
being narrated by the actor to which those relate.

And may I draw attention once more to the fact 
that strictly there is no "neutral" genus in 
East Slavonics, only "unanimated". This 
distinction might seem unimportant, but it is 
definitely there.

-Yury

On 12/20/2012 01:00 AM, Peter Constable wrote:
...
> On the other hand, there is the issue of characterizing whether a text as a whole reflects usage by a person of a particular gender. That is the distinction that might be of interest for capturing within a language tag via a variant subtag. For this, I think the only options are male vs. female vs. neutral.
>
> (Note that I'd use those terms, not masculine / feminine / neuter: these would refer to grammatical gender, whereas male / female / neutral better reflect the class of people reflected by the content or for whom the content is intended.)