Tuesday 13 April 2010

A friend with no notion of gender

    My wife's friend R is Hungarian. She's a lovely girl who's a lot of fun to be around, and we see her quite regularly. I won't be coming out to her any time soon for cultural reasons, but we count her as a member of our closer circle. Having lived in the UK for several years now she speaks excellent English, but for one charming oddity. For her, "He" and "She" are interchangeable because it turns out that the Hungarian language does not have gender specific pronouns and it has been difficult to lose the habit of a lifetime.
    It's rather nice to have one of your female friends refer to you spontaneously as "She".

2 comments:

  1. "G-Granville? It says here that half of you is of unspecified gender..."

    ReplyDelete
  2. But which half, Mr. Arkwright?

    ReplyDelete

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