Hey, Language Hat, thanks for the plug!

As a lover of poetry, I thought you might also have mentioned "Allusions to Classical Chinese Poetry in the Lyrics of Pink Floyd"! (What? Roger Waters doesn't qualify as a poet? Fair enough, but Li Ho and Li Shang-yin are both pretty good!)

Bathrobe

Up to now I had thought that under the bathrobe there was a she...

Me too. I wonder why. Influence from French robe (f.)?

Your comment could not be submitted due to questionable content: ■■■
Mamma mia! discussing the gender of angels is forbidden here...

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> David*

Funny, isn't it, especially since English is more gender neutral then some other languages. How at least two persons — two men — got to think of Bathrobe as a woman?

And if one of them speaks primarily German and the other one French, shouldn't they have had opposite feelings, mostly due to the strong celestial influence of the moon (male in German, female in French) and the sun?

But isn't Language Hat using “he” as a generic pronoun meant to be neutral?

Anyway, it doesn't really matter as it has been proven that le petit Prince was some kind of angel — you know, these ■■■less [read: a■■■ué] creatures that are said to float halfway between divinity and humanity.


* For some time now something has been wrong with the diacritic above the -c in your name: “Posted by: David Marjanovi?” (at least for me).

So much for celestial influence then. (BTW, the sun, too: die Sonne, le soleil; and death, and so on...)

The accent is screwed up because I'm writing this in a French university lab on a Mac. I'm using Safari, the best available browser for the Mac*, which correctly displays all special characters it can (almost never in the correct font, but then, unlike MSIE, that means it even displays them when the font in question doesn't have them), but does not let me choose the encoding of any site. It's always "default". I'll soon be home in Vienna, and sometime in January (back in Paris) I should get Internet access on my laptop, which is a PC.

* Honestly. Netscape is worse, even Mozilla is worse. MSIE for Mac, like all MS products for Mac, is shit, quite unlike MSIE for Windows.

If you are using a Mac, you should use Firefox to post to Languagehat.

All the Chinese characters I post to Languagehat using Safari get garbled. Firefox: no problems.

Bathrobe (definitely male)

Ah. Interesting.

One of the ways I've been trying to improve my Chinese reading ability is to work my way through all the Harry Potter books in the Traditional Chinese versions. So far I've read the first five books. Needless to say, many of the words in these books are not in my dictionary - and there are many times where I had wished for a resource like this one. I'm sure I'll be relying upon it when I start volume 6 next summer.