21st Century Grammar Handbook

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21st century grammar
21st century grammar, transformation, transformation, - - - .pdf;filename*= UTF-8''অনুবাদ চর্চা (প্রথম আলো পত্রিকা থেকে-২৯-০৩-২০২০)-1, 21st century grammar

G
Gave. See give.
Gender. People, animals, and some objects have gender—they are male and female.
Some grammatical elements re ect this natural fact, and others are oddly indi erent to it. Moreover, the pattern of assigning gender to living things and then to words that represent them has left odd traces in English, particularly when English words are somehow related to or derived from non-English ones. Add to this the troubling overidenti cation of some words with gender, and one arrives atone of the more tangled sides of our language (see sexist language.).
Despite the complexity of this aspect of English, the consequences for grammar and
usage are relatively slight. Few, if any, English words have gender-speci c forms,
which means issues of gender agreement are few. Pronouns have clear genders:
masculine and feminine “he” and “she,” “him” and her his and “hers”
(nominative, objective case, and possessive, respectively. And it is relatively easy to match up distinctly male and female beings with the corresponding pronoun The bull rams his horns The cow chews her cud The woman writes her novel The man irons his shirt The boy hugs his sister But some words for animals or people don’t match a gender. For animal words of this type we can turn to the neuter “it”
and “its”: “The dog chews its bone Of course, if the gender of an animal or plant is known, a gender-speci c pronoun can be selected to match The dog chewed his bone See also case.
Words that depict human roles, occupations, and soon are trickier. It is clear that mothers are females and fathers are males. But doctors, lawyers, nurses, truck drivers, boxers, and presidents of companies and countries can be either male or female. Thus the sentence The lawyer checked his notes while the secretary waited for her assignment assumes gender identi cations that might not be accurate and that are certainly stereotypical. Your writing should not assume such gender identi cations but should nd ways to indicate the possibility of either a female or a male performing the action or occupying the role you are writing about. Use he or she change singular to plural, or reconstruct the sentence to get out of the phrase
that is causing the problem. Whatever solution you nd to correct assumed and perhaps biased gender identi cation, make sure you pay attention to this problem and avoid it in your writing.
English words that have nothing to do with living things also have gender identi cations that have persisted from older forms of our language or have been imported with words from other languages we now use as though they were English

in origin The ship sailed at her full speed, but the plane had reduced her rate of descent Since these distinctions have their roots in older forms of English or other languages, the genders of the objects tend to fade or become less distinct. Thus it is proper to refer to a ship or airplane as it Adjust your style tot your audience’s
requirements.

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