> Japanese may not have specific gramatical gender, but men and
> women speak differently enough that when reading you can tell
> if a man or a woman is talking.

Able to tell gender of written Japanese?  Spoken yes, because they use very
different colloqial conjugations of the words, but I can't see how that
would appear in writing since written Japanese (at least in newspaper and
books is pretty 'textbook'.  This however is akin to the dialect differences
too.  Learning textbook Japanese (Tokyo dialect) will not prepare you for a
trip to Osaka other distinct different parts of Japan.  Heck, when living in
Japan there was even a TV show that made questions for a game show based on
dialectic differences of the language.  They'd show a short clip of someone
saying a word (usually really funny sounding) and then ask them based on
context what they thought the word was... usually the contestants were way
off.  It was a riot.

But back to the point... I can't say as reading Japanese you could see
whether the author was male or female, unless you are talking a personal
letter.  This also doesn't point to gender in the language, cause a pencil
isn't male... and an eraser isn't female... though it's not an eraser
either.  It's a 'rubber' when translated... a good american GRiN on that
one.

Keith L. Kovala
klk@renderedelement.com

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