> > 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

You are most likely correct. "Standard" Japanese is the masculine dialect
of Tokyo. And formal language of any sort tends to use the standards.

Textbook English won't prepare a Japanese person for parts of America,
either.

> 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

I'm not saying anything about the gender of the author, but that of the
character. I should have stated that I study languages to read fiction.
In Japanese my goal is manga, where the gender differences in language
tend to be a bit exagerated.

Though, even in English I can usually tell the gender of the author of
a piece of fiction if I read enough of it. Unfortunately in English I
don't know exactly how I do it, because English is my native tongue.
--
D. Jay Newman           !
jay@sprucegrove.com     ! Xander: Giles, don't make cave-slayer unhappy.
http://enerd.ws/robots/ !

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