American comics aren't really accurate in their attempts at other languages. I remember the scene in Kingdom Come when Superman attacks the UN building. Somebody shouts (in Filipino) "Nandiyan na ang siva ulo! Papatayin niya ulo!" which would be translated as "Here comes the crazy guy (siva ulo, which should be SIRA-ULO)! He's coming to kill HEAD (which is the literal translation of the world "ULO")" They should have written it as "Papatayin niya TAYO (which means "US").
SIRA-ULO translated literally means "broken in the head," whcih also means "crazy."
You had me until the last paragraph, Loren. You're normally more reasoned and objective in your writing than to put such a subjective, English-centric sentiment in here.
Assigned genders to words is hardly a "utterly silly and useless complication" - it actually makes things a little simpler than in English once you enter the area of pronouns. To demonstrate, fill in the pronoun:
* "A person is putting on [xxx] shoes."
* "My dog is chasing [yyy] tail."
* "Everyone went to [xxx] room."
What is [xxx]? His? Her? Their? What is [yyy]? His? Her? Its? There are arguments for any of the above forms, but no clear, definitive, easily-learned answer to those questions.
Contrast that with a gendered language, where "person," "dog," and "everyone" have assigned genders; you never doubt which pronoun to use there.
Still, I enjoy this blog; I'm sorry you aren't able to update it more frequently!
English has an entirely workable system for assigning those prefixes.
"If the noun is a living thing with a discernable gender, you use that gender."
"If the noun is a person without specified gender, use male."
"Otherwise, use neuter."
Perfectly functional, unless you have a fit at the use of masculine pronouns as generic.
You had me until the last paragraph, Loren. You're normally more reasoned and objective in your writing than to put such a subjective, English-centric sentiment in here.
My apologies. It just happens to be a pet peeve of mine, and it's about all I could remember to add to a discussion of German.
Contrast that with a gendered language, where "person," "dog," and "everyone" have assigned genders; you never doubt which pronoun to use there.
But in addition to the doubt resulting from having to remember whether 'person' has been deemed male or female (and personally, memorization was my weakest point in foreign language), the English system provides better information to the reader. "A person is putting on his shoes" implies that the person is a man. "My dog is chasing her tail" implies that my dog is a female dog. This is additional information that is lost when the pronoun is designed to refer to the grammatical nature of the noun, rather than the real-world nature of the subject.
"My German teacher once said that Germany was perhaps moving to use the neutral gender for everything; "
That would come as news to me - and I am German, with many of my friends studying to be teachers of German, so I guess It would have come up 
I can only say that if you grow up with a more complex language, it makes learning another, simpler language much easier... but a few years ago they changed a lot in how the language functions (reducing the number of ß's, for example, and unifying rules how some things are written so there are less exceptions), which has lead to me actually being better at putting commas in the right spots in English than in my mother tongue... somewhat depressing, that...
And as for the use of foreign languages in comics: yep, it would be much better to ask someone who knows it... for example, Nightcrawler uses the word Ach in a way that my grandmother used it, but which is much less common today... and even Nazi soldiers were, I am told, generally able to string together basic sentences that made sense, and didn't first have to be translated into English using babelfish... and as It mostly is only short passages, I cannot imagine that it would be a problem to find a fan who would translate it for free...
Re: Genders in German
Russian is my native language, and it also has seemingly arbitrarily assigned genders. Although I've lived in a America for ten years, I still can't get over the whole absence-of-genders thing. I constantly have to resist temptation to use "him" or "her" instead of "it", especially when it comes to plants and animals. When I studied German, genders actually helped, since at least it was based on something I already knew (granted, German genders and Russian genders didn't always correlate). So, really, it's all relative.
Far worse is Charlie Huston, who has clearly been using a phrasebook or bilingual dictionary to try to piece together sentences in French, with baffling and sometimes hilarious results. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that Huston has introduced a slew of purportedly French-speaking characters to the cast, all of whom run around spouting incomprehensible nonsense. It makes you wonder if Huston has ever even heard French, and you just know he's sitting at his computer thinking "French? No problem. Got it all figured out, thanks to my parents' nifty little copy of Nous Partons en Vacances!"
which all bows you use? i love recurve bows
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