honcho > honchas

[Joel S. Berson]

Doesn't Japanese have affixes that are gender specific?  Such as -ko
added to a given name for a female child?  (On the other hand, the
couple of on-line dictionaries I consulted didn't add "female" to
their definitions as "child".)  Perhaps that's what Michael T.
Wescoat was referring to when he wrote "cho" was gender-neutral.

Joel

At 1/31/2007 12:20 AM, Wilson wrote:
>... Japanese doesn't have grammatical gender, so that's nothing to worry
>about. It's a problem for languages like Russian that do have
>grammatical gender.
>
>On 1/30/07, Michael T. Wescoat <mtwescoat at ucdavis.edu> wrote:
>>FWIW, the 'man' part of the above definition is probably not an
>>inherent part of the meaning of the Japanese expression.  The word is
>>a compound of _han_ 'squad' (anglicized in the spelling to <hon>) and
>>_cho:_ 'leader' (Kenkyusha's New Japanese English Dictionary). It is
>>my belief (corrections welcome) that compounds with _cho:_ apply to
>>men or women.  (Good news: no need to mark gender.)

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