some light questions

[cellio]

I learned today that there is a full-service gas station on my way to/from work. I didn't know we had any of those locally. It's been years (probably decades); what is the conventional tip?

As I pulled up to an intersction (all-way stop), someone from the cross street was backing through the intersection. After backing into the space in front of my car, he immediately popped into drive and went through the intersection. Whose turn was that, the cross-street or mine? :-)

I have occasionally noticed (because of tracking/RSS feeds or because I viewed the journals directly) posts to LJ that did not show up on my friends page. Is this happening to anyone else? I haven't detected a pattern yet.

Why does Hebrew have two words for "open" that differ only (apparently) in what objects they take? It's peh-kuf-chet when talking about eyes and ears, and peh-taf-chet for anything else.

Comments

[cigfran-cg.livejournal.com]

That's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (no "Other") by George Lakoff. The idea is not that women and fire are necessarily dangerous things, but that all three items share a grammatical category in a particular language.

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's it. Thanks.

You're entirely correct that grammatical genders (which, indeed, need not have anything at all to do with biological gender) often appear to be quite arbitrary, and all we can really do with the particular gender in Dyirbal that includes these categories is to describe it; it's futile to try to explain it, as it is to explain why (as Twain famously noted) in German, a table is feminine but a maiden is neuter.

Nevertheless, I think that at some level -- which may turn out to be simply morphological; I don't speak Dyirbal! -- I think one can argue that the Dyirbal-thinking mind sees some sort of connection between these categories, and it's intriguing to speculate as to what that is.