Talk:Reverse the gender of a string: Difference between revisions

: While the exact list of words would be a problem were we to be talking about doing a definitive translation, if solutions just make it so that the list of words is relatively easy to change (i.e., so that it is clear that the code isn't taking a special position on what the true mapping is) then there should be no special problem; it's just a string processing task that applies many simple transformations to some input text. Anyone who really takes issue with it can be invited to come up with the definitive mapping and samples to demonstrate with (which will keep them busy for a while). –[[User:Dkf|Donal Fellows]] 12:32, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

 

To a linguist, this task is completely laughable on many levels. First of all, you can't reverse the gender of a string because strings don't have gender. But even allowing that the string represents a text with gender-based references, you can at best do a partial effort at each linguistic level: the morphological level, the lexical level, the semantic level, and the pragmatic level. And physiologically speaking, at some point you're going to be trying to decide whether certain sexual characteristics can be considered "opposite", which is unknowable without deep understanding of the text, since to calculate an opposite you have to know in which sense something is being taken, and only change one aspect of it. Plus all the other problems. But the lexical problems are the real killer; sometimes the opposite of "a cock" is simply "a hen". And be careful how you cock that gun... --[[User:TimToady|TimToady]] 23:56, 24 October 2012 (UTC)