Gender agreement

[dr_whom]

I wonder how often English-speaking Latinists fall for the temptation to translate suus/sua/suum as his/hers/its respectively.

Comments

[boojum42.livejournal.com]

This same thing comes up in living languages related to Latin. (OK, so of those I only speak French, and it just has son/sa-- no neuter.) But I could imagine thinking the gender went with the possessor rather than with the thing possessed.

[qnmark.livejournal.com]

What boojum42 said. When I first learned French, my teacher specifically warned us about this. (Hebrew has grammatical gender, but unlike in Latinate languages or German, most determiners don't inflect for gender or number.)