5 responses so far ↓

• 1 Neal Chambers // May 21, 2009 at 4:54 pm

  Great stuff as always Jamie. I’m really surprised about dogs. I thought dogs would be gender neutral really. I guess I just know some strange women.

• 2 admin // May 21, 2009 at 10:15 pm

  Thanks Neal
  Actually, this clip really can’t be taken too seriously. I didn’t really start thinking about how misleading the results are until a few weeks after I made it. For example, you will find that on Google, the subject pronoun ‘He’ is approx. 4 times more common than ‘She’. So you can instantly see that the ‘He likes dogs’ versus ‘She likes dogs’ comparison is doomed from the start. I look at these ideas in a bit more depth at the Macmillan dictionary blog:
  http://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/purses-and-wallets/
  Thanks again
  Jamie

• 3 Neal Chambers // May 24, 2009 at 4:12 pm

  You sparked my interest. So, I had to run a test in Japanese:

  First the basics:
  女性 (jyosei) - woman or female - 316,000,000
  男性 (dansei) - man or male - 148,000,000

  彼女(kanojyo) - she or girlfriend - 47,900,000
  彼(kare) - he - 61,400,000

  And then on to the dogs:
  彼女の犬(kanojo no inu) - her dog - 80,900　
  彼の犬(kare no inu) - his dog - 78,700

  彼女は犬が好き(kanojyo wa inu ga suki) - She likes dogs - 1,240

  彼は犬が好き(kare wa inu ga suki) - He likes dogs - 1,100

  彼女は犬が大好き(kanojyo wa inu ga daisuki) - She loves or really likes dogs - 319

  彼は犬が大好き(kare wa inu ga daisuki)-He loves or really likes dogs - 136

  Of course, Japanese uses pronouns a little more sparingly than English. There are also some different uses of pronouns like kanojyo can mean girlfriend or she. This can be a little confusing at times.

  Anyway, I thought it was interesting that the statistics are fairly different in Japanese.

• 4 admin // May 25, 2009 at 1:57 am

  Neal - fantastic searches. How strange that the results are so different to the equivalent ones in English. Wonder if it means anything …

  Love the way the Japanese charaters look on the blog by the way.

  Thanks a lot
  Jamie

• 5 Alex Case // Aug 29, 2009 at 2:29 pm

  According to the new Oxford Picture Dictionary 2nd edition, a woman’s money carrying whathaveyou is also called a wallet in American English, though might be another example of how PC it is

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