quote:A chaste individual may have difficulty siring many heirs.
so that it will refer to both sexes. 'Acquiring' is the best I can come up with, but it's not quite right. Suggestions?
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
I think you could easily say "She begot a daughter", although admittedly the rather patriarchal KJV probably wouldn't.
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You could just as easily say "She sired a daughter." If you're willing to ignore the dictionary definition, why are you looking for a different word.
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Because it's only one dictionary, and on the web at that; I prefer to trust my own sense of language.
"A sire" is the male-gendered counterpart to "a dam". "A begetter" is someone who causes the existence or coming into being of something - in accordance with the second definition of your dictionary. In the sentence "Did Kosovo beget East Timor?", which shows up on a quick Google, what gender would you assign to Kosovo?
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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"Beget" is traditionally paired with "bear" in the same way that "a sire" is paired with "a dam." I don't think the dualism is a sufficient reason to discard one and not the other, since both have a female analog.
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Heirs are easy to produce: you can have thousands. Just pick people out of the phonebook, and put them in your will.
Posts: 8501 | Registered: Jul 2001
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In some precise and technical aspects of property law, heirs are only those who would inherit if there were no will. So you can't pick them, and they don't exist until you die.
But in common usage, even common legal usage, you are correct. Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
How 'bout conceive? That word can be gender neutral, though it is most commonly used for the female.
Posts: 7050 | Registered: Feb 2004
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Thanks people, but I think I'll go with beget. It fits in with the general archaic tenor of a medieval game. (Besides, it's a nice five-letter Anglo-Saxon word.) I don't like 'produce', it rings wrong - kind of industrial. And 'conceive' sounds feminine to me. As for the issue of heirs vs offspring, we are talking of royal and noble dynasties, and offspring are mainly useful for being heirs.
Incidentally, you should all play Crusader Kings, check it out at the Paradox website. You might want to wait a couple of weeks for the patches to fix the English, though. It's a Swedish production, there were some issues with changing developers in midstream, and some of the language is seriously bad.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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Indeed I did, see my post above for the reasoning. The same post, in fact, that you just quoted. Perhaps you did not read it all the way through?
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But that tends to imply female as well.
