"sisters and brothers", "brothers and sisters";
"boys and girls", "girls and boys"
— they don't sound different at all. How should they, having both the same number of syllables and the same stress?
And I think this is not about sexism at all.

One word order is a good as the other and everybody is free to choose, as long as there isn't a strict social convention.


On the other hand
"men and women"
"Mr. and Mrs."
"wife and husband"
seem to be preferable
due to metrical reasons.
But this isn't a law written in marble.

I understand what al_ex_an_der meant that the order doesn't change the meaning at all, but I agree with CK that some sequences don't sound natural at all.

Some orders just don't happen - they aren't the reflex of natural language use. They are possible, but this doesn't necessarily mean that they are good translations... well, that's just one more point of view!

Hi again, guys,

Just by accident, I stumbled across some information that may be useful to this discussion. Yesterday I was reading a John Lyons’ book, Language and Linguistics, and he was talking about descriptive, expressive and social meanings. After reading that, my modest (and possibly wrong) interpretation is that

“How many brothers and sisters do you have?” and
“How many sisters and brothers do you have?”

have the same descriptive meaning, but may not convey exactly the same social meaning.
The descriptive meaning seems to be the meaning to which al_ex_an_der referred.
However, it seems to me that, if you say “How many sisters and brothers do you have”, you’re also saying “Hey, I’m a foreigner / I don’t speak English as a native language”, whereas the first sentence doesn’t carry this “extra” social meaning. People, consciously or not, take note of that.

So, if you are translating, maybe it would be interesting to notice whether the original sentence also has this social meaning or not. If not, why adding this “noise” (or social meaning, as Lyons calls it) to the translation?

What do you guys think??

Peace and love, buddies.

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