Re: OT: Conlangea Dreaming

On Mon, 9 Oct 2000 17:15:58 -0400, Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...> wrote:

>On Mon, 9 Oct 2000, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Oct 09, 2000 at 04:32:40PM -0400, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>> > OC, I've had a couple people on this list and elsewhere mistake me for
>> > male, even with the emotes.  Who knows?  =^)
>>
>> Honest confession: when I first saw your name on this list, the first
>> impression that came across was "this is a guy". The fact that I know a
>> Korean guy elsewhere who's also called "Yoon" doesn't help.
>
>Well, "Yoon" is only half a given name in Korean, and it could be the
>first or second syllable.  "Yoon Ha" is actually *either* male *or*
>female in Korean, and my mom tells me it's slightly more often used for
>males or something.  <shrug>
>
>> *ahem* cautious person that I am, I silently stayed away from deciding
>> one way or the other, and after observing the tone of your posts (and of
>> course, the emotes), I started to doubt my initial hypothesis. Then, one
>> fine day, I came across the line "YHL, wishing she were actually fluent"
>> and I said to myself, Aha! so it *was* a female :-)
I also figured out you (YHL) were female, but for the wrong reasons: when I
saw "Yoon Ha Lee", my subconscious (or whatever) seeing an oriental name
automatically took Yoon as the surname, even though I knew that Lee was a
more likely surname. "Ha Lee" then sounded (to my mind) like "Holly", a
female given name.
>
>I happen to be one of the people who doesn't actually care whether
>someone on the web is male or female except when silly English pronouns
>come up.  On a somewhat related notes, some of my friends have noted that
>it's disconcerting that in my fiction, I have this tendency not to refer
>to the sex or a character until s/he actually appears, and they want to
>know *right away* or it feels uncomfortable.  I'm perfectly happy not
>knowing unless it becomes relevant to the plot and interactions
>(pregnancy, societies that differentiate male and female roles, etc.).  I
>seem to be a minority, though.
>
[snip]

>For those who aren't sure, I'm not offended by referred to as an "it,"
>but I suspect I'm also in the minority there.
To me, "it" suggests an inanimate object, and you seem to be rather animate!
I usually refer to a person of unknown gender as "they"; this also works
well if the person has multiple personalities.

>
>YHL, much amused
Jeff