Re: OT: Conlangea Dreaming

On Tue, 10 Oct 2000, John Cowan wrote:

> Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>
> > [I]n 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.
>
> IIRC, in one of Delaney's later novels, "she" is the default pronoun, and
> "he" refers to an individual whose sex you care about, whether male or
> female.
Having read some little Delaney, I'm not surprised.

C.J. Cherryh in the Faded Sun trilogy uses "degh" (I believe) for
sex-neutral when referring to an immature regul (alien species in the
books), because the regul "sex" upon reaching maturity.  Example passage,
from _Kutath_ p.38:

"These were secret things, in which Suth [name] felt an instinctive
vulnerability.  Degh ["it"] was not capable of full function in degh's
hormone-tormented state...."

OTOH, this is the series of which I've heard that Cherryh used Tuareg for
the mri (another alien species) language but not the mri culture.  <Shrug>

YHL