Re: OT: Gender Bending Moro

On Apr 3, 2005 2:28 AM, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...>
>
> Well...just about any language feature that you can think of is
> bound to occur *somewhere*.  I mean, if I felt that way, why
> would I ever create a language?  I personally, since I try to
> create naturalistic languages, for the most part.  Anything I
> think up is bound to occur (or have occurred) somewhere, but
> that doesn't make it uninteresting to me.
I never said i thought it was "uninteresting".

I said I wasn't impressed. There's a world of difference between the
two. I'd appreciate not being associated with things I never said.

I did say I found it a "neat way" (which is another way I say
"interesting"). Of course anything any of us think up is bound to
occur. As a species, Humans aren't *that* innovative with things that
are already around (i'm not saying they aren't innovative *at all*,
mind you).

>
> Lots of language don't distinguish gender grammatically.  And even
> though there is no base word for "boy" and "girl" in Tagalog, there *is*
> a base word for "man" and "woman".  So Tagalog makes pretty
> much as many gender distinctions as Moro (which also doesn't
> distinguish gender in the pronouns or on the verbs).
Yes.

What I was saying is this: Just because a language uses gender,
doesn't mean that it's necessarily swayed one way or another socially.
Those who speak Spanish as their first language in the Philippines are
no more Patriarchal than their fellow countrymen who speak the native
languages  (because Filipino culture tends to be a lot less
patriarchal than say, Mexican or even Spanish culture)

>
> Also, I wasn't *seriously* claiming that Moro culture is more
> gender neutral.  I never explained anything about Moro culture,
> in fact, and from all indications, it seems like a society where
> the man do the hunting and the work and the women do the
> cooking and the housework and child rearing.  This is just an
> interesting fact that I personally have never seen in a natural
> language before.
I wasn't saying you did at all.

I was commenting on the all too common misconception that language
influences culture and gender views, when it really doesn't. I've not
really found typical Spanish Speakers to be any more aware of gender
in language than English speakers are of the lack of it.

Language *can* of course _reflect_ gender views (which is where get
get all sorts of chestnuts like "woman comes from womb + man,
reflecting Anglo-Saxon's Patriarchal culture, saying that all womyn
are, are men with wombs!" (yes, I HAVE heard someone say that -- a
rather rabid, zealous feminist).

>Just because it was bound to occur somewhere,
> I fail to see how it's uninteresting.
Did I say that at all?

Again, I never said I thought it was uninteresting. It is. I just said
I didn't think it was all that unique, because it's unsurprising that
some language somewhere that uses gender would use "girls" instead of
"boys" for a group of girls and boys.

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