Re: OT: Gender Bending Moro

Andreas wrote:
<<
While reflecting about the overwhelming amount of physical work
inherent in
making breakfast, a somewhat un-feministic possible explanation for the
Moro
patterning struck me - might the "girl" word originally have meant
"child", and
had its meaning restricted in the singular but not in the plural?
 >>

Funny you should mention that...

Moro, like Bantu languages, has noun classes that are discernible
by the prefix a given noun takes in the singular and plural (or
the letter it begins with).  It just so happens that the word for
"girl" patterns with a class of inanimates, whereas "man" and
"boy" and "woman" pattern with a class of animates.  So while
I don't have any historical evidence to back your idea up (and
I don't really know how I'd go about obtaining it, either...), your
hypothesis just might be true.

Barry wrote:
<<
I guess I just don't find it weird or strange or
very unique, because it was boud to occur *somewhere*).
 >>

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.

Barry also:
<<
Hell, there's no gender in Tagalog (except in borrowed words from
Spanish) and even the 3rd person pronouns are gender neutral (leading
Filipinos to say "she" when they mean "he" and vice versa when
speaking English), but that doesn't mean the society is especially
"gender neutral".
 >>

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).

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.  Just because it was bound to occur somewhere,
I fail to see how it's uninteresting.

-David
*******************************************************************
"A male love inevivi i'ala'i oku i ue pokulu'ume o heki a."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

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