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Re: OT: Gender Bending Moro

From:Patrick Littell <puchitao@...>
Date:Sunday, April 3, 2005, 3:43
On Apr 2, 2005 2:17 PM, Pascal A. Kramm <pkramm@...> wrote:
> I think it's that way in Spansih and other languages (e.g. Italian), because > thoese are primarily male-dominated societies where the womens don't have > much influence, which reflects in the language. > If women were to have more influence in the society (or if it would even be > a female-dominated society), I could very well imagine that mixed-gender > groups would be based on the female form then - not just in Moro, but > probably also in other languages in which women have some influence in the > society (female amazon tribes, for example).
This has been on the back-burner of my mind for some time. I've heard quite often that things like "ninos" and the generic "man" are artifacts of male domination, but I've always been a bit skeptical. (Anyway, "man" was *originally* a generic term, wasn't it? Like "anthropos" and "homo", right?) This is just a subjective perception on my part, based on knowledge of only a handful of languages, but I don't see a great deal of correlation between the two. Chinese is completely neutral in the (spoken) 3rd person, and for professional terms, but I seriously doubt this is either the effect or cause of a sexually egalitarian society. Same with Turkish. (Actually, I can only think of examples of gender-neutrality in societies that are *more* male-dominated than European ones :-P) Since someone is going to bring it up eventually, I figure I'll do it: Proto-Semitic polarity. The plurals of masculine nouns being feminine and plurals of feminine nouns being masculine. (Scads weirder than Moro, in my opinion, although probably not indicative of any sort of excessive gender-bending among ancient Semitic peoples.) There's still bits of this in Arabic, mostly of the masculine singular => feminine plural variety. I can't say I understand the details, so I'll leave it to one of our resident Semiticists to fill me in. Did this also work with explicitly sexed groups? I think it doesn't with modern "walad" (boy); "awlad" (boys) is still masculine (right?), even though most of the nouns I know in that plural-class go through polarity. This issue -- gender in language and its relationship with sexual politics -- is one I've always wondered about, but I've never managed to find much cross-linguistic data about it. Or really any data at all; usually I just hear it asserted as a truism. Does anyone have any pointers to studies about this? Especially about, as Pascal mentioned, societies that are more female-dominant? -- Patrick Littell PHIL205: MWF 2:00-3:00, M 6:00-9:00 Voice Mail: ext 744 Spring 05 Office Hours: M 3:00-6:00 -- Watch "reply-to"!

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Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...>