Re: Mixed person plurals: gender & the (in/ex)clusive distinction; !Ora

tomhchappell wrote:

> This is at least my second, probably my third, reading of your post;
> I think I missed some things the first (two) time(s) that deserve
> talking about.
I was about to forward the 2 private mails you sent to me. Not needed
any more.

> In a private post I mentioned previouse threads explaining why I
> don't think these fit into a hierarchy.  In a sense, I think they
> will overlap in my proposed(?) conculture, which is why they interact
> multiplicatively instead of additively when I don't choose between
> them.
Not knowing the conculture your conlang was meant to, didn't help me. I
was thinking of a simple human male/female culture.

In an environment with various alien species and different level of
intelligence for the artificial life forms, what you wrote takes all its
meaning.

However, I maintain what I wrote: Such a complicate system can only
disappear. Not totally but partially through simplification. Unless all
species are equally mixed everywhere in your conculture and they share
the same technology and the same culture, there will be some local
usages. They will all use the words "person", "computer", "AI",
"animal", "tool", "robot", etc, but these words will represent different
realities according to each species. So they will use different genders.
Then it will become "fashion" to speak like this or this species. The
words will remain basically the same but one species will mimic the use
of genders of another species. Or more simply, imagine two species which
don't met often, during such meeting they realize they don't use the
same genders to speak of similar things, so they start using only the
most essential genders to make themselves clear.

Grammar describes only the rules you can violate when you speak.  ;-)
Don't expect people to resort on a stricter and more complicate grammar
when it comes to make things clear, especially if they don't fully
master this grammar because of their local usages.

Well, this is only a theory since a multi-species environment is
something we haven't encountered yet.

	[---CUT---]
> "Talking to furniture" doesn't really count here; I don't know
> exactly what you call that, but it's a kind of minor-sentence
> figure-of-speech in which the speaker is being illogical,
> and not using the language for a purpose in which
> the notion of "addressee" makes any sense.
> "Talking to their computer", in the sense you meant it, is
> like "talking to furnituer"; but my conculture will have computers,
> some of which will qualify as Rational, some of which will qualify as
> Animate (both degrees), some of which will qualify as Sentient.
You must be a Vulcain to call this illogical behaviors.  ;-)

Nobody expects one nowadays computer to react to his/her voice --Voice
recognition is still rare.-- and the same applies to the furniture but
people continue doing it. Some even say that talking to plants is vital
for them(NonRational). So the question is: Has the language a _logical_
purpose that is only to transmit information from a speaker to an addressee?

You reach the top of a mountain and you say "Wow!" or some less polite
word when you discover then landscape. Who or what is the addressee? The
landscape? The mountain? Yourself? The ones behind you? The 2 first ones
can't be addressees because they aren't Rational. Talking aloud to
yourself... Well... No comment.  ;-)  If you are really transmitting
information to the ones behind you, why are they all saying words which
mean the same thing? You already transmitted the information.

Such utterances are defintively illogical but that's still language.

We aren't all Vulcains.  ;-)

> A pet or a baby is a Sentient Animate Non-Rational entity.
Ouch! Some mothers may skin you alive if you don't treat their baby as
if it were an entire person, i.e. with the genders that apply to a full
adult. Only English allows you to (linguistically) treat a baby as if it
were an animal. Some urban legends say that a mother can lift a car to
rescue her baby... Be careful, the alien mothers may do worst!  ;-)

	[---CUT---]
	(You're just like me. A keyboard is a dangerous weapon in
	between your hands.)
	[---CUT---]
	[---CUT---] A lot of interresting stuff...

> Bound-Animate vs Free-Animate degrees of animacy is not going to
> distinguish between slave and free in my conlang.  Adult living
> rationals are not going to own each other nor be owned by anything in
> my conculture.  I expect problems to arise about the ownership of non-
> adults whose rationality is newly-minted, and about the possible
> ownership of non-living rationals such as artificially intelligent
> machines, but I see no overwhelming reason why that would have to be
> related to the bound-animacy vs free-animacy distinction, which
> really has to do with whether a being can control its own motion from
> place to place, or only its own motion-in-place.
Slavery isn't my cup of tea either, especially when I think that some of
my ancestors maybe became slaves.

On Shaquie, the persons are not objects that can be possessed, even by
the language. There are two forms of "possession": a real possessive for
the things and something else to describe the inter-personal relations
in expressions like "my friends", "my children", "my teacher", "my
doctor", etc.

	[---CUT---]
> "Rational" as first used by the first publishing professional
> linguist to insert it into the Animacy Hierarchy was to distinguish
> humans who could talk (Rational Humans) from humans who could not
> talk (Non-Rational Humans, still higher in the Hierarchy than Non-
> Human Animates).  My use of the term is inspired by that use; but the
> concept, for which I appropriated the term, is inspired by the
> Antique Roman notion of "talking tool".
My Rational/Irrational gender comes from this list, well, only the name.
When I create the pronouns I wanted to separate the persons from the
objects, or in other words, to have the "it" we don't have in French.
Since I didn't have to worry about the male/female distinction for the
Shaqueans, I created the Personal/Objective gender. I just decided to
find a better name the first time I wrote "Personal personal pronoun". <g>

	[---CUT---]
> As Siewierska says (I think I quoted some of this), it is highly
> unusual to have a gender on any person but the 3rd, and highly
> unusual to have a gender on any number but the singular.
> !Ora is very unusual this way.
I already have a gender that applies to dual and plural 3rd pronouns.
It's high time to apply it to the 2nd pronouns.

Be the way, please, don't make me laugh with the "Universals". When it
comes to alien languages, these Universals are just a checklist of what
to violate.

> A trained dog or trained horse, or a speech-recognizing programmed
> computer, may be able to recognize commands -- not /new/ utterances,
> but still, utterances in a language.  If I have my Labrador
> Retriever, my Newfoundland, my horse (ha! I can't afford a horse!),
> and my daughter all out at the same time, and I say to one of
> them "Come by!", how are they to sort out which one I mean?  (Of
> course, a bystander could tell this way; if one of the animals comes
> up, I was addressing that animal; if nothing happens except that I
> start looking frustrated, I was addressing my daughter.)
LOL. I don't have children but I have a 4yo niece who is also a source
of frustration.  :-)

	[---CUT---]
> Imagine this;  I have a voice-input-capable computer.  In it I have
> a "Window" open.  I want the window from the room to the outside to
> be closed.  I say to my room-mate, "Would you-RATIONAL-FREEANIMATE
> please close the window?"  My room-mate knows it's her I'm speaking
> to because of all the pragmatic contextual devices you mention
> below.  My computer knows I am not speaking to it because of the form
> of 2nd person pronouon I used.
In this case, with voice-recognition, things get very different but your
post didn't mention the level of technology in your conculture. Now, I'm
thinking about inserting a gender to my 2nd personal pronouns. With that
many artificial life forms cluttering the shaquean space, that may be
handy. Your example is very convincing.

I'm about to remove the plural from Shaquelingua, gendered 2nd pronouns
could fill the gap... or add a new bump!

	[---CUT---]
> I think many of your caveats or quibbles, or whatever word should be
> used, have to do with your conlang understanding the Rational gender
> differently from my conlang understanding either the Rational, or the
> Sentient, or the Animate (either Bound or Free degree) genders).
Definitively! Besides the word "rational" also has a generic english
meaning which comes in the way. I got lost in the "Rational Bermuda's
Triangle".

> If I was wrong about that, please re-phrase or otherwise clarify and
> write again.
Don't get me re-started!

>>"You, inanimate things, do you have a soul?"  ;-)
> Now, that's a /dang/ good question.
	[---CUT---]

Don't you hear the police behind the door? They are shouting "Drop that
keyboard!"  ;-)

Bang! Bang! Too late...

--
==================
Remi Villatel
maxilys_@_tele2.fr
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