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Re: Writing Systems and Biscriptal Children

From:Patrick Dunn <tb0pwd1@...>
Date:Wednesday, December 1, 1999, 2:09
> nicole.eap@snet.net writes: > >conlangers on the list, do you find > >yourselves dissatisfied with these horrid male-dominated natlangs and > >left brain alphabets, and is this why you conlang - and, do you make > >your conlangs/concultures/conworlds female dominated? It's funny, China > >was so male dominated and their women came up with Nu Shu, but Chinese > >uses ideographs...hmm.
Even though I'm a feminist (and an anarchist and probably a communist too), I don't find myself bugged by "male dominated natlangs." I make an effort to use inclusive English and that's that. Hatasoe does not discriminate on the basis of gender. In fact, evidence that humans are cruel and dangerous was provided by both a man *and* a woman, (two great generals, who practically destroyed their people before finally throwing down their weapons and declaring -- in passionate poetry, if you believe the lays -- that authority was inherently evil, that the will-to-power was a mental illness, and that they would forevermore wear black robes and spend their lives fishing and providing the food to the people, asking, always, for forgiveness for having dishonored so many ancestors through their violence) and thus so was the cultural framework that established the Hataso anarchy as it now stands. The blackrobes still exist among the Hataso -- they spend their time doing menial tasks and begging for forgiveness for past wrongs. They also are the only people who use weapons, although they never refer to those weapons by name (only as satape = "killing tool"). They use these weapons to keep order -- in fact, this is the only police force. As we might call a fireman if we need help putting out a fire, a Hataso might call a blackrobe. Either a man or a woman may become a blackrobe; all it requires is giving up everything that one owns (and that isn't much, since most property is communal, belonging to voluntary collectives) and putting on a black robe. The worst shame in the world is having one's black robe stripped from one. This occurs if a blackrobe ever uses a satape to kill unjustly or unnecessarily. He or she is then usually exiled to one of the outlying islands or given the option to commit honorable suicide. There are two gendered terms fo address, roughly equivalent to our "Mr" and "Ms". They are "sho" for a man and "tano" for a woman. They come after the name and mean, simply, "man" and "woman." (specifically *adult* man and woman, something not taken for granted when one turns eighteen) --Pat