Re: Láadan and woman's speak

Robert Hailman wrote:
> I, personally, love gender, but as an English speaker I guess I have
> some bias against it. I don't think, however, that gender is nescessary
> to a language, and could easily see a language loosing it, more easily
> than one gaining it.
A great many languages have gender, so it must be pretty easy to gain
gender.  Remember, language has been around AT LEAST 100,000 years,
thus, every language, including English, can be traced back at least
100,000 years.  I strongly doubt that anything of the original
language(s) has survived, so genders existing today had to have been
gained at some point in the relatively recent past, if it was hard to
gain, there'd be very few that had gained it.

> Right, I could see this turning into a gender system, over a period of
> time? I'm curious, though, do we know if this is a new distinction or a
> remnant of English's original gender system? If it's a remnant, it could
> be on it's way to dissapearing also.
No, he/she/it and who/what are remnants of the old gender system.  I
don't know when the count/mass distinction appeared, but it's not
related to the Old English genders.

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