Re: Láadan and woman's speak

Robert Hailman wrote:
> I have a little trouble with the whole "gradually" concept, a line has
> to exist somewhere between gender and no gender, although the gender
> system would grow and diversify after this.
You're right, the gender itself would appear pretty quickly.
Presumably, what would happen is that classifiers would become
generalized until they're used for all nouns.  Later, some speakers
would begin to repeat them; for example, suppose that "he-" became
attached to masculine nouns.  Then some speakers might begin to say
"He-old he-man" instead of just "old he-man", or like the modern French
tendency to say "John, Jane, he saw her"

> I get it now, I wasn't sure how gender came to be. I'm curious, though,
> as to what would cause this classifier system to exist in a language
> that doesn't have it.
As far as I know, every language has at least a little bit of it,
especially for inherently mass nouns like "water", you have to say
"[number] [unit of measurement] of water", e.g., "five liters of
water".  It's a short step to using them on nouns that are less
clear-cut mass, like "five sheets of paper", and eventually to all
nouns, "five people of children (?)"

> Not neccesarily, the new genders could come in, and then the old ones
> dissapeared because they were irrelevant. I'd find it more believeable
> that a system slowly changed to the technological-distinction system,
> rather than a language losing a system and then shortly after gained
> another one. I'm always open to being wrong, though.
It seems implausible to me that two separate gender systems would
exist.  I'm sure that gender systems can be elaborated, but it seems
that it would be more likely to develop if there were no competing
gender system to begin with (in other words, a gender-free language).
If, say, the original distinction was something simple like male/female,
I could see additional genders developing to classify inanimate nouns
(and perhaps eventually male and female would be taken over by an
animate gender), but if it were an elaborate system like the Bantu
languages, I doubt that a competing system could develop.

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