Re: Láadan and woman's speak

Nik Taylor wrote:
>
> 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"
>
That's what I was thinking too. The difference between "old man", "old
he-man" and "he-old he-man" isn't great enough to develop one stage at a
time, a long time after each other

> > 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 (?)"
>
I haven't heard of any languages that don't use it in small amounts, but
I don't know much of many languages. Are there any languages that say,
in essence, "five water liters", where the unit of measurement is the
nown and what is being measured is an adjective? That'd be something fun
to incorporate into the next language I make, I don't feel like
modifying Ajuk to encorporate it.

> > 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.
I was assuming a male/female system, but you're right, in an elaborate
system, the existing system would be simplified to male/female or lost
completely before the new one developed.


--
Robert