Re: Láadan and woman's speak

Robert Hailman <robert@...> wrote:


>I also find it doubtful that a culture would adopt a new gender system
>just because they couldn't understand what gave nouns their gender under
>the old ones, more likely that would cause them to drop gender almost
>entirely.
Suppose the language first loses its gender system, and then
develops another one. Classifiers are a way, as some have
already said. I'm also thinking about things like the modern
English prefix 'e-' (as in e-mail, e-commerce, etc.), which
could (or could not) become a gender prefix. It's a matter
of telling when a derivative affix becomes grammatical.

Other examples could be '-ie' (as in trekkie, yuppie, and
countless others), 'tech(no)-', 'cyber-', 'eco-' ("ecological"
= "natural" = "not obviously artificial")... While these are
all derivatives, it's not absurd to think of them becoming
compulsory. For example, I've found that most English speakers
in the web don't say "mail": they specify "snail mail" or
"e-mail".

English is quite monosyllabic now; extrapolate it a millennium
and we may suppose that it goes down the Mandarin path, with
monosyllabic roots and loss or merging of final consonants.
In this context, compounding is bound to arise in order to
distinguish homophones; if you compound all animal names
with, say, -/&~/ < "animal" and names of common things
with -/TI~/ < "thing", you can end up with two gender
suffixes...


--Pablo Flores
  http://www.geocities.com/pablo-david/index.html
  "... When all men on earth think, day and night, about the
   Zahir, which one will be a dream and which one a reality?"
                              Jorge Luis Borges, _The Zahir_