Re: Láadan and woman's speak

Tom Wier wrote:

>> I've even read a (a really old) book that suggested that English has SEVEN
>> genders. In addition to your four, he separated the inanimate uses of
>> "she" (like a car or boat) and "he" (don't remember his examples, and I
>> usually don't use he of inanimates), and the use of "it" with babies and
>> sometimes young children.  A bit excessive in my opinion.
>
>Could he come up with good syntactic reasons for doing that?  I can't
>imagine that he could legitimize that based on morphology.
Nope.  No justification for what he said at all.  He wasn't even being adamant
that it was truly the case, just suggesting the possibility since it was just
as realistic (to him) as claiming English had three based on the pronouns.

Marcus