Re: Láadan and woman's speak

Nik Taylor wrote:

> Tom Wier wrote:
> > Could he come up with good syntactic reasons for doing that?  I can't
> > imagine that he could legitimize that based on morphology.
>
> It seems to me that things like "ships" being "she" are merely irregular
> classifications, the kind that exists abundantly in most of the other
> European languages (and, of course, many other families as well)
Perhaps.  Synchronically, however, for the vast number of native English
speakers, I would presume that most would take that as "poetic" metaphorical
usages.  Metaphors, like diachronic analogical change, don't usually apply
systematically throughout a language, but only to very limited classes of
words or constructions.

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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