Re: Láadan and woman's speak

Marcus Smith scripsit:

> I'm not sure what you mean by irrelevant.  I don't see why gender in German
> and
> Spanish is so "relevant".  They don't need it for any special reason that
> English lacks.  The system is just there, so the speakers have to abide by
> it.
Gender does have certain advantages.  Sometimes it allows pronouns
not to be ambiguous.  Consider the English sentence "He took the
manuscript out of the briefcase and threw it in the sea".  Threw
what, the manuscript or the briefcase?

In French, one is masc. and one is fem., and the pronoun disambiguates
perfectly.  Of course this doesn't happen every time!

In Lojban, there are 17 genders: words beginning with "b", words
beginning with "c", ..., words beginning with "z".  For each of
these, the letter of the alphabet can be used as a pronoun.

--
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
        Yes, I know the message date is bogus.  I can't help it.
                --me, on far too many occasions