Re: Láadan and woman's speak

Nik Taylor wrote:

> Robert Hailman wrote:
> > I, personally, love gender, but as an English speaker I guess I have
> > some bias against it. I don't think, however, that gender is nescessary
> > to a language, and could easily see a language loosing it, more easily
> > than one gaining it.
>
> A great many languages have gender, so it must be pretty easy to gain
> gender.  Remember, language has been around AT LEAST 100,000 years,
> thus, every language, including English, can be traced back at least
> 100,000 years.
No -- traceability and theoretical existence are entirely separate issues.
We believe that some distant ancestor of English existed perhaps 100k
years or more ago, but there is no real way to prove this;  extremely
long-range comparison is not at all widely accepted (pace Merritt Ruhlen).

>  I strongly doubt that anything of the original
> language(s) has survived, so genders existing today had to have been
> gained at some point in the relatively recent past, if it was hard to
> gain, there'd be very few that had gained it.
Since we can't really know what the original language was like, it is probably
better to prove this in the way you've already shown -- saying that genders are
likely to be lost typologically begs the question:  how did they get there in the
first place?  We know that gender is only one of many semantic fields that can
be grammaticalized, just as case systems can rise and fall.  There is no reason
to suppose that I know of that gender should be treated any differently.

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