Re: Láadan and woman's speak

John Cowan wrote:

>> 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.
Absolutely.  But there is no need for it in German or Spanish that is not in
English.  I'm just saying that genders don't disappear when they aren't
"relevant" anymore.

>In French, one is masc. and one is fem., and the pronoun disambiguates
>perfectly.  Of course this doesn't happen every time!
I've often noticed that natural groups of words have different genders.  In
every language I'm familiar with that has genders, "sun" and "moon" are
different; "fork" and "spoon" are different (add a third gender like in German
and "knife" gets the third); and so on.  It's not surprising, then, that "man"
and "woman" get placed in different genders ("child" in a third in German).

This isn't true of all systems, and not all groups are differentiated like
this, but it is an interesting tendancy.

Marcus