Re: French (was Re: Re: Optimum number of symbols)

Kendra wrote:
> Exactly-- but teachers of ANY language at my school basically teach it as,
> 'this is just the way it is.'
That always bugs me.  My Spanish II teacher *did* explain *some* things
about Spanish, like why you say _vendre'_ as the future of _venir_
(namely, drop the _i_ of the infinitive, then, since you can't say _nr_,
stick a _d_ there; that's more or less how he put it) and he also
explained about the (rather obvious, I think) orthographic changes, like
_tocar_ -> _toque'_ (to touch; I touched), the first person past tense
of -ar verbs is -e', but *toce' would be pronounced /tose/, so you have
to spell it _toque'_ to keep the /k/ sound.  Very simple!  :-)  But,
even with him there was a lot of "that's just how it is".  I guess most
students would probably consider detailed explanation of why it's that
way more confusing than helpful.  Different styles of learning, I
guess.  :-)

> Yeah, I have a feeling they would be by English feminists too. I'm not
> really a femenist, though--I dislike the idea of gender distinction at all.
> I'm more for gender equality, where the gender of the subject is irrelevant
> to the conversation, and does not need to be specified, implied, or even
> thought of at all. It should, imho, make no difference if I'm male or female
> and speaking about something
Japanese is fun in that respect - there's virtually no grammatical
gender, but there is a lot of *cultural* gender.  For example, for "I
saw him" a woman might say "(Atashi wa) ano hito wo atta wa", using the
first person pronoun "atashi", which is reserved for female speakers (or
effiminate male speakers) and the sentence-final particle "wa" which is
used only by female speakers (or effiminate male speakers), or speakers
of certain dialects; a man saying that sentence might say "(Boku wa) ano
hit wo atta yo", using the pronoun "boku", which is mostly male (female
speakers occasionally use it, but I think that might've just been a fad
a while back) and the sex-neutral particle "yo".  In more formal
registers, those gender distinctions are lost, so either sex could say
"(Watashi wa) ano hito wo atta yo."

My conlang uses 7 genders, 3 of which are used for sentient (capable of
using language) beings.  Gender 1 is "female sentient", gender 2 is
"male sentient", and gender 3 is "epicene [either gender] sentient".
Gender 3 is used for generic references (Like, "A soldier came by here"
- the Kassi have both male and female soldiers, altho they're segregated
by sex, and the men can't rise very high in rank) or, in the plural, for
mixed-groups.

The other 4 are:
Gender 4: Animals associated with people
Gender 5: Animals not associated with people
   This distinction is not entirely predictable.  Infants and mutes
     (and, occasionally, foreigners) are in Gender 4, as are pets,
     beasts of burden, food animals, etc.  Animals that live in the
     wild are in gender 5.  Pests, animals that attack people, and
     the like, however, are arbitrarily divided between the two
     genders
Gender 6: Other animate; also sometimes called pseudo-animate
   Things like language, social institutions, emotions, fire, wind,
     plants, sometimes insects
Gender 7: Inanimate.

Gender 4 was lost from many dialects, those nouns moved to gender 5, due
to a phonetic change that collapsed their prefixes.  Some dialects of
Low Uatakassi lost gender 6, dividing those nouns between 5 and 7,
and/or gender 3, making gender 1 the default.

--
"There's no such thing as 'cool'.  Everyone's just a big dork or nerd,
you just have to find people who are dorky the same way you are." -
overheard
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