Re: Homosexuality and gender identity

Christophe Grandsire wrote:

> True exceptions (and I don't
> count the "mädchen" thing as an exception) are quite rare actually.
>
> That said, Maggel does fit the popular view of gender in Standard German,
> except that it's even worse :) .
Hmm... I think Pidse is a bit more like St. German in this regard.

It's grammatical gender stems from a feminist movement because the word
for 'that' was the same as the word for 'he' (a holdover from Ygyde). So
women started using 'she' for 'that'. The word for 'it' was also the
word for 'this', which mostly posed no problem. Because men are more
likely to refer to their wives and women their husbands than men to
their husbands and women to their wives (in Pidse that makes no sense as
there are separate words for homosexual partners), these words delevoped
genders opposite from their biological sex. Other words took one of the
three at pretty much random. But because the pronominal use is separate
from that of the article, one's biological sex determines the pronoun to
use.

A class of nouns are masculine or feminine in the singular but neuter in
the plural; this is because the plural masculine and feminine plurals
merged with the neuter article; reanalysis ensues.

Hence:
_ju iInese_  /lo @maf/ 'that man' (lit. that husband) but _Nese... ji
..._ /me: ... je/ .
_ji iInod_ /je je~:/ 'that woman' but _Nod... ju ..._ /mab ... lo/.
_jv iIyoic_ /wo r\ajei/ 'that evening' and _Yoic... jv ..._ /Cei ... wo/.
_ji iIyovc_ /je r\iM\o:/ 'that occurence of El Nino, that El Nino year'
but _Yovc... jv ..._ /Cou ... wo/ (the plural of which is neuter and the
same form would mean El Nino, occurence thereof, or drought; in the
singular, _Yovc_ (n.) means 'drought'. I haven't worked out Pidse
plurals yet---don't even have the foggiest of how they might be formed!
(or even if they're different other than article/pronoun etc.)).

In the above examples, the nouns, pronouns and articles are all in the
nominative. The reason for the different form in the noun is that
there's a strong and a weak form, one used with adjectives and articles,
the other without.

(BTW: I don't think any sound changes from Ygyde to Pidse are unlikely.
What's more unlikely is the orthographical changes... but even they
originate from my handwriting! In good Pidse typography, the <i> and <j>
are dotless, ascenders being ugly, and the <s>, rather than curling up
at the bottom, tapers of below the baseline slightly, descenders being
nice.)

(If that made an ounce of sense, it's a coincidence. :) )

--
Tristan                  <kesuari@...>

Replies