Re: Genders (was Re: Láadan and woman's speak_

Robert Hailman wrote:

> Nik Taylor wrote:
> >
> > Robert Hailman wrote:
> > > Right, but since there is a factor of chance involved, since we don't
> > > know exactly what inspires a language to develop gender, or lose it,
> > > what are the odds a language would lose one gender system and gain
> > > another?
> >
> > Very high, but why do you keep insisting on having lost one earlier?
> > Given enough time, I would suspect that the evolution of a gender system
> > is virtually inevitable.
>
> You said it right there, with the inevitability of a gender system.
> Since a civilization that is very technically advanced would likely be
> very old, the language would probably be even older than that,
Why? I see no reason to assume language continuity over the periods
of time that Nik is talking about.  The civilization shared by the Sumerians
and Akkadians was substantially the same, with many of the same myths,
writing systems, forms of government, etc., even though the latter eventually
entirely supplanted the former as a language in common, every-day use,
except for religious ceremonies and such things.

> and
> during that time the language probably would have had some sort of
> gender that had later been lost.
Why?  There is no inherent reason why a gender system has to develop
_a priori_, nor why one should disappear.  The fact that languages are
constantly changing and the elements that make up particular languages
are logically independent phenomena.

> The techno-gender could very well be
> the first one, though, but that would suggest a younger language to me,
> perhaps one too young to belong to a technologically advanced
> civilization.
I'm not sure I follow you here.

> > Well, it's impossible to know - there's never been a society in such a
> > state!  But I've seen the most bizarre gender systems, things like
> > "long, narrow objects", or "non-flesh food".
>
> Any gender system is possible, for sure, but how common are these
> systems? If you checked one language at random, it would probably have a
> more Indo-European-like gender system, I'd imagine.
Why?   There are all sorts of different ways of breaking the world up into
categories, and biological sex is only one of the more prominent ones.   There
are languages that categorize animates/inanimates (as indeed PIE might have);
ones that categorize things that change from things that don't. Shape, color,
sound, texture, smell, and taste are also all possible and readily imaginable
categorical criteria.

> > Besides, I think what's really implausible is a conscious engineering of
> > a natural language like that, or an artificial language being adopted as
> > a mother tongue, especially if a common language already existed.  It
> > would be more reasonable to suppose that those genders evolved naturally
> > then that someone put them in there.
>
> It depends on the civilization that engineered it. I'm thinking:
> Technologically advanced civilization begins to expand rapildy. Conquers
> areas that don't speak the language. Unable to integrate conquered areas
> into official language.
What makes you think that that would happen?  France has been pretty
amazingly efficient at stamping out regional languages that were once widely
spoken. Attach symbolic meaning to the official language as part of official
state propaganda ("the unity of the Republic"), and if you back that up with
commercial, cultural and maybe religious pressure, voila, you have endangered
languages after a few generations. If that doesn't work, try demographics.
Official Soviet policy for decades was the Russianization of non-Russian parts
of the Soviet Union by forced or coerced mass-movement of linguistic Russians
into areas dominated by ethnic minorities. If those fail, you could just exterminate
the repressed people, which is what Stalin did to certain Ukrainian communities
in the 30s. This last method has been highly successful many times in history
**[I am NOT of course advocating any of this in any sense;  I am merely being frank
about historical fact.]**

We have been assuming all along that advanced civilizations must be liberal
bourgeois democracies.  There is no historical reason for simply assuming this, one
way or the other.  The circumstances under which democracy thrives have been shown,
however, to be rarely achieved:   the culture involved requires a strong middle-class
with _de facto_ power decentralized away from any one elite class of people, among
other characteristics.  Much as we would all surely want democracy to thrive, is there
any reason to think that in *thousands* of years of history there will be no relapse into
a world system of generally despotic regimes?  I, for one, cannot agree with the likes
of Francis Fukuyama and his thesis we today live at the "End of History".

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