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

On Sat, Jun 03, 2000 at 11:09:01PM -0400, Robert Hailman wrote:
> 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, and
> during that time the language probably would have had some sort of
> gender that had later been lost. 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.
Surely all the "young" languages vanished many tens of millions of
years ago, and all the current languages have gone through many cycles
of change since then.  Having a new gender system be the "first" one
that a language evolves would only mean that it was the first one
since the language had begun to be recorded.  Before that anything's
possible.

> > 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.
They're very common.  That is, gender systems full of idiosyncracies
and culturally motivated categories are very common.

Even gender systems with weird categories like "non-flesh food" or
"long, narrow objects" tend to have these categories *in addition to*
or *as extensions of* very familiar categories based on rationality,
animacy, or sex.

But granting that, they're quite common.  At least, so I gather from
Corbett's _Gender._  But I must say I don't have statistics.


Ed