Re: Insult (jara: Weekly Vocab 8)

>I haven't figured it out yet.  Which is one of the
>reasons my story about the cloudspirits stalled out.
>There are only so many stylistically valid ways to
>avoid pronouns and then the text starts *feeling*
>contrived and . . . Well, in my notes I refer to their
>sexes as alpha, beta, gamma, delta and epsilon.
Most of the good sci-fi I've read involving more than two sexes ends up
having to either sacrifice that to being just an interesting cultural
subnotes  or invent pronouns for them. My earliest memory of a 3-sexed
society was a novel in which the author called them "demi-males". Marge
Piercey make use of "per" as a non-sexed pronoun in _Woman on the Edge of
Time_.

>And this story has two alphas as main characters and
>at least mentions characters of ALL the genders.  As
>did that also stalled piece on Alelliawulian
>courtship.
My only initial problem with naming them "alphas", "betas", etc. is that I
first think of the alphas, betas, etc in _Brave New World_. I then think of
social ranking - alphas on top, then betas, etc. Though I suspect I could
overcome both these these reading a well-written story. You could borrow the
pronouns for their language, but that too might be distratcting.

Anyone here know how natlangs for cultures with more than 2 genders handles
pronoouns?

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