Re: Constructed natlangs

At 03:46 PM 2/12/99 -0500, you wrote: "From what I can see, the so-called
"women's language" of Chukchee is a matter of a single regular phonetic
alternation, and 2-4 other alleged-but-not-very-convincingly-documented
ones -- but _no_  morphological, syntactic, or lexical differences.  This,
to me, seems an unfair stretch of the term "language".  This style has been
dying out rapidly since the 1950s, but was already moribund at the turn of
the century.  It's also interesting that loanwords from Chukchi into
neighboring languages are all "standard" pronunciation -- despite the large
amount of marriages and residences among linguistic communities; this makes
me (at least) wonder if the "women's style" was a recent, short-lived
innovation.
Kenji


The article about Eme-sal is by I. M. Diakonoff in the 1974 "Sumerological
Studies in Honour of Thorkild Jacobsen on his 70th Birthday." It is
available from Amazon.

The term 'women's language' doesn't seem an unfair term; I suppose dialect
or style is more accurate. Maybe the 'women's style' was short-lived, but I
am inclined to trust Diakonoff's work on Eme-sal as it seems a
well-reasoned, if sparse, analysis of the topic. I have inquired on the
Ancient Neareast list to see if anyone has more recent works on Eme-sal,
but no responses yet. Diakonoff wrote in 1974 as if there were some degree
of depth to his info on Eme-sal; I am hoping there are other texts on the
subject that might allow me to clarify his analysis. Clearly Eme-sal was a
dialect in the true sense of the word, as it has different lexemes than
Eme-ku and the same pattern of sound replacement that the Chukchee women's
style shows, albeit a much more complicated one. The strange thing is that
all the evidence I have shows only persons in the non-male (= female) class
of beings is shows to speak Eme-sal. What does that indicate?

BB
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