Re: Nauradi

On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 5:26 PM, Alex Fink <000024@...> wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Nov 2008 14:30:14 -0700, Scotto Hlad <scott.hlad@...> wrote:
> I second this call for ANADEW.  Among conlangs it seems to be very prevalent
> that languages profess not to mark the masculine / feminine distinction, but
> then in the pronoun system there's a masculine and a feminine suffix that
> can be added in case disambiguation is necessary, or in case the speakers
> for some reason want to make a person's sex known.
> (Frankly, seeing this in conlangs kinda gives me the impression that the
> author doesn't want the English masculine/feminine distinction but can't
> quite stomach giving it up.  No reason to let this deter you, of course;
> it's your lang.)
As an engelang, gzb has this kind of optional pronoun marking.  I think
in my early use of the language,  I probably leaned on sex-marked
pronouns more than I do now.  A look at my last frequency analysis
of my corpus, which is weighted toward recent texts, and a bit of
possibly unreliable introspection suggests that I tend to use bare
unmarked pronouns more often these days, and when marking
pronouns with some kind of qualifier for disambiguation, suggests
that I'm more likely to mark them for age, humanness, number,
or attitude than for sex.  (There are about as many situations
where I talk about two persons of the same sex but different ages,
or toward whom I feel differently, as there are situations where
I talk about two people of different sexes; and practice shows that
in many cases context will make the pronoun referents clear
even without qualifiers.)

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/