Re: Nauradi

On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 04:27:30PM -0700, Scotto Hlad wrote:

> But I'm really wondering if differentiation between male and female is so
> inherent in the human existence that we still need to know the difference.
> It seems that we do need specialized words in some cases. I can't think of a
> language that doesn't have a unique word for cow and bull as historically
> speaking they held such important and unique positions in agrarian
> societies.
I don't see any reason why a language can't have a word for "man" and
a word for "woman", while having no grammatical gender and no sex-specific
pronouns.  Before Japanese added "kanojo" for "she" in imitation of
European languages, it had no third-person gendered pronouns (an argument
could be made that the first-person pronouns and some of the second-person
pronouns are gendered, however!)  Yet it still had the words "onna" and
"otoko".

Likewise for other important-to-humans species.

Are you perhaps wedded to the idea that "man" and "woman" be expressed
as "person (m.)" and "person (f.)"?  If this is a favorite feature of
Nauradi, then maybe it is more in keeping with the language's ethos
to keep the male and female suffixes.

> As far as the possibility of not sex marking at all, how would a
> non-sex-marking language deal with the situation of someone having sex
> reassignment surgery? "He is now a she." Or "She is now a he."
"The man is now a woman" - would you really say "X is now a she" rather
than "is now a woman?"  It's a marked usage in English, using the pronoun
as a noun.

Now, if a language had not only no grammatical sex-related gender, but
also had no *nouns* for "man", "woman", "boy", "girl", "cow", and "bull",
that would be interesting indeed - practically speaking, it would have
to reflect a society where men and women fulfilled the same roles in
daily life (and where cows and bulls did as well!  Maybe a hunter-gatherer
society?).

At some point there would have to be words.  "Person with [genital type
A]", maybe :)

tylakèhlpë'fö,
Amanda

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