Re: Relative Genders-Comments

At 05:42 PM 3/19/99 -0800, you wrote: "As far as relative genders go, I
think there'd be some contexts in which the gender would have to be
'absolute.' Relative gender would introduce extremely impractical ambiguity
into sentences like these:"

Why? You are specifying the gender in English by a word that means "female"
or "male." A language with a relative gender system would no doubt have a
word which refers to "female" or "male."

Examples: "People trust female babysitters more than male babysitters."
If you were writing in Old Babylonian, the female babysitter would end in
"-[a]tum" and the male would end in "um."

If you were writing in Oogaboo, which indicates relative genders, and its
gendersystem assumes masc-fem genders, and -UM was for same-gender and -AT
for opposite-gender, you would say (same /um/plural /u:/; opp. /at/ plural
/a:t/):

"I  hired a babysitter-AT because I trust female-A:T babysitter-A:T over
male-U: babysitter-U:"

In this case, the PRONOUN is either gender-unmarked (unlikely!) or has
different forms for male and female speakers (I for men, ME for women), and
there are separate words - as in English - to denote gender. A woman would
say:

"Me hired a babysitter-UM because Me also trust female-U: babysitter-U:
over male-A:T babysitter A:T."

"Only the female of the species has poison."
(male) Only the female-AT of the species-? has poison.

You can see how this would be awkward, though. I would prefer to use gender
only with animate, human-class creatures - humans, pets, intelligent
aliens, whatever - as opposed to slugs, houses, etc. I would make a third,
neuter gender which does not have a marker - ie. intelligent creatures are
marked for gender, otherwise the word is unmarked. Otherwise it would make
these monster-long sentences!

And what about a truly alien language, one that humans could only figure
out on paper like a math problem ... with multiple genders relating to
time, shape, or place-referents? I-now speak of him-then and the like. What
a nightmare - and would make for some fun, fun work. An alien language
worthy of Cherryhian work would be fun to build - I especially like the
shape-referents. Tall gender, round gender, distance factors ... you'd have
way fun explaining why a species would want to indicate relative distance
so much it's built into their brains!

You can see how this can be done, but it would be delicate work.
Genitalia-reconstruction, indeed!

BB

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