Re: Sapir-WhorFreakiness

Thomas R. Wier said:
>
>> > Less freaky, but the language is also one with different phonemic
>> > inventories for men and women.
>
> One of the members of our department is documenting Karaja /kara'Za/,
> a Macro-Ge language.  In this language, one of the gender-based variations
> is that men systematically drop all /k/s from words, while women retain
> them.
Yep. That amounts to a difference in phoneme inventory, at least
superficially. Since the men presumably have no difficulty understanding
the women, we can assume that at least the men's auditory phonologies
include a /k/ phoneme that is heard as zero in male speech.

If this is what's going on in Piraha, then the women aren't *really*
lacking a phoneme.


>> > How and why do such systems arise?
>>
>> Taboos, probably.  I recall an Indonesian lang. where s ~ h also
>> alternated between men/women, tho I don't recall which used which.
>
> Or maybe simply the desire to identify as a male.  Georgian men do
> this in a weird way: they all sound roughly as if speaking with swobs
> of cotton in their mouths*.  (Georgian women talk much like other
> women in Caucasia and the CIS do.)
>
> * This is what we call an "unscientific characterization".
Hmm. I wonder if that extends to singing. I once performed a Georgian hymn
in public. Maybe it came across as effeminate, since I generally take
pains *not* to sing as though I had cotton balls in my mouth...


-- Mark