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Re: Gender in conlangs (was: Re: Umlauts (was Re: Elves and Ill Bethisad))

From:Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>
Date:Monday, November 3, 2003, 2:52
>Makes sense. The body is not the person - that's >a well known precept in Telerani spirituality! > >I don't think I have a Talarian word for corpse >yet, but of course, its gender will be dictated >by etymology and may well be animate. :) > >Daine languages have genders (but I'm not exactly >sure how they function). I do know they too would >consider the dead body as inanimate, or not a >person. > >Padraic.
As I said, I think that the answer to the question is culturally significant. It can have a good deal to do with the metaphysics of the culture involved. For Orthodox Christians, for example, the person is both the spirit and the body together - a psycosomatic unity. When the soul and the body become separated, death ensues. You are then left with a lifeless corpse, which I would see as inanimate (I've only been to a few funerals, but I definately perceived the corpse as both human and inanimate at the same time), and living soul. However, a soul separated from its body may be alive, but it is very definitely *not* in its natural state. Its natural state is to be together with its body. This problem will be corrected at the resurrection, when the bodies of the dead will be raised and reunited with their souls. My Cwendaso/Tovláug do not have that much knowledge about what happens after death. They do believe that the soul/spirit/whatever survives, i.e. it is not annihilated, but that is about all they know. They have a profound reverence for human life in general, and they treat corpses and human bones with the utmost care and reverence, and have no fear of them. They might possibly gender human remains as epicene to give them the dignity of something human and also so that corpses can be made male or female by verbal agreement. Or they might also gender them as inanimate to show up the contrast that the corpse used to be a living, breathing human being, and now it is most definately not (although it is still most definately human, and will never cease to be.) One additional piece of information that might possible figure in or might not is that somewhere between 1500-2000 years ago, the ancestors of the Cwendaso/Tovláug were anamists and ancestor worshipers. This might possibly affect how human remains are seen today, but that seems unlikely to me, because there was a sharp split between the people who kept the old religion and the ones who accepted the new religion and became the Tovláug/Cwendaso. The Tovláug essentially rejected the entire religion of their forfathers and migrated and became a separate people. It seems unlikely that too many relics of the old religion would have remained. (And in case you were wondering, the two names are because the Trehelish, their southern neighbors, call them "Cwendaso" i.e. "the people of the Cwendas Mountains," and they call themselves "Tovláugad," that is, "The Instructed." The singular is "Tovláug.") Isidora

Replies

Costentin Cornomorus <elemtilas@...>
Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>Corpses, etc. (was: Re: Gender in conlangs (was: Re: Umlauts (was Re: Elves and Ill Bethisad)))
Herman Miller <hmiller@...>Corpses (was Re: Gender in conlangs.....)
Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>Corpses (was Re: Gender in conlangs.....)