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

>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

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