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From: deb5@ellis.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: International Language.
Message-ID: <1995Jan14.180804.5301@midway.uchicago.edu>
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References: <3eouom$l18@panix2.panix.com> <1995Jan8.181104.10649@midway.uchicago.edu> <3f78nd$g03@mother.usf.edu>
Date: Sat, 14 Jan 1995 18:08:04 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu sci.lang.translation:705 sci.lang:34333

In article <3f78nd$g03@mother.usf.edu> millert@grad.csee.usf.edu (Timothy Miller) writes:
>Daniel von Brighoff (deb5@ellis.uchicago.edu) wrote:
>
>: Nu?  Who said that gender in a language has anything to do with
>: determining modern attitudes?  My point with reference to Esperanto
>: is that deriving feminine nouns referring to people (agentative and
>: non-agentative) from the corresponding masculine nouns implies that
>: masculine persons are primary and feminine ones secondary.  Although
>
>Pardon me, but this is stupid.  

I pardon thee if I do question the tactfulness of your wording.

>Female could just as well have been chosen and then masculine forms would 
>have been derrived from the feminine ones... if this were the case, would 
>you still complain about the language being sexist?  Somehow, I doubt it.

First off, I wasn't complaining.

Second, I would still say it encapsulates a bias, albeit a less
pernicious one.  Like I've said plenty of times, *I don't really
care*!  I just don't want to hear Esperantistoj telling me their
language is free of the nasty biases that infect natural languages
when that is patently untrue.  Furthermore, they can talk Esperanto 
however they want and I won't tell them to change it; that doesn't 
mean, however, that I have to approve of anything they do.
>
>The other option is to have a genderless root and have two suffixes (or 
>prefixes, or whatever), one feminine and the other masculine.   But 
>what's the point?  Do you like wasting time?

How on earth is this wasting time?

>: I certainly wouldn't say that this practice subliminally makes all 
>: Esperantists sexist, I don't like the symbolsim and  would prefer an
>: alternative:  e.g. "knabo" meaning simply "child", "virknabo" 
>: meaning "boy" and "knabino" meaning "girl."  This visibly puts
>
>Yeah... here you have a root and then the masculine and feminine forms.  
>Doesn't seem very helpful to me, except that you want people to have to 
>deal with something extra, on top of all the other stuff that people have 
>to deal with.

It *is* quite demanding, isn't it.  I'm sorry to ask all those poor
people who struggled for years to master the one Esperanto case ending
to go through so much extra trouble. 

>Ever hear of compression?  Or efficiency?  I like efficiency.  Having a 
>basic form and deriving something from it is efficient.  Having a basic 
>unused root and then adding UNNECESSARY things to it is NOT efficient.

"Basic unused root"?  I don't think their's anything "inefficient"
about having a form of "common gender" for discussing persons.
Sometimes the gender just isn't important; sometimes it isn't even
known.  In a case where you didn't get a good enough look at someone to
sex them, what's more efficient to say?

"I saw a boy or a girl run by"

Or:

"I saw a child run by."

I like efficiency, too, but I like clarity better. Besides, if you're
going to start talking about increasing efficiency, be prepared to
rebuild Esperanto from the ground up.  Like any language, it could
be more "efficient" than it is.

>Now, I've played around a bit with developing languages, and the concept 
>of gender I didn't add to a language until MUCH later.  There could 
>be a form for 'sibling', and then you could make it male or female

According to another poster's comments, Esperanto is heading in this
direction, which I endorse wholeheartedly.

>3 different words.  I just recently realized how useful gender (or 
>rather, noun class) is in a language.... the more genders, the more 
>pronouns, and therefore, the more ways of reducing ambiguity.

Rather noun class, exactly.  Why does it have to be gender-based?
Many languages have pronouns which express concepts such as "the
person last mentioned," "the person other than the last mentioned,"
"the person way over there," "the honoured person," and so on.
These do a lot more to reduce the kinds of ambiguity to which you refer
than gender does.

>PC increases ambiguity.

For one thing, my remarks have nothing to do with the PC movement
and I wish people would stop making that connexion.  I felt the
way I do before people ever demonised the extreme, if well-meaning,
efforts of some journalist students and used the discredited term
as a catch-all for any attempt they didn't like to eliminate bias in 
speech.  (It took me several tries to disambiguate that last clause
and I still wasn't entirely successful.  Pray, tell me how use of
gender would have made it less ambiguous or "PC" made it moreso.)

For another thing, this statement isn't even true (assuming I under-
stand what the poster meant by it; the term "PC" has become almost as
meaningless as--and nigh interchangeable with--the term "fascism").
-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
