Re: Gender in pronouns
Saul Epstein 
Wed, 14 Oct 1998 16:00:25 -0500

(Quotes MDriest: Wednesday, October 14, 1998 1:38 PM)


> I think the first possibility would work better and I agree
> with T'Pel. It is more precise. The chance that any Vulcan
> would stoop to verbal abuse is quite small, my Lady, but the
> the language is probably capable of it.

"Abuse" may be too strong for what Vulcans are likely to pursue in
this regard, but I can't see them being completely free of it. I seem
to recall a scene in "Journey to Babel" in which Amb. Sarek indulged
in some mildly insulting -- but highly logical -- criticism of someone
with whom he disagreed.

> There is another possibility, T'Pel already told us, we could
> simply not sort for gender. We could make a distinction on
> grounds of something else. I thought is was one of our goals
> to create an alien language, so why not create something no
> Terran language has?

It is also one of our goals to build on the foundation already laid,
to whatever extent possible.

> Another idea:
> - different stages of abstractness. This may need some work.

Entity Classification is an important part of any language, and is
often manifest within a language in different ways, essentially
classifying kinds of classification. That the distinction "one or
neither of two genders" should show up in pronoun structures is, to be
sure, not especially alien. But, as T'Pel pointed out, neither is it
especially Terran. There are probably languages that don't make formal
distinctions of gender at all, and there are certainly some that don't
do so in their pronouns.

But there are many different kinds of disctinction that can be made,
and many different ways to make them. A book I happen to be reading
happens to describe Swahili as "frequently analyzed as having a total
of nine different noun classes, each one requiring a distinct system
of agreement prefixes attached to other words in the sentence," in a
section dealing with some of the problems of accounting for features
like gender in grammatical analysis.

Class can be manifest in restrictions concerning what kinds of
modifiers can be applied to an entity, what kinds of actions entities
are permitted to commit or be subject to, etc., in addition to simple
tagging with affixes.

Rob has mentioned frequently a desire to formally classify different
levels of abstraction in Vulcan, and I think it's a great idea. We can
replace the original pronoun-expressed distinction with such, or find
some other way to express it.

I should also point out that, as originally formulated, ZC has a basic
sentient-nonsentient distinction, but the manifestation of that
distinction is never described. Unless it is implied by the presence
of "it" among the pronouns. All that's said is that it doesn't
correspond to carbon-noncarbon. So I think it would make a lot of
sense if the most commonly used pronouns only distinguished sentient
from non, while a speaker could have the option of specifying gender
if it were pertinent to her statement.

--
from Saul Epstein
locus*planetkc,com - www,planetkc,com/locus
"Surakri' ow'phacur the's'hi the's'cha'; the's'pharka
    the's'hi surakecha'."
                                        -- K'dvarin Urswhl'at