From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Sun Sep 18 21:52:27 2005 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Sun, 18 Sep 2005 22:32:17 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.52) id 1EHDdj-00082H-2G for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Sun, 18 Sep 2005 21:52:27 -0700 Received: from sparkle.rodents.montreal.qc.ca ([216.46.5.7]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.52) id 1EHDde-00082A-83 for lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org; Sun, 18 Sep 2005 21:52:26 -0700 Received: (from mouse@localhost) by Sparkle.Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA (8.8.8/8.8.8) id AAA18658; Mon, 19 Sep 2005 00:52:14 -0400 (EDT) From: der Mouse Message-Id: <200509190452.AAA18658@Sparkle.Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-Erik-Conspiracy: There is no Conspiracy - and if there were I wouldn't be part of it anyway. X-Message-Flag: Microsoft: the company who gave us the zombie armies. Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 00:39:21 -0400 (EDT) To: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: lojban-beginners Digest V4 #188 In-Reply-To: References: X-Spam-Score: -2.6 (--) X-archive-position: 2139 X-Approved-By: rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-original-sender: mouse@Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-list: lojban-beginners > Instead of merely providing gender-neutral options so that we don't > default to sexist usages, Lojban seems to make you work hard to > provide the casual, ubiquitous gender awareness we are used to. And good for it, in my opinion. I don't *like* that ubiquitous gender/sex awareness. Why should it be any more relevant, when discussing (say) a shopkeeper from whom I bought something today, that the shopkeeper is a man, but not that, say, the shopkeeper is Oriental, or short, or any of the equally obvious categories said shopkeeper might fit into? Yet English, like most natural languages, forces me to drag one of them in, willy-nilly, and makes me work to drag any of the others in. I much prefer the Lojban way, making you say what you mean, but not requiring you to say more than you mean - and not making it trivial to say "the person I was speaking of (who happens to be a man)" and clumsy to say "the person I was speaking of (who happens to be short)". Douglas Hofstatder, I think it was, wrote a lovely little piece: "A Person Paper on Purity in Language", which appeared in Metamagical Themas. See www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html, which brings this linguistic bias into delightful focus. And on another note, in passing, > Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2005 14:00:58 -0500 > From: Chris Capel > Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: podcast (pimsleur method) > > U3VwZXJtZW1vIGlzIGJhc2VkIG9uIGdyYWR1YXRlZCBpbnRlcnZhbCByZWNhbGwuIFRoZSBzdXBl > cm1lbW8gc2l0ZQpjb250YWlucyBpbmZvcm1hdGlvbiBhYm91dCB0aGVpciBhbGdvcml0aG0gYW5k > [...] Is there some way to eliminate such things, either by massaging them into text form or just dropping them, at least from the digest? /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B