From - Tue Aug 06 11:50:18 1996 Message-ID: <320769BA.7313@ccil.org> Date: Tue, 06 Aug 1996 11:50:18 -0400 From: John Cowan Organization: Lojban Peripheral X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.0 (Win16; I) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Lojban List Subject: Re: male/female, man/woman, human/person References: <199608060104.VAA20537@locke.ccil.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 1742 la marvn. cusku di'e > Okay, the powers that be in the lojban community discourage the use of > nanmu (man) and ninmu (woman), saying that they're sexist. Okay, I > totally understand and support that guideline. I think you are overgeneralizing from the guidelines about examples. Of course it is all right to use nanmu/ninmu where necessary and useful. We just try to avoid examples that refer to "le nanmu" and "le ninmu" all the time, so that people don't feel excluded. Similarly, the reference grammar says "he or she" or avoids the issue. This has nothing to do with what to do when writing in Lojban! Similarly, tanru of the form "nanmu/ninmu broda" are hard to construe. Just what is supposed to be a "male human" or "female human" attribute, beyond the anatomical? It's too culture-specific. > The thing is, I wonder why > they even exist as gismu. Why not just combine fetsi (female) with prenu > (person) to form fetpre (female person)? (Or would it be fetypre?) fetpre is correct. "tp" is a valid consonant cluster, and "fe tpre" is impossible because "tp" is *not* a valid initial cluster. > It > seems that fetpre and ninmu mean the same thing. They both have the same > place structure, and are non-age and -species specific. Meaning is a sticky issue that we avoid defining as much as we can, and so synonymy of predicates is not part of the Lojban definition. In addition, "fetpre" may include a female cat that has a personality (to the speaker), whereas "ninmu" surely excludes such a one. I think the use of "humanoid" in the place structure is plain waffling.... female chimps? female ETIs? -- John Cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban