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[lojban-beginners] Re: Genders



On 9/17/05, la cuncuxnas. <thatskotkid@gmail.com> wrote:
There probably is a really easy way to do that kind of thing.  The lojbanists who know what they're doing pull linguistic tricks from out the very air, and I feel like a six-year-old at his birthday party trying to figure out how that rabbit got in that man's hat in the first place.  But it seems to me that Lojban doesn't really have a lot of those titles, or honorifics, or anything.  (The 'hauteur' cmavo comes close, though.)  I think such nomial add-ons would come naturally through usage (and, also, adding straight rafsi to names wouldn't be a bad way to do it, in my opinion).  Or there's that really easy way I just don't know about, either one.

To my own disappointment, so far I have found this is not the case. I would be happy to find out I'm wrong, but it seems that in Lojban, either you leave gender unspecified, or you make an introductory remark about gender as in "I'm going to tell you a story about 'it,' and oh by the way 'it' was male" and the subject never comes up again without constant inconvenient awkardness. 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.
-epkat