[lojban-beginners] Re: lojban-beginners Digest V4 #188

[der Mouse <mouse@Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>]

> 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 <pdf23ds@gmail.com>
> 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?

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