coi doiI don't know how important this issue is in other cultures. I haven't heard about anything of the sort with regards to languages with gender more firmly entrenched than English, such as Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi (which only avoids gender in the pronouns).
As far as I know, the Finno-Ugric languages (like Hungarian), the Ural-Altaic languages (like Turkish), Georgian, Basque, and the Malayo-Polynesian languages make no grammatical gender distinctions.(Japanese is an exception, using 'konohito' for 'he' and 'kanoja' for 'she', but the basic word 'kore' '[s]he' has no gender). It is an issue derived not from cultural genderism or the lack of the same, but from how the ancestral language community mapped their linquistic universe. Modern languages which maintain grammatical gender distinctions all derive from languages which divided the entire linguistic universe into masculine/feminine or masculine/feminine/neuter. The Semitic languages (Hebrew, Arabic...) and the Hamitic languages (Egyptian, Berber...) maintain a masculine/feminine division, so everything is either masculine or feminine. The most ancient Indo-European languages tend to either classify everything as masculine/feminine (Sanskrt) or masculine/feminine/neuter (Greek). [note:grammatical gender may not be consistent between two languages deriving from the same parent language. For the Spanish, a hand is feminine, but for the French it is masculine.]
Other linguistic classifications have occurred. If I recall correctly, Sumerian had a grammatical distinction between living and non-living, while Swahili and some of the Caucasian languages have highly complex grammatical classifications.
It is in the lexical choices that we see how the culture handles gender. For instance, while Sumerian had no GRAMMATICAL distinction like he/she, there were different words for cultural roles, such as 'king'/'lugal' and 'queen'/'gashan'.
mu'o mi'e bobgrif.
From: HeliodoR <exitconsole@gmail.com> Reply-To: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org To: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: gendered and gender-neutral language Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2005 17:06:34 +0200 Um... I really don't know much about the issue, but is this really such an important and serious question? Is it in other countries? Maybe I don't really encounter it as we only have "(s)he" and "it", without any distinction between the two genders. And after all here in my country mysogynism is not a great problem, here REMNA live and not FEMALE and MALE ones (or just that's how I C it). Maybe that's because Hungarian people are part of the 'minority' of the world (which may sound silly) and know how it feels to be categorized as "other countries". mi'e xili,odor.