DJP criticisms

[KathTheDragon]

Of course not - but there's not really any necessity to go any particular direction on which gender should be considered default, and the simplest approach imo is to simply not distinguish gender except for a small set of highly specific nouns, where the words should be completely different. E.g. "boy" vs. "girl" (unrelated), but just one word for "actor" and "actress". If it becomes necessary to disambiguate, you can say "male actor" and "female actor".

[Travis B.]

Of course the simplest approach - which is always a plus when it comes to auxlangs - is to not have grammatical gender at all and to have only a small set of explicitly inherently gendered words that are highly lexicalized in nature, using adjectives/stative verbs to mark gender when needed otherwise, as you say. I was just pointing out that one cannot expect to achieve social goals through designing one's auxlang in such a fashion, since natlangs have not influenced the societies where they are spoken in the fashion that one would expect were language to influence social mores in such a fashion.

[KathTheDragon]

Again, when did anybody say that was a goal?

[xxx]

However, avoiding heterosexual bias in language is a meme of modern lobbying ... even here...

[Salmoneus]

Of course not - but there's not really any necessity to go any particular direction on which gender should be considered default, and the simplest approach imo is to simply not distinguish gender except for a small set of highly specific nouns, where the words should be completely different. E.g. "boy" vs. "girl" (unrelated), but just one word for "actor" and "actress". If it becomes necessary to disambiguate, you can say "male actor" and "female actor".

But Volapuk was designed for a different society - a Victorian society, in which the salience of gender was much higher than it is today. Of course, it's would be a strange choice for someone designing a language for the 22nd century today - but Volapuk was in fact designed for and by the people of the 19th. So I'm not sure it makes much sense to describe this as a fault in the language.

I'd also note the irony in your examples! The idea that "boy" and "girl" (gender-specificied words for people who are young) are inherently 'unrelated' and 'should be completely different' to indicate gender seems almost as archaic, and certainly as arbitrary, as saying the same about 'actor' and 'actress' (gender-specified words for people who act). The Victorian no doubt thought it essential to specify the gender of a person who acts; and the 22nd century critic will no doubt be appalled and/or amused by the idea of obsessively specifying the gender of young people...


[It's also worth pointing out that gender-specifying words, and even male-default words, are not inherently anti-feminist. They're sex-normative, but the assumption that they're anti-feminist is itself a reflection of society's anti-feminism. One person can look and say "they assume that men are the default, so women are by implication inferior and abnormal!" - but that shows how they've been brought up to see men and women. Someone in a very different society could equally say "they assume that men are the default, so by implication women are superior and special!" (eg there are language where feminine markers descend from honorifics). But really, the language just creates the divide - the power balance across that divide is something each society contributes themselves...]

[mèþru]

But the divide's existence in the first place was probably motivated by what would be called sexism by modern standards.

[WeepingElf]

My major problem with The Art of Language Invention was its totally misleading title. It's not about how to conlang; it's about how DJP made some specific conlangs, with a bit of other linguistic data thrown in. There's nothing wrong with the information in the book, but it's not what I thought I was paying for, based on the title and summary.

Well, he speaks from his own experience, and uses those conlangs as a source of examples which he knows best: his own ones. I see little fault in that; most of us would probably write a book about how to conlang in a similar way; avoiding this certainly is not easy.

[KathTheDragon]

I'd also note the irony in your examples! The idea that "boy" and "girl" (gender-specificied words for people who are young) are inherently 'unrelated' and 'should be completely different' to indicate gender seems almost as archaic, and certainly as arbitrary, as saying the same about 'actor' and 'actress' (gender-specified words for people who act). The Victorian no doubt thought it essential to specify the gender of a person who acts; and the 22nd century critic will no doubt be appalled and/or amused by the idea of obsessively specifying the gender of young people...

Oh, my reasoning was that high-frequency cases should have dedicated words for brevity.

[Salmoneus]

But the divide's existence in the first place was probably motivated by what would be called sexism by modern standards.

Depends what you mean by 'motivated' and 'sexism'.

On the one hand, the existence of gender is not inherently sexist - it's a technique primarily to allow easy disambiguation. Most of the early distinctions in IE were balanced - that is, there's nothing linguistic that makes '-tor' vs '-trix' sexist (at least synchronically - the latter does derive from the former via a suffix, but this wouldn't have been transparant to Latin speakers themselves).

On the second hand, the use of the masculine as a default for many nouns is sometimes due to linguistic-diachronic factors rather than sociological ones. For instance, in spanish and portuguese, 'people' are by default feminine, even if they're male (sp. "persona"), but this doesn't really reflect any widespread misandry, just the history of the word.

On the third hand, the use of particular genders as the default assumption for nouns relating to occupations dominated by one gender is not inherently sexist per se, although it is conducive to essentialism. Since most occupations historically were male-dominated..

On the fourth hand, the creation of the male-default situation has often been the result of generously extending a male-only term to women. For instance, take 'actor'. It used to be that a male was an ac-tor and a female was an ac-tress. That's obviously conducive to essentialism, but it's also symmetrical - it doesn't (synchronically) make one the default (unlike, say, author/author-ess). The term 'actor' was then extended to women (and indeed claimed by women) as a gesture of respect in the face of existing sexism. That is, because women were devalued, their words became devalued, so to combat sexism it was thought good by both parties to use the male words to refer to women also. But that in turn formally deranks the female term, makes it a special word only used to emphasise that a female actor is in some way not the same as a male one. So in many cases, the 'sexism' of the male-neutral, female-exception terminology actually arises from well-meaning attempts to reduce the sexism of the language.

On the fifth hand, even overt male-normative language was not necessarily consciously 'motivated' by any overtly sexist motive - in most areas of life, indeed, sexist rules were created not out of overt misogyny but out of misguided principles, in most cases principles endorsed or even fought for by both men and women of the time. In the case of female-exceptional language, this was often insisted upon by polite mores, including by women, as an indicator of politeness and respect - a recognition of difference. Calling an early actress an 'actor' - implying that acting on stage somehow meant she had to drop her feminine prerogatives, that it made her in some way mannish, suitable to be called by male-gendered words, would widely have been regarded as a crass insult! [imagine, after all, even today, the outrage if a magazine decided to call Serena Williams a 'father'! There'd probably be quite a lot of angry letters just if they routinely referred to her as a 'parent'...]

Of course, it's fair to point out that a lot of overtly polite and protective behaviour is/was suspiciously close to the sort of behaviour that benefits those in power. So perhaps you could talk of sexist "motivations" in a metaphorical, sociological sense. But i think that's much more problematic when you try to impose those 'motivations' in the ordinary psychological sense on individual behaviours. Because on the personal level, probably both the woman who accepted and even insisted on being called 'Miss X, the actress" (because she was still a woman and entitled to the respect of being addressed as such) AND the woman a generation later who encouraged or insisted upon "X, the actor" (because she was the same as her male colleagues damnit) were acting out of genuine sentiment and not specifically driven in any conscious way by 'sexist' motivations.

[Salmoneus]

I'd also note the irony in your examples! The idea that "boy" and "girl" (gender-specificied words for people who are young) are inherently 'unrelated' and 'should be completely different' to indicate gender seems almost as archaic, and certainly as arbitrary, as saying the same about 'actor' and 'actress' (gender-specified words for people who act). The Victorian no doubt thought it essential to specify the gender of a person who acts; and the 22nd century critic will no doubt be appalled and/or amused by the idea of obsessively specifying the gender of young people...

Oh, my reasoning was that high-frequency cases should have dedicated words for brevity.

OK, I guess that's a fair line to draw.

Although I suspect it'll still seem odd in the future - after all, gender is relevant so extremely rarely that it hardly seems like dedicated forms are ever needed, beyond a medical 'female'/'male' for the aid of doctors. How many sentences with 'boy' or 'girl' in them really have the gender neither irrelevant nor obvious from context? Very, very few, I should think.

Nonetheless, I take your point.

[KathTheDragon]

Of course, it doesn't rule out the need for gender neutral "child" as well, and like any good language, if words turn out to not be necessary after all, well, nobody's forcing anyone to use them.

[zompist]

As a reminder, even traditional cultures do not all have the male = default convention. There are languages where default/mixed gender assignment is female, ones where it's neuter, and ones where there are separate genders for younger and older women. (To say nothing of languages which do not grammaticalize gender even for pronouns.)

[Salmoneus]

And of course 'default' is a vague concept anyway, conflating many different concepts that individual languages can treat differently, such as:
- an unmarked gender for nouns where one gender is marked
- an unmarked gender for adjective agreement where one gender is marked
- an unmarked gender for verbal agreement where one gender is marked
- an unmarked gender for pronouns where one gender is marked
- a preferred gender in pronoun (or noun) selection for items without clear gender
- a preferred gender in pronoun (or noun) selection for items with ambiguous or many-valued gender
- a preferred gender in pronoun (or noun) selection for items of unknown gender
- a preferred gender in pronoun (or noun) selection for collections of items of different genders (where the preference may be either a tie-breaker or the dominant factor in selection)
- a gender ascribed provisionally to most items
- a gender ascribed provisionally to items not more clearly dealt with by the principal ascription rules*
- a gender ascribed in general to new loanwords

...and probably other things too, any of which can fail to align with any of the others. In common imagination, these things also include the property of causing the speaker to ascribe a particular non-linguistic gender in their imagination to items of unknown gender and so forth, though this is a sociological phenomenon rather than a linguistic one.

*I'm distinguishing here between a primary stage of conceptually ascribing gender to words or concepts, and a secondary stage of determining how to deal grammatically with cases where the primary-stage rules do not appear to function.

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Anyway, I'd be interested if you had a name for the language with age-based genders. Not doubting you, it just sounds relevant to my interests.

[missals]

Oneida. It has two feminine genders, feminine-zoic and feminine-indefinite. Broadly speaking, feminine-zoic is used for women of childbearing age and female animals, while feminine-indefinite is used for older women and for generic/unspecified referents.

[zompist]

One example is certain dialects of Polish, where unmarried girls are neuter. This apparently was generalized from a diminutive ending which happened to be neuter. This affects not only adjective and pronoun agreement, but verbs, since the past tense in Polish inflects by (number and) gender.

[xxx]

Essentially genders make it possible to remove ambiguity from languages by the agreements they allow...
Also languages like English that have few agreements, that use gender only for sex, and have a gender neutral, tend to amalgamate gender and sex ...
And it is true that gender can also define the sex of your interlocutor...

In the Anthropocene period, human reproductive sexuality is a problem, encouraging other practices is a solution...

Even if the Sapir Whorf hypothesis seems unfounded and imposing a linguistic change will have no social impact, talking about it all the time plays a positive propaganda role to induce such an impact...
The languages and the speakers being very conservative, change language genders is potentially impossible in the medium term, so it increases for a long period the discussions on the subject and the impact on mentalities...

So for conlangs it is unproductive not to use genders ...
It deprives itself of the benefits of agreements and its disambiguation, it deprives itself of an important naturalistic aspect ...
Except talking about it all the time to help fight against the Anthropocene in this world...
But it is better on the contrary to multiply them, and make it a good lever of propaganda...

[mèþru]

I know these things about grammatical gender. I'm just saying that some of the diachronics behind the categorisation is sexist, and the idea that these specific categories are something to distinguish as opposed to categories not lined to social gender is sexist.

[alice]

Of the major auxlangs of that era, Volapuk is certainly the one that's aged best, precisely because, as you say, it's ridiculous. It's the steampunk of conlanging.* It has abundant character and it's own weird beauty - half auxlang, half art project - that the battleship-grey esperanto and its romance-with-the-edges-filed-off successors were never able to match.

A cinematic analogy which just occurred to me:

Volapük: Plan Nine from Outer Space
Esperanto: John Travolta's science-fiction epic Battlefield Earth

Anyway, don't knock the 'to too much; you can still learn quite a lot from it, if not what Dr. Z originally intended.

[xxx]

for DJP conlang, I heard Dothraki, it does the job, it's heard as a mix of Arabian and Russian... for villains you like to hate, it's ok...
my opinion on DJP work, as any movies and books' conlangs... a good gibberish is enough...
I understand the use as hook for fans that is a conlang like any derivative product... but it is not my vision of conlanging...

[mèþru]

But the Dothraki aren't exactly villains or heroes. Their attitudes to women are awful, but it many ways their society is shown in the books to be better for Danaerys than Westerosi culture or the cities of Essos.