tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jul 09 10:53:23 1993

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

Re: House languages


>If designing a language, take careful consideration as to what it may do
>the the thought patterns of the speakers.  If gender equality is desired,
>for example, you may consider lojban's approach of no gender specification
>in pronouns (ASL has this as well).  If respect for elders is important,
>different 2nd person pronouns for same-age, younger, and elder people
>can be used (cf: Vietnamese).  What about a singular 2nd person pronoun?
>This is one feature of English which truly annoys me (it's lack of
>a singular 2nd person pronoun).


English did of course have a 2-pronoun address system until at least
Shakespeare's day, and still has in some British dialects where "thou"
survives as a term of address to a friend. But of course you can't
still make the difference between singular and plural in the case of
people you wouldn't say thou to (compare Spanish, where you have 4
possiblilities to take account of this). Until only a century or so ago
standard English still made a difference between "you is" (singular
you) and "you are" (plural you). But the mystery is why these
distinctions (of number and "politeness") should have died out in
England, by common consent one of the more class-ridden parts of the
world, and not in the rest of Europe?

Languages do tell us something (though not everything of course) about
the mentality of their speakers, and artificial languages even more
about their inventors. For example, the Hopi tribe of N America are
said to make a difference between roundish objects and squarish ones.
What this really tells us about their minds is arguable. However,
Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, was showing us something about his
attitudes when he created a special suffix to express the concept of
"feminine" (sex not grammatical gender) in his idealistically-motivated
language. In his view of the world, persons by default are male. How PC
is Klingon?

Back to archive top level