Gender, Race, Theism In Language
Sep. 19th, 2005 10:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nemorathwaldIn this LJ thread I recently had a debate over the words "under God" in the pledge of allegiance. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
debeorn is of the view that it "simply acknowledges that the country is accountable to something more powerful then itself, even if that is the World Conciousness." I was of the view that although it's good for our nation to be accountable to its neighbors, world opinion and God are not interchangable terms.
The following may seem like a change of topic but in fact it's a serendipitous occurance. Yesterday I commented on the Lojban mailing list.
Today a member of the Lojban mailing list responded to demonstrate why this aspect of Lojban is a good thing.
She attached a link to an article in which Douglas Hofstadter writes as a racist fictional character "William Satire". See especially the explanatory postscript by Hofstadter. "Satire" inhabits a fictional universe in which perfect sexual equality has been attained, even in our pronouns, but all usages of the word "man" such as "mailman," "chairman," and "mankind" have been always been "mailwhite," "chairwhite" and "whitekind." He does not see this as racist, and supports that assertion with arguments similar in nature to that ofdebeorn. lorrraine is especially going to get a kick out of this.
debeorn is of the view that it "simply acknowledges that the country is accountable to something more powerful then itself, even if that is the World Conciousness." I was of the view that although it's good for our nation to be accountable to its neighbors, world opinion and God are not interchangable terms.The following may seem like a change of topic but in fact it's a serendipitous occurance. Yesterday I commented on the Lojban mailing list.
...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.
Today a member of the Lojban mailing list responded to demonstrate why this aspect of Lojban is a good thing.
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)".
She attached a link to an article in which Douglas Hofstadter writes as a racist fictional character "William Satire". See especially the explanatory postscript by Hofstadter. "Satire" inhabits a fictional universe in which perfect sexual equality has been attained, even in our pronouns, but all usages of the word "man" such as "mailman," "chairman," and "mankind" have been always been "mailwhite," "chairwhite" and "whitekind." He does not see this as racist, and supports that assertion with arguments similar in nature to that of
debeorn. lorrraine is especially going to get a kick out of this.
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no subject
Date: 2005-09-19 03:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-19 03:09 pm (UTC)RIght on!!!
Date: 2005-09-20 02:30 am (UTC)We would outright forbid it, but there was enormous pressure not only from his peers, which you might expect, but also from his teachers. In the end we were labeled as eevil liberals, and mostly shunned.
Re: RIght on!!!
Date: 2005-09-20 01:25 pm (UTC)