Submitted 5 days ago by TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Imagine there was a society in which blue eyed people are referred to with blee/bler pronouns, and green eyed people are referred to with glee/gler pronouns, and one day someone from that society saw a brown eyed person and had no idea whether to categorise them as blee/bler or glee/gler
Never thought of doing Jane Elliott’s lesson with transphobia
Thanks for the link. I had never heard of this either.
Having heterochromia would really suck.
In a similar vein, imagine if we were like cats, and there were skin colors/patterns that only women could get.
Yeah it’s so weird when you think about how arbitrary separating pronouns by gender really is. I feel like it would make way more sense to have multiple ungendered ones that work similar to the way we have this and that to talk about two different inanimate objects
I don’t think it’s all that arbitrary. A bit, sure, but not fully. If i’d have to guess, it probably has to do with the cultural, social and biological relevance of sexual preference in bonding and maybe reproduction and all that.
Language tends to evolve to convey culturally relevant information. You know, like tu/vous or status/relationship distinctions in japanese or the amount of words there are for friendship in arabic.
If that was the case it would be a much more common feature. There are about 7000 languages in the world and only about a hundred of them have that feature.
But, cultures speaking languages with that feature tend to be much more likely to subjugate other cultures than other cultures are.
So, while if you take a random culture on this planet, it most likely won’t have the he/she distinction in their language. But if you take a random human on this planet, they most likely do have it.
Yeah, we have all kinds of labels that are not arbitrary, but also also not 100% accurate in all cases. They only tend to be a problem when people try to treat them as absolutes.
There are plenty of examples of languages with two, three, or no grammatical genders (which don’t always correlate with biological genders—e.g., some languages see ”animate” and “inanimate” as genders.)
If it isn’t arbitrary, why is there so much variation?
or glee/gler
um it's called being a gleek thankyouverymuch and guilty as charged ;)
In the Stormlight books by Sanderson, society is split based on eye color; bright eyed vs dark eyed. Bright eyed people are called Brightness or Brightlord. Not exaclty the same as what you said, but it is an interesting society based on eye color.
Early Proto Indo European genders were if things had agency/was animate/acted on the world or not. Was pretty much him and it. A car would be a him because it moves around. Same with a river or a weapon. A rock would be an it. A rolling boulder though becomes outside context, since now he’s an animate rock that has enough agency to kill you. You get enough of these inconsistencies and the language just loses the original plot and you just have to memorize it points to Germanic and romance languages
Breebrer
Weird but I love it
chazwhiz@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I had to check if I was in the Lemmy equivalent to /r/cremposting… There is one but it’s dead, oh well.
For context, in the Stormlight Archive fantasy series, eye color determines social standing. Blue or green eyes are “light eyes”, and are like nobility. Whereas “dark eyes” are commoners, laborers, etc. There are quite a few few linguistic things related to that, so your thought could fit right in.
Admetus@sopuli.xyz 5 days ago
That sounds a bit like Aryan fantasy but I’m not jumping to conclusions.
chazwhiz@lemmy.world 5 days ago
If it were a glorification of that concept, then sure, but it’s not. Most of the time spent on that particular bit of world building it to point out what a stupid system it is.
blackstampede@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
I’ve read the series, and it’s not. The characters struggle with the (often nonsensical) established caste system and their role in it, and it’s intended as a mirror to real world caste systems and racial divisions rather than as a celebration of them.
LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
I got confused at first because I didn’t know about that Sanderson book series and thought you were talking about The Lightbringer Series by Brent Weeks. They develop colored rings based upon the light spectrums they use, each with their own properties. Their nobility or such being those who use multiple colors and usually their is one Prism, who can use the full spectrum of light. (It touches on a couple outside out view like sub red and ultraviolet as well)