From: miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Esperanto's embedded sexism
Date: 19 Aug 92 06:59:23 CDT
Organization: University of Kansas Academic Computing Services

In article <1992Aug18.232442.3065@memstvx1.memst.edu>, connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:
> In article <1992Aug17.212205.42412@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>, miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:
>> 
>>> Morphemes -- in-
>>> herited, invented, or accidental [?] -- are all the speaker has to express
>>> his meaning.  Either the hearer interprets *them*, or he engages in
>>> mind-reading.

	[stuff deleted]

>> Ah!  Now I see our problem.  You are working with the
>> encoding/decoding theory of language: the hearer understands the
>> meaning of an expression by computing it from the morphemes in the
>> expression, which function like little "vehicles" containing bundles
>> of meaning.
> 
> I just said they didn't *contain* meaning, and in another post (replying
> to Ivan Derzhanski) I railed against the tendency of linguists (and too
> many linguistics texts) to define, or at least conceptualize, morphemes
> as units of meaning.  They're minimal units of word formation, nothing
> more, even though most (not all) of them in some sense "have" meaning.
> Furthermore, I believe the obvious: that not all meaning in all languages
> is associated with a morpheme; much (and not just the "extras" in a word
> like _farmer_) is not.  So there's no way I could hold a pure encoding-
> decoding theory; I fully accept the necessity of interpretation.  But
> what is interpreted?  Those morphemes!  And, as my last post on this
> should have added, the syntactic structures in which they occur.

Sorry I attributed to you a theory you don't subscribe to--that was
jumping to a conclusion.  OK, all the above is right on target, but in
the full spirit of interpretive meaning we should say: What is
interpreted?  The morphemes, the structures in which they occur, their
context of utterance, and shared beliefs of speaker and hearer.  It is
in this light that I argue that grammatically unmarked maleness has 
little to do with meaning (not that anyone really understands just how
all this works).  Consider: in Menominee, a Wisconsin Amerindian 
language I did fieldwork on, the word for 'bear' "really means" (in 
terms of its morphological make-up) 'little who-is-it' (because 
mentioning bears directly was at one time taboo).  But that's history,
not meaning.  The speakers I worked with were not aware of the etymo-
logical meaning until I pointed it out, and could not rationalize it
even then.  For speakers, the word "just means 'bear'."

I guess the moral is--and you sort of pointed this out earlier, but
you didn't go far enough--we not only *shouldn't* blame our ancestors
for morphology, we *can't* blame them because no _single_ generation
designed the language.  (That's the problem with the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis, which implicitly underlies what I've been railing against:
*whose* "thought processes" are we going to pin the morphology on?)


> Unlike Israeli Hebrew, Esperanto has no native speakers.

This is factually wrong; there are definitely native speakers (I don't
want to get into the question of how many but perhaps over a
thousand).  These speakers came into being much the same way as the
first speakers of modern Hebrew: their parents "had a dream."  Does
this raise important questions about what a natural language is?  You
bet!

	- Ken <miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>