From: connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Esperanto's embedded sexism
Date: 19 Aug 92 00:04:59 -0600
Organization: Memphis State University

In article <10422@scott.ed.ac.uk>, iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) writes:
> In article <1992Aug18.003231.3058@memstvx1.memst.edu> connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:
>>In article <10397@spark.ed.ac.uk>, iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) writes:
>>> In article <1992Aug16.002920.3039@memstvx1.memst.edu> connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:
>>>>
>>>>The point is that _patrino_, like (most? all?)
>>>>nouns referring to females, is *formed* in exactly the way
>>>>that a word for 'female father' would be.
> 
> What does `female father' mean?  Is it `female male parent'?

Hardly, though I must point out that there are other possible definitions
(e.g. 'provider of sperm to fertilize the egg') which with some female-
looking hermaphrodites would make 'female father' not wholly impossible.
Biology aside, *if* Esperanto had need of a *word* for such a thing,
_patrino_ is how to say it.

>>> The semantic component `male' is expressed by a zero morpheme, just as the
>>> component `singular' is expressed by a zero morpheme if the plural
>>> ending "j" is not present.
>>
>>I don't think this argument is legitimate...
>>I maintain that morphemes may be posited only if they
>>have some nonzero realizations; <...>
> 
> None the less, "patr-o" has the meaning `parent + male + singular'
> rather than `parent + unspecified_sex + unspecified_number', and as
> such it is parallel to "patr-in-o-j" `parent + female + plural';
> therefore it seems fair to me to analyse it as "patr-0-o-0".

I quite agree that _patro_ and _patrinoj_ each have four discernible
chunks of *meaning*, if not more.  But not every chunk of meaning surfaces
as a morpheme.  In Esperanto, 'male' and 'singular' precisely do not,
while 'plural' and 'feminine' do.

Linguistics texts still often make a grave mistake in defining, or 
better, in characterizing the morpheme as the minimal unit of a word
*capable of bearing meaning*.  While it is true that nothing smaller
can bear meaning, it does not follow that all morphemes actually do,
or that all meaning is expressed in morphemes.  And morphemes may
correspond to *combinations* of chunks of meaning.  Latin _bonus_
seems to have two morphemes (synchronically, of course), bon- + -us,
where the latter covers 'nominative' + 'masculine' + 'singular'.
Meanwhile, the meaning 'animate' (or 'inanimate') is simply not
expressed by any such morpheme, though it can be in other languages.
Should we then posit a zero morpheme for animacy in Latin just be-
cause other languages have one?  Or consider verb tense.  Tense, in
many languages, is the morphological realization of time.  English
has an obvious past tense morpheme, but not a present tense morpheme.
Proto-Indo-European did, I think; at least, the difference between
primary and secondary desinences is that the former contain a mor-
pheme typically realized as -i.  I say: all languages cover the same
range of time *meaning*, but not all time meanings in all languages
are realized by a morpheme.  And the chunks may seem strange, as
when Dyirbal has two tense morphemes for 'future' and 'non-future'
respectively.  We might as well posit tense and number morphemes
for Chinese, if we assume four for _patro_!  No, I can't accept
zero morphemes for any language, though of course I do accept
zero allomorphs ('plural' in _Sheep eat grass_, etc.).

--Leo Connolly