From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Esperanto's embedded sexism
Date: 20 Aug 92 11:54:45 GMT
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK

In article <1992Aug19.000459.3066@memstvx1.memst.edu> connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:
>In article <10422@scott.ed.ac.uk>, iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) writes:
[_simile_]

>> 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.

You have a point, of course: `father' : `mother' as `begetter' : `bearer',
not just as `parent' : `parentess'.

>Biology aside, *if* Esperanto had need of a *word* for such a thing,
>_patrino_ is how to say it.

True.  Therefore it could use a word _matrino_ for `mother' in the
regular sense, corresponding to _matro_ `male mother' (male-looking
hermaphrodite in whose womb the egg develops).  Instead it prefers to
use the root "patr" for both purposes, as it happens in Arabic
(_wa:lid_ `father' vs _wa:lida(h)_ `mother').

>> "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.

Add one for another "-0" `nominative' at the end (_cf._ "patrinojn").
There are zillions of languages where the nominative case morpheme
has no non-zero allomorphs.

>But not every chunk of meaning surfaces
>as a morpheme.  In Esperanto, 'male' and 'singular' precisely do not,
>while 'plural' and 'feminine' do.

Fine; so far I've been saying "is realised as a zero morpheme" for
what you call "doesn't surface as a morpheme".  It doesn't make all
that much difference in the long run.

>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.

It does not follow in a natural language, but in a planned language
(such as Esperanto) it should be reasonably expected that all
morphemes bear meaning, and it may well be the case 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'.

Which is why we call Latin an inflected language.  Esperanto, on the
other hand, is agglutinative, and it tends to break combinations into
individual chunks and assign separate morphemes to them.

>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?

Other languages don't come in.  If Latin had a non-zero morpheme for
inanimacy, then it might make sense to speak of a corresponding zero
morpheme for animacy.  I say that there is a zero marker for person
and number in Turkish _vur_ `hit (thou)!', but only because there is a
matching non-zero one in _vurun_ `hit (ye)!'.

>English has an obvious past tense morpheme, but not a present tense morpheme.

But what tells you that the verb is in present tense, if not the
absence of the past tense morpheme?

-- 
 `If ye hiv ears oan yer heid - then use them tae lissen.' (The Glasgow Gospel)
Ivan A Derzhanski   (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk;  iad@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu)
* Centre for Cognitive Science,  2 Buccleuch Place,  Edinburgh EH8 9LW,  UK
* Cowan House, Pollock Halls, 18 Holyrood Park Road, Edinburgh EH16 5BD, UK
Xref: sparky sci.lang:6395 soc.culture.esperanto:1361