As I said, Linguistics isn't my field of science, (and what I do know is decades out of date at best). Ask me what forces and pressures cause a landscape to look the way it does, I'm your girl with a rock hammer. Ask me now to remove a binary worldview from a language, that's another thing....
As I said, Linguistics isn't my field of science, (and what I do know is decades out of date at best). Ask me what forces and pressures cause a landscape to look the way it does, I'm your girl with a rock hammer. Ask me now to remove a binary worldview from a language, that's another thing....
It seems to me that language has to evolve AS the worldview and concepts change. "Newspeak" in "1984" seemed too simplistic to me, since all that removing and simplifying language so to block out "doubleplus ungood" concepts would do, is cause people to develop new words and terms for those very same concepts. Even a language as stilted and ritualized as church Latin has to evolve to meet new needs (after all, it's not like the Romans had helicopters and cellphones, right?)
Iceland is very serious about maintaining the purity of its language, (it's a core part of their culture and identity), but there they will go back into the language to create new terms with a historic root to identify new concepts and terms. I touched on how they're gradually evolving naming conventions to be more gender neutral as the culture trends towards full equality. This shows how language can evolve towards that mindset without losing its identity. (Contrast that to French, with L'Institut français trying to hard to maintain the ideological purity of the French language, that they routinely alienate other francophone countries and people)
You're correct, we coexist with language. And we certainly need to evolve it away from the gender binary to better reflect the wider range of how gender is perceived. The question for me is how do we break the internal habits in us, that cause us to fall back into that binary?
And the other thing to remember is that while gender is definitely not binary, most people are--and binary people's experiences of gender are, well, *binary*. Imagine someone who's red-green colorblind and then imagine they need to explain what red is in a way someone who isn't colorblind would understand it--the issue isn't in language, but in their very lived perspective. With heo and support, they could build a framework to deal with and understand redness, but it will forever be an acquired, not an understood, thing for them.
So too with binary people, cis or trans, who work with nonbinary genders. We have an inherent, perspective-based limitation. As such, while the language is an excellent first step, the really big one ought to be research teams made up of a mix of binary and nonbinary people, so the team as a whole has perspectives that allow it to research and understand more deeply what it is that they're researching.
That takes a lot of time and money to build, though.
As I said, Linguistics isn't my field of science, (and what I do know is decades out of date at best). Ask me what forces and pressures cause a landscape to look the way it does, I'm your girl with a rock hammer. Ask me now to remove a binary worldview from a language, that's another thing....
It seems to me that language has to evolve AS the worldview and concepts change. "Newspeak" in "1984" seemed too simplistic to me, since all that removing and simplifying language so to block out "doubleplus ungood" concepts would do, is cause people to develop new words and terms for those very same concepts. Even a language as stilted and ritualized as church Latin has to evolve to meet new needs (after all, it's not like the Romans had helicopters and cellphones, right?)
Iceland is very serious about maintaining the purity of its language, (it's a core part of their culture and identity), but there they will go back into the language to create new terms with a historic root to identify new concepts and terms. I touched on how they're gradually evolving naming conventions to be more gender neutral as the culture trends towards full equality. This shows how language can evolve towards that mindset without losing its identity. (Contrast that to French, with L'Institut français trying to hard to maintain the ideological purity of the French language, that they routinely alienate other francophone countries and people)
You're correct, we coexist with language. And we certainly need to evolve it away from the gender binary to better reflect the wider range of how gender is perceived. The question for me is how do we break the internal habits in us, that cause us to fall back into that binary?
Well, that's why we're evolving frameworks like gender modality, isn't it?
And the other thing to remember is that while gender is definitely not binary, most people are--and binary people's experiences of gender are, well, *binary*. Imagine someone who's red-green colorblind and then imagine they need to explain what red is in a way someone who isn't colorblind would understand it--the issue isn't in language, but in their very lived perspective. With heo and support, they could build a framework to deal with and understand redness, but it will forever be an acquired, not an understood, thing for them.
So too with binary people, cis or trans, who work with nonbinary genders. We have an inherent, perspective-based limitation. As such, while the language is an excellent first step, the really big one ought to be research teams made up of a mix of binary and nonbinary people, so the team as a whole has perspectives that allow it to research and understand more deeply what it is that they're researching.
That takes a lot of time and money to build, though.