Rodiniye wrote:First of all, I think I have been nice and tried to answer everything politely. It is just that some people were being repeatedly irritating and not having a good or professional attitude or respect.
Ok, but consider that you've come into a group containing many experienced language learners, most of whom are highly educated (i.e. have university degrees) and some of whom are linguists and language teachers by trade, and you have dismissed valid debate by calling yourself an "expert" and referring to your marks at university. A high mark doesn't mean you're
right, just that you have demonstrated a broad understanding of the theory and have argued your case well.
Now to go back to the same point you and me have been discussing, but which I don't think you've really got to the bottom of: gender.
You'll be familiar, I assume, with Myers-Scotton's notion of
markedness.
When it comes to biological gender vs neuter, which is the unmarked choice in Rodinian? Coming from within the language, there is no clear criteria for identifying one choice as marked and the other as unmarked, so for someone coming from a language with strong gender (eg Spanish) the natural (hence unmarked) choice would be to use the gendered forms, an the natural choice for someone from a language without gender would be to use the neuter form.
Already, we have scope for dialectisation.
But what happens for speakers of weakly gendered language? In English, for example, we have gendered pronouns and a small (and decreasing) set of gendered nouns ( prince vs princess is universal, actor vs actress is disappearing ). Are English speakers going to use gendered pronouns and ungendered nouns? Possible, but unlikely. Instead, I think English speakers would gravitate towards using the gendered forms as the unmarked choice, making neuter the marked choice.
The reason people don't use neologous gender-neutral forms in English or Spanish is that they're a marked choice, because they diverge from norm. To be non-discriminatory, I would argue that the neuter form would have to be the unmarked form, so that gender marking would be a marked choice, and discouraged by the language where not necessary; this is why I suggested having gender marking as a clitic that is added after the neuter form -- the neuter form is then a "base" and universal. It becomes unmarked, because you're always going to say it, and the gender marking becomes marked because most of the time your meaning is clear before you say it.
Consider subject pronouns in Spanish -- including them in a clause with a verb is a marked choice, and that markedness is what gives them their emphatic/contrastive force.
Now imagine Spanish if there was no marked/unmarked distinction between a clause with a subject pronoun and one without. How would anyone know which one to say? It would be an unstable state, and very quickly Spanish-speaking populations would settle on one or the other. That would possibly mean dialectisation (in the Basque Country, prodrop due to Basque being prodrop; in South America, whatever the local languages do) or just everyone going the same. With Rodinian, as I have previously said, I would confidently predict dialectisation.
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