From: Colin Hales (colin@versalog.com.au)
Date: Mon Mar 04 2002 - 11:13:03 MST
I've been shopping and found the crusty bones of hundreds of years of
attempts
here....
http://www.aetherlumina.com/gnp/
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/baron/essays/epicene.htm
http://www.speckhardt.org/gnp/
The 3 lower items are now in the trolley:
Lexeme nominative accusative reflexive weak genitive strong genitive
(adjective) (posessive pronoun)
she she her herself her hers
he he him himself his his
se se sem semself ser (sems)
ey ey em eirself eir eirs
ve ve ver verself ?ver ?vis
(pronunciation "ey, eir, em" rhyme with "they, their, them" resp.)
My need is for AI only. My daughter and I went through the whole alphabet
and spoke some test sentences out loud. All feel wrong to speak. Curiously,
if you stick in L in front of ey, eir, em (ley, leir, lem) it gives them an
easier tongue. It's the only one that felt relatively OK out loud. The V and
S versions make you sound like an east european (polish?) speaking english -
wierd.
"I taught him/her to think for himself/herself yesterday but when I asked
him/her he/she had forgotten" becomes
"I taught lem to think for leirself yesterday but when I asked lem ley had
forgotten"
(note the new 'i before e except after c and possibly l?' :) The technical
term for this whole thing is, I think, Yuck).
I am writing - many thousands of words in a document that will become public
one day. Because of the way the content is evolving, dialogue with and about
an AI occurs. I feel a need for a truly gender neutral way of handling the
discussion. This is not a drill or an intellectual puzzle. If I ascribe male
of female gender I predict criticism from humans ('why did the AI come out
male - typical'...'why did it come out female....trying to construct your
perfect woman or something?') I simply don't feel right when having dialogue
about an AI where the AI is, in an increasingly real sense, listening.
Talking about someone to a 3rd party whilst they are there is simply rude.
The key to it seems to be the 'personalness' of the relationship. The more
of this, the more 'it' sounds inappropriate.
Executive decision: I am going to use ley, leir, lem for purely speech
reasons and later let the AI sort it out!
Col
"If a man (person) is standing in the middle of the forest speaking and
there is no (-one) woman around to hear him (them)...is he (are they) still
wrong?"
From: "The Philosophy of George Carlin" (desexed by me)
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