Eekohudespair
Sep. 4th, 2002 12:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
strange_aeonsOne would think that living, as I do, in an environment wherein I am perpetually up to my ears in many and varied representatives of the illustrious phylum Arthropoda would desensitize me. After all, Salon keeps publishing hysterical, poorly-researched articles on how precisely this effect may be observed in soft, pink children exposed to excessive media violence, and if it's in Salon, it must be true, right? I certainly thought that, though maybe 'prayed' would be a better word. But no, looks like it doesn't work quite that way, at least not for me. I've reached the point at which I can't even bring myself to duck under the spiderweb in the front doorway (there's always one there, no matter how many spiders I kill); I have to get rid of it with a broom. I can't go out back at all.
I'm not looking forward to fall. Just thinking about it exhausts me.
I've been pondering one of the many possible wossnames of inheritance among critters. Wossnames. I'm sure there's a real noun I could put there, but I have no idea what it is. Anyway, female-line is probably most common, because without genetic testing only the mother can be determined with total certainty (see also humans; and even then you can make a mistake), and females have the size and tendency-to-physical-power to back that sort of thing up. That's not what I'm playing with, though. What I'm thinking of is janitor-line inheritance. The estate goes to the firstborn janitor, who's expected to find (or to have already found, by the time the passing-on-of-money happens) a female to defend the estate and a male (remember, they're the ones stereotyped as intelligent) to manage it.
Work on a language progresses, though slowly. I'm kind of stymied on the morphology, because no matter what I do, it all looks like Martian to me, not like a language with a coherent sound. I'm also vaguely worried that the whole thing is too Indo-European. VSO; nouns inflect for gender, number, case; verbs agree with their subjects and probably their objects as well. That's all enclitic; there are also a lot of unattached particles, most (thirty-one, at last count) of them indicating aspect. I love aspect. I can't get enough of it. Aspect is my fantasy boyfriend.
I need to work out more about the culture this language is attached to before I can get anywhere on the subject of what gender does to nouns, exactly. Whatever else happens, I know I'm keeping that.
Now, with extra coherency goodness! I should know better than to not proof these things when I'm writing at nearly one in the morning.
I'm not looking forward to fall. Just thinking about it exhausts me.
I've been pondering one of the many possible wossnames of inheritance among critters. Wossnames. I'm sure there's a real noun I could put there, but I have no idea what it is. Anyway, female-line is probably most common, because without genetic testing only the mother can be determined with total certainty (see also humans; and even then you can make a mistake), and females have the size and tendency-to-physical-power to back that sort of thing up. That's not what I'm playing with, though. What I'm thinking of is janitor-line inheritance. The estate goes to the firstborn janitor, who's expected to find (or to have already found, by the time the passing-on-of-money happens) a female to defend the estate and a male (remember, they're the ones stereotyped as intelligent) to manage it.
Work on a language progresses, though slowly. I'm kind of stymied on the morphology, because no matter what I do, it all looks like Martian to me, not like a language with a coherent sound. I'm also vaguely worried that the whole thing is too Indo-European. VSO; nouns inflect for gender, number, case; verbs agree with their subjects and probably their objects as well. That's all enclitic; there are also a lot of unattached particles, most (thirty-one, at last count) of them indicating aspect. I love aspect. I can't get enough of it. Aspect is my fantasy boyfriend.
I need to work out more about the culture this language is attached to before I can get anywhere on the subject of what gender does to nouns, exactly. Whatever else happens, I know I'm keeping that.
Now, with extra coherency goodness! I should know better than to not proof these things when I'm writing at nearly one in the morning.
no subject
Date: 2002-09-03 10:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-09-05 12:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-09-05 02:53 pm (UTC)Actually, I've been as busy pondering the ramifications of your question as I have been meditating on its vast inferiority to
I think a recognizable ... I think 'civilization' is a bit strong; 'incorporated agrarian culture'? ... first appeared during an ice age, when the females of a population (possibly the only population) left the northerly highland area that was their usual stomping ground because there was a glacier on it. Nobody likes a glacier. A climatic change like that is unlikely to effect the males much so long as they don't have to contend with the glacier too, which they didn't. Ice ages can come on pretty fast, but not so fast that the males wouldn't have time to figure out how to make heavier clothes, and sentient creatures can be remarkably bloody-minded about staying where they are so long as nothing's actually physically preventing them from staying there (the advance of a glacier, for example).
That's bound to be a linguistically volatile situation, since the languages spoken by males and females are undoubtedly going to bear some relationship because they do have second-hand contact via the janitors, but are also undoubtedly going to be mutually incomprehensible or nearly so. There's only so much a third of the population that's not even around all the time can possibly do.
I imagine some females actually did head for friendlier climes when those climes stopped being under thousands of tons of snow, but that was many generations later (it was a long ice age, because that's what's convenient for me) and enough of them were entrenched in whatever it is barely-post-neolithic people do that they didn't care to leave. I suspect the lack of a long wait between male-janitor and janitor-female couplings did remarkable things for the size of the population, though it must have made the janitors, programmed to travel long distances in search of mates, kind of jumpy....
Does this sound too much like I'm pulling it entirely out of my ass? It seems reasonably well-founded to me, but I'm biased.
Hmm. I ponder a (bronze-age?) culture consisting of a lot of small towns a day's march, maybe farther, apart, where the towns are inhabited by males and females (with the occasional janitor in a child-rearing arrangement with a female), and the janitors travel, or anyway are expected to travel, from town to town, spreading genetic material for and to them as wants it spread. That looks likely to, given time, evolve into an arrangement where janitors carry not just genetic material, but gossip, goods, entertainment and probably the occasional passenger.
This all plays interestingly merry hell with the Western, human ideal of romantic love.
It just occurred to me that nowhere in this comment have I answered your actual question. Hmm. Upper- and priest-classes look like they will appear pretty much inevitably, at some point, but I'm not sure they're necessary for keeping the population in one place. These creatures are almost human (basically 'humans with differences in places where I find it interesting for them to have differences'), and humans don't always gravitate towards areas that are climatologically ideal for them, otherwise we'd all be naked and living at the equator. What humans mostly do is (a) alter the environment, or (b) alter themselves (mostly with clothing).
Also, people go where the jobs are. Females are excellent at heavy lifting. I imagine males are good at coming up with things for them to lift.