Analog SFF, June 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "I don't know,” Liz said. “Saying the Anunnaki were just patterns of memories . . .” She shook her head. “That's kind of hard to swallow."

  "It was for me, too,” Tobias said. “At first, at least. I never subscribed to the notion that consciousness existed apart from the neurons that supported it. But think about it. If one of the superintendent's neurons died and we replaced it with a synthetic neuron that had all the same synaptic connections, would he still be Superintendent Cantrell?"

  They both looked at Cantrell, who blinked, not sure he liked the direction the conversation was taking.

  "I guess it would still be him,” she said.

  "And if we replaced ten of them, or twenty, or even half of all his neurons, it would still be him, right? As long as we still made the same connections, we'd still get the same responses."

  Liz nodded.

  "So even though consciousness depends on something physical,” Tobias continued, “you don't have to have the same physical neurons as long as you maintain the same connections. It's really the connections, the pattern, that counts. That's what our individual identities really are—patterns."

  "And you're saying the Anunnaki took their individual patterns with them?” Liz said.

  "I'm sure they left a few of their memories behind—all those that hadn't migrated to the sample we sucked up into the transport ship—but they took enough to reconstitute each individual Anunnaki. After all, if you forget some of your memories, if some of your experiences don't stick in your mind, you're still you, aren't you?"

  "Well, yes, I suppose so . . .” she said.

  "My guess is that that's how the Anunnaki saw it—almost all of what they left behind were just duplicate memories. In any event, once we uploaded them, they reconstituted themselves in their original form, then they took over the ship and modified the engines to achieve the kinds of speeds we can only dream about."

  "You don't know that,” Cantrell said. “You don't know any of that for sure."

  "That's true,” Tobias conceded. “I don't know any of it for sure. The only way to know for sure is to ask them.” His gaze dropped away as he mulled over the problem. “Only we can't do that, can we? Because someone . . .” he looked back up at Cantrell “. . . because someone let them all get away."

  Both Liz and Tobias smiled at the superintendent.

  Cantrell glowered back at them as the color rose in his cheeks, but for the first time Liz could remember, there was absolutely nothing he could say.

  Copyright © 2010 bond Elan

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Science Fact: DER MANN, DIE FRAU, DAS KIND by Henry Honken

  To a linguist, “gender” doesn't mean quite what you may think. . . .

  A Definition of Gender

  Readers of this magazine who studied a foreign language in high school most likely had Spanish, French, or German, still the perennial favorites in the United States. If you did, you undoubtedly ran into problems with a grammatical feature that English is blessedly free of, called gender. The title of this article is the German equivalent of “The man, the woman, the child” and you can see the effect of gender in the three different forms of “the.” Adding a modifier—say, “small"—adds even more complexities: ein kleiner Mann, eine kleine Frau, ein kleines Kind. In effect, all German nouns fall into three groups, each of which calls for its own articles, demonstratives, and adjective endings.

  Genders are also called noun classes and the last sentence of the paragraph above is in fact how linguists define them. A gender system is an exhaustive classification of the nouns in a language into groups defined by the behavior of associated words.

  This qualification is important because there are other kinds of noun classification systems possible. Japanese, for example, doesn't have gender like Spanish, but it does have a system of counters that, in combination with numbers, divide Japanese nouns into several-score groups on the basis of shape, species, concreteness, and so on. But the counters simply prescribe how a given noun should be counted and don't require special forms for other modifiers or the nouns themselves.

  Most Americans, even if they don't speak Spanish, will be familiar with the words sombrero ("hat"), casa ("house") and bueno ("good"), so let's use those to get an idea of how gender works.

  * * * *

  Gender in Spanish

  All Spanish nouns belong to one or the other of two groups, conventionally called masculine and feminine. Words referring to male humans and animals belong to the first; those denoting female humans and animals to the second. But since all nouns must belong to some gender, the majority of “masculine” and “feminine” nouns are assigned genders on some basis other than sex in the proper sense of the word.

  This basis is partly phonetic. With few exceptions, nouns ending in —o like sombrero are masculine and those ending in —a are feminine. Such nouns can be said to be overtly marked for gender since these same endings are found on noun modifiers. The difference is that nouns have a constant form, while modifiers change their shape to agree with the noun.

  Thus, in Spanish “a good hat” is unsombrero bueno, but “a good house” is una casa buena. Similarly, “these good hats” is estos sombreros buenos but “these good houses” is estas casas buenas. The Spanish system fits the definition of gender I gave previously since the classification is exhaustive (all nouns must be in one class or other) and defined by the behavior of associated words; only some nouns take gender endings but all modifiers must agree with their heads—that is, take the endings appropriate to the head noun's gender.

  Gender is not universal and languages with gender systems, like other language features, tend to cluster in certain areas. Many European languages have gender, as do many languages spoken in the Caucasus, but gender is rare in the Far East and the Americas. About two-thirds of African languages have gender and gender systems, and they are also common in New Guinea and Australia.

  Gender can be lost. Old English (449 AD—1100 AD) had three genders like modern German, but modern English has lost gender for the most part. Though Latin had three genders, most modern Romance languages like Spanish, French, and Italian have only two.

  Gender is interesting and important for several reasons. For one thing, it plays a part in how speakers and auditors parse (assign function and meaning to various elements in) a sentence. Since gender is based on agreement, it helps speakers analyze a phrase. Even more significant, though, is the connection between gender and meaning.

  * * * *

  Types of Gender Systems

  Nouns are assigned gender based on different criteria. Gender may be based on phonetic criteria as in Spanish, where nouns ending in —a like casa, amiga, hija, cantina are all feminine. Or it may be based on grammatical criteria, as in German where all nouns with a diminutive suffix like Mannchen ("little man"; from Mann, meaning “man") are neuter. But the most widespread criterion is meaning, and all gender systems have at least some semantic component.

  This means that gender systems may contain clues as to how words are stored in the brain and to the way in which the societies that use that language categorize the world. The fact that speakers of gender languages seldom make mistakes in gender and consistently assign gender to loan words and new words in the same way shows that gender systems are never completely arbitrary.

  To illustrate the semantic-based type of system, let us take a closer look at two languages with gender systems very different from the sex-based systems found in Europe. The first is Dyirbal (pronounced jeer-bahl), spoken in Australia. The second is Jul'hoan, a click language spoken in Namibia. After that, I'll discuss Yimas, a language of Papua New Guinea, which has a mixed semantic/phonological system.

  * * * *

  Dyirbal, an Australian Language

  Dyirbal is one of the approximately two hundred languages spoken in Australia before the European invasion. The Dyirbal~an live in a predominantly rainforest area in North Queensland and speak a typical Australian l
anguage with a relatively simple phonology but complex grammar.

  Nouns in Dyirbal are accompanied by a noun marker, which (so to speak) marks the “nouniness” of the noun—it identifies its gender and case and where it is in respect to the speaker. For nouns visible and away from the speaker, examples are bayi yara ("the man"), balan dyugumbil ("the woman"), balam mirany ("the black bean"), and bala dyawun ("the dilly bag"; an aboriginal bag made from reeds, grasses or hair). The noun markers are bayi, balan, balam, and bala, with the changing ending marking the genders.

  Dyirbal has four genders. The first contains human males and most animals, the second human females and words referring to water, fire, and fighting. The third contains non-flesh food (fruits and vegetables), and the fourth everything else.

  These are the basic criteria, but nouns may be assigned to a class other than that expected because of some mythic belief or because they have some striking characteristic, most commonly danger.

  Thus birds are in the female gender because they are thought to be spirits of dead women; and storms and the rainbow, believed to be spirits of men, are in Class I. Most fishes are Class I because they are animate, but stone fish and gar, which are harmful, are in Class II. (For the same reason hawks, which eat other birds and therefore are harmful, are in Class I, rather than Class II like other birds.)

  Things associated with fire, like fireflies and stars, are in Class II, but the Moon and Sun are believed to be husband and wife, so the Moon is put in Class I and the Sun in Class II.

  Thus Dyirbal has a predominantly semantic system, which is fully comprehensible only when one understands the culture of the speakers.

  * * * *

  Jul'hoan, a Click Language of Namibia

  Jul'hoan (the vertical bar represents a dental click, like English tsk-tsk), spoken by about 30,000 people in Namibia, is one of the more flourishing of the Khoisan or click languages, most of which are dying rapidly, and certainly one of the best-studied. There are two published dictionaries and grammars for this language, as well as an official orthography, and the gender system has been investigated by several researchers. See the Phonetic Symbols section at the end of the article for a brief discussion of the orthography.

  Previous studies sketched the basis of the gender system in some detail, but left most of the criteria governing the way in which nouns are assigned gender somewhat vague. My own analysis is based on approximately 1,200 nouns taken from the dictionaries of Snyman and Dickens (see references).

  The gender classes are defined by five sets of concords, and I'll follow the usage of Dickens who simply numbers these from 1 to 5. “Concord,” you will understand from the definition of gender, is the way in which the associated words change to reflect the gender of their head. By “head,” linguists mean the word in a phrase that governs the grammar of the whole phrase. In the phrase “the dog's house,” “house” is the head since it governs whether we refer back to the phrase with a singular or plural pronoun (in this case, “it” rather than “they").

  In Jul'hoan, the genders govern three factors:

  *the choice of pronoun (just as masculine and feminine in English govern the choice of “he” and “she")

  *the word for “this"

  *the pronoun substituting for “one” in phrases like “the ‘s one"

  This last criterion needs some explanation for an English speaker. In English, “my house” can be substituted by “mine,” “his house” by “his,” “her house” by “hers,” and so on. Jul'hoan also has a set of pronouns that substitute for the possessed word in a possessive phrase (called the possessum) and these, too, vary according to the gender of the noun they refer to. But the Jul'hoan structure is more like “my it” or “your it” or dialect forms such as “his'n” than Standard English “mine” and “yours."

  The basic singular/plural pronoun sets are: ha/si, ha/hi, ha/ha, hi/hi, ka/ka.

  So “he sees it” where “it” refers to “lion,” a Class 2 noun, would be ha ho ha in Jul'hoan, but if the referent is “bee” in Class 4 or “house” in Class 5, the Jul'hoan equivalents would be ha ho hi and ha ho ka respectively.

  * * * *

  ha ho n!ha “He sees the lion."

  ha ho ha “He sees it."

  ha ho zo “He sees the bee"

  ha ho hi “He sees it."

  ha ho too'"He sees the house."

  ha ho ka “He sees it."

  * * * *

  Unordered Plurals :: Collectives

  !kui ("hair") [5] :: txao ("crest") [4]

  !uh ("track, footprint") [5] :: n!ama ("path") [4]

  tootoo ("knife") [3] :: t'an ("Ovambo knife"; kept in a sheath) [4]

  tuhn ("star") [3] :: djxom ("Pleiades"; cluster) [4]

  tkoa ("scar") [5] :: txoan ("stretch marks from pregnancy) [4]

  Table 1. Nouns contrasting collective plurality and unordered plurality

  * * * *

  The first ha in the examples is the subject “he” and the change from ha to hi to ka in the object of the verb ho reflects the change from “lion” to “bee” to “house.” Or, if the frame sentence is “This is his “ with the same three nouns, the Jul'hoan equivalents would be he o ha ma, he o ha hi, and ke o ha ga, literally “This is his it."

  Class 1 contains all kin terms, all words referring to humans such as “man,” “woman,” “child"; types of people such as “youth,” “glutton,” “poor man"; social categories such as “wife,” “age-mate,” “chief"; kin terms like “father” and “mother"; and ethnic terms referring to the in-group such as “Jul'hoan.” Interestingly, words referring to non-Jul'hoan, ethnic terms like l'hun ("White man") or Tamah ("Herero") are in the “animal” gender Class 2.

  With few exceptions, Class 2 contains all animal names: predators, ruminants, birds, reptiles, insects. Other exceptions are a small number of inanimate nouns; for example, all words for “spear” or “assegai” such as !u!u (the “!” is the “cork out of a bottle click” like the one in Miriam Makeba's Click Song). It may be that these nouns are in Class 2 because they “hunt prey” like an animal. Similarly, leg rattles made of cocoons may be in Class 2 by way of semantic association with the original inhabitants of the cocoons, but also because they move and cry out, as does the bullroarer (ntabi, Class 2).

  Particularly interesting is the loanword konobe ("button,” from the Afrikaans word knop), probably in Class 2 because buttons resemble warts or moles (which in turn may be in Class 2 because they resemble insects).

  The majority of plant names, roughly 75 percent, are in Class 3, the remainder scattered in 4 and 5. Class 3 also contains most concrete nouns such as domestic articles, celestial objects, and so on. The more specific, concrete nature of Class 3 is highlighted by such pairs as Class 3 tsii ("sieve"), undoubtedly derived from tsii ("very small hole"), which is a Class 5 noun, and dohm ("dry river bed") in Class 3, derived from dohm ("throat") in Class 5.

  While most objects are found in Class 3, those in Class 5 are mostly the result of semantic association (just as in Dyirbal). For example, all words meaning roughly “stick,” such as “bow,” “arrow,” parts of a bow or arrow, “digging stick,” “walking stick,” “club,” and “carrying pole,” are in Class 5 because of the semantic association with !aihn ("tree").

  Class 4 is the smallest of the genders, with less than a hundred nouns. Most researchers have found this gender puzzling. The following inventory gives some idea of the range of nouns in this class.

  *Certain insect names: zo ("bee") and g!u'urikug!u'm ("edible winged termite").

  *Words referring to fire: da'a ("fire"), da'ani ("firestick"), diih ("lightning").

  *All words for path or road.

  *Some body parts: trachea, omasum, spleen, gland, small intestine, arteries.

  *Powdered substances: millet flour, red ochre, Marula poison.

  *Ovambo knives.

  The common thread of meaning in Class 4 seems to be “composed of many small unindividuated parts” or “com
plex configuration” with the added connotation that the group is ordered. This is the sort of plural linguists call a collective plural.

  Note that bees and winged termites characteristically swarm. Bees congregate in a hive and the nuptial flights of bees and winged termites, as well as the behavior of bees in general, suggest ordered swarming in contrast to the random swarming of flies.

  Though “fire” and “path” do not seem to be collectives to an English speaker, “path” can be considered a collection of footprints (spoor), “fire” a collection of pieces of wood, embers, or sparks, and the small intestine is coiled in loops as compared to the simpler form of the large intestine.

  The trachea is forked at the lower end and composed of cartilaginous rings separated by ligaments. The omasum, sometimes called many-plies, is the “second stomach” of ruminants like cows and antelopes. It has numerous accordion-like folds of mucosa. Arteries have multiple branches.

  Ovambo knives are made together with a wooden sheath and form a set.

  In a crest, the hairs or feathers belong together, but the individual feathers in a bird's coat have no specific order (at least not one visible to the untutored eye). Scars need not form a pattern, but the stretch marks resulting from pregnancy are all located together in a specific area of the body. Constellations and star clusters form a set and so on.

  Class 5 contains nouns referring to parts of things such as body parts (gogoro; “heel") and parts of plants (doaqra; “leaf"). Class 5 also contains things which have a metaphorical relationship to body parts, such as “handle,” “pipestem,” and “arrow-shaft."

  In addition, it contains all generic nouns like !aihn ("tree") and t'angama ("snake"). The term “generic noun” means nouns that refer to the genus and not specific examples of it. Cobras, mambas, and puff adders are all “snakes"; baobab, shepherd's tree, and camelthorn are all examples of the generic noun “tree."