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[Saede Riordan]

I'm with Louella. Grammatical error aside, I don't think gender neutrality has a place in the State given the PF that's available. If homosexuality is kinda looked bad at, why would gender-queer individuals be looked at any better, let alone have vernacular to help them fit in?

Well, the grammatical error isn't exactly something that should be ignored. If there needs to be words to refer to someone's gender in conversation, like the Caldari version of Sir or Ma'am, then we can come up with some, but they should fit in with the rest of the grammar of the language.

One interesting place that would sort of make sense to add gendering would be to gender Heiian. To split it into 'men's duty' and 'women's duty.'

[Anslol]

Can you clarify the error in -haan and -haani? Because, for instance, in Japanese, you use the words separately when addressing genders (i.e. Obasan vs Ojisan).

[Louella Dougans]

Citizen, is a word that would be used to lay on societal expectations, pretty heavily.

the whole thing with "heiian" meaning "Heiian: This word cannot readily be translated, it is the concept of supreme loyalty over anything else to the State. It applies readily to military service but can be applied to any other work aiding the State", it's a word that conveys a whole bunch of stuff in a single word. Economy of expression.

So, -haan meaning male citizen, conveys a whole bunch of stuff about what it means to be an idealised Caldari Man, and so on and so forth.


Communist parties used "comrade" instead of "mister/miss" for same reasons, to convey more than just a means of addressing someone.

[Anslol]

So is she suggesting doing away with -haani/-haan in favor of a more 'comrade' type form of address?

If that's the case, I'm still 100% against it.

[Anja Suorsa]

I have no preference but can readily see both sides of this argument. The homophobic angle would be correct, from the societal point of view. Ie. make babies not rainbows muthafcuker. So for this reason and because the holy primer says so, I will continue to use the existing -haan/-haani suffixes for the correct gender.

On the other side there is a foundation (I have no time to find the links sorry) for the State maintaining actual equality between men and women. None of this psuedo equality we have today. Men and women in the state are not (or rather should not) be discriminated upon due to their gender. So rolling -haan/-haani into one word would fit along those lines.

I guess basically I don't see anything wrong with any of the arguments. That said, because there is nothing wrong, I see no reason to change it.

My £0.02

[Louella Dougans]

my point was, the communists used "comrade" as a form of address, to remind people of the whole communist struggle, with every sentence. They were trying to create a whole new culture.
It changes people's views of each other, when language is used like that.

single word of "-haan" to remind a person of the entireity of the concepts of "being loyal to the State, aspiring to be the ideal Caldari Man". Same for "-haani" to remind of "being loyal to the State, aspiring to be the ideal Caldari Woman".

It's a term that would be required to be used all the time, and as such, is a very strong tool in reinforcing the societal expectations of the culture.

[Saede Riordan]

Can you clarify the error in -haan and -haani? Because, for instance, in Japanese, you use the words separately when addressing genders (i.e. Obasan vs Ojisan).

What Stitcher says here sums it up:

The history of it is that Napanii was invented to service the need for a lingua franca in the newly-formed State. It's a constructed language, in other words. The thing to remember about constructed languages is that they use consistent and rigid rules for things like pluralization and so on. In English we have oddities like "sheep/sheep", "mouse/mice" and "goose/geese" because the language was mashed together by common usage over centuries and has loaned both words and grammar from foreign dialects. If English were a constructed, consistent language then the plurals would me "Sheeps", "Mouses" and "Gooses"

"-haan" literally just means "citizen". It's a gender-neutral term by definition. The English equivalent to the feminine "haani" would be "citizeness" which is an absurd, divisive construct which serves only to suggest that men and women are different kinds of citizen. That's not in keeping with how I think of Caldari attitudes.

Remember, the whole "-haan" thing was inspired by the Japanese "-san" tradition, which itself is gender-neutral.

The correct pluralizations for all Napanii nouns and verbs is actually -t/-et/-at/-ut. So the plural term "citizens" would be "Haanat"

"-i" is the stem for infinitive expression and present action. Applying it to "haan" results in the term you use when referring to citizenry in an abstract or objectified way.

"I am a citizen" = "Nei haani
"This citizen" = "Hanta haani"
"Those citizens" = "Soyi haanat"
"We citizens" = "Kiriit haanat"
"All citizens of the Caldari State" = "Haanaten Caldarin Vaktikun"

So in fact, "haani" when used to refer to a woman treats her as an object rather than as a person. Which suggests a rather more sinister explanation than the cutesy "you're pregnant! I'm going to start calling you citizens-plural now."

The 'comrade' thing is worth pointing out, its notable that in Russian, comrade is товарищ (tovarishch), which is gender neutral. It would seem to me that being a citizen, and having duty to the state would transcend gender. You are a citizen, your gender is irrelevant as long as you do your Duty to the State.

[Anslol]

Point taken. Still, I prefer -haan, -haani.

[Louella Dougans]

Given the clearly stated PF of homophobia, the "Duty to the State" is then apparently dependent on the individual citizens gender. That is, a woman has a different Duty to the State than a man.

E.g. Kaikka Peunato. PF states: "Peunato, an extremely competent pilot, was forced out of the Caldari Navy when he revealed he was gay."
the Duty to the State was incompatible in some way with being homosexual. Thus, the Duty to the State has a clear gender role part to it. Which means man/woman has significant relevance, and so, would be something that an artificial language would want to emphasise.

[Shiori]

..I'm confused. So the Russians were wrong, then? Or did they expect men to start carrying children as well?

[Lyn Farel]

I see both points of the arguments. Both sound sensible.

I would even tend to think that -haan can be pretty generic and gender neutral - much like -san in japanese - where -haani could be just a specific way to address a woman when one wants to make it clear.

Maybe -haan is ambiguous, and can be either neutral (in the sense of the status and title of the individual like in japanese, meaning, part of the Caldari and thus not a jaiji like gaijin in japanese) or masculine (in the sense of citizen or the persona, with a duty, male or female).

Maybe better to compare it to the suffix -kun rather than -san in japanese, -san being exclusively a title of rank and status where -kun is either used to express attachment to someone, either used for juniors (rank and status here), or either used as a specific way to address to male individuals (reference to the sex of the person here).

[Pieter Tuulinen]

It'll be the mother of all cluster-fucks to change it now.

Can't it be an inherited construct from the original Raata era language?

[orange]

Given the clearly stated PF of homophobia, the "Duty to the State" is then apparently dependent on the individual citizens gender. That is, a woman has a different Duty to the State than a man.

E.g. Kaikka Peunato. PF states: "Peunato, an extremely competent pilot, was forced out of the Caldari Navy when he revealed he was gay."
the Duty to the State was incompatible in some way with being homosexual. Thus, the Duty to the State has a clear gender role part to it. Which means man/woman has significant relevance, and so, would be something that an artificial language would want to emphasise.

In a setting where bodies are grown and a civilization increased its population through entirely artificial mass procreation, how does a woman carrying a child for 9 months even matter?  It takes the woman away from duties that can otherwise not be fulfilled by common place medical systems!

Secondly, there are multiple threads about the topic of homosexuality in the State.  The State and sexuality and Gender in New Eden.  Or said another way, the PF is not as clear on closer examination.

[Pieter Tuulinen]

What's always clear in the State is that whilst you don't have to toe the State line in private, acting openly against social and cultural norms is heavily frowned upon.

Heavily.

[Stitcher]

It'll be the mother of all cluster-fucks to change it now.

Can't it be an inherited construct from the original Raata era language?

It was changed in the first place. Seriously, when I was first introduced to Napanii, it was "haan" for both genders, end of. As I said, the entire point was to echo the Japanese "-san", which is genderless, and the soviet "comrade". Remember, this primer was compiled after Napanii had been around for a while. If it still existed, I'd link to a much older Fourth District thread on the subject where the word "haani" was conspicuously absent.

Anyway: Whether or not there are gender-based expectations of what constitutes a person's duty to the State is not in any way relevant to whether or not the word "duty" itself requires gender variance.

Real example: "Men's work" versus "Women's work." the word "Work" is identical between them. It doesn't describe a specific activity or expectation, it just describes expending energy to accomplish a task. When I say "I am going to work" I am telling you precisely nothing about what my job entails or what qualifications are involved in being able to do it.

I think that the same should be true for "heiian" and "haan". Heiian is the abstract concept itself. If you want to talk about "male heiian" versus "female heiian" then again, the concept of having a heiian of some description remains neutral and non-prescriptive. The same goes for "citizen".

Laying aside the whole question of institutional sexism for a second, this is the Caldari we're talking about - in some cases irrational and impulsive, in others pragmatic to a fault. Remember: Napanii was invented, and designed to facilitate communication across a culture of billions of people. The creation of a common language for the State would absolutely fall under the second bracket. The language would be designed so as to be terse, economical, and flexible.

Brevity and clarity would be essential tools in such a language. If you have two words which mean the exact same thing, but one of them is the masculine form and the other is the feminine, then you're unnecessarily cluttering up the language with redundant vocabulary, which I feel its history would preclude. In inventing Napanii, I feel they would actively have looked for opportunities to condense the vocabulary.

Caldari would reserve masculine and feminine forms for where the distinction actually matters. "Mother" and "Father" both mean "Parent" but contain additional useful information. "Sir" and "ma'am" in a military context, however, just mean "superior officer" and I suspect that the Napanii equivalent would literally just translate to "Superior". It doesn't matter if the person giving you an order is male or female, young or old - if they outrank you, you jump to.

They are a collectivist culture. "We are all Caldari!" "We are all Lai Dai citizens!" "We are all part of Work Team Twelve!". Language is a powerful propaganda tool for reinforcing a sense of community and togetherness. It's also a powerful propaganda tool for isolating and dividing people. "haan" versus "haani" creates a division which makes men and women feel like separate kinds of citizen. That would seem to me to contradict and weaken the "pull together for the State" mindset.

There are practical reasons of morale involved, and I think those would guide the decision-making process more than any idealism about eradicating gender stereotypes.

The fact that the State prefers people to be cisgender heterosexual has no bearing on whether the State would also prefer a gender-neutral pronoun for general use.