I'd note that (within the first two or three pages) we find out that Breq/One Esk Nineteen is able to recognise Seivarden from the line of their hip and arm, despite not having seen them in a thousand years, but regularly struggles to correctly gender non-Radchaai humans. This suggests that there is something more complex going on with either Radchaai concepts of gender, gender roles on Nilt and elsewhere, or actual gender.
Breq actually tells us that Radchaai language doesn't mark gender and I wonder if that is at the root of Breq's problems, was the neural circuitry for processing gender never part of Justice of Toren/One Esk Nineteen/Breq's makeup, and therefore something they've had to assemble rules of thumb to interpret. I need to remind myself what Chomsky (IIRC) says about language structuring the way we think.
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regna
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Date: 2014-09-16 11:13 am (UTC)Breq actually tells us that Radchaai language doesn't mark gender and I wonder if that is at the root of Breq's problems, was the neural circuitry for processing gender never part of Justice of Toren/One Esk Nineteen/Breq's makeup, and therefore something they've had to assemble rules of thumb to interpret. I need to remind myself what Chomsky (IIRC) says about language structuring the way we think.