Why do I insist that speaking of "con-sonants" makes sense only, when one
speaks of "sonants" = only if there are (self-)sounders,
sounds that only
sound together with sounders, together-sounders/con-sonants exist.
I am a nominalist = I think most things do no exist in themselves, by themselves.
Speakers make them.
bois, forêt, Wald, Holz, Gehölz, Hain, grove, wood, woods, forest, jungle, taiga, maquis, Mischwald, Urwald, Holzplantage
These words do not reflect things that exist in reality independent of speech,
rather: words structure reality, they make us see what is there ...
... and sometimes what isn't.
Reizklima exists only in German,
And some Germans think: If we have a word for it, it must be there.
No, not at all. We can select real (!) things in a way that they correspond to a man-made concept.
As I see it, there is no homosexuality. The label is used for a hundred different things, but not for an entity that existed before someone described it.
As I see it, it is mind boggling to put female-female and male-male into one box. They are opposites.
Polar desert, sand desert, stone desert are not the same. Just as desert can mean unpopulated or arid or barren,
homosexuality sometimes stands of an inborn trait in
every human, for an inclination of some, for activity (or passivity) in others, for a preference or a possibility (when deprived of available sex with a member of an other sex),
sometimes for a
lifelong exclusive character trait, sometimes for something that comes and goes and
coexists with its "opposite", characteristic
or accidental. Some languages differentiate between fucker and fucked one, find it absurd to use one word for the robber and robbed one, for prison guard and inmate, consider "active prisoner/homosexual" and "passive prisoner/homosexual" as mad ‒ as mad as calling the victim of a crime "(passive) criminal."
BTW, in German we have Eiswüste instead of polar desert ‒ similar, but not the same.
"Sexuality" was coined
somewhat before 1800 for
reproduction involving different sexual organs
= organisms having different reproductive roles = organisms capable of
reproducing
sexually, was applied to plants most of the time.
Hence the concept of one- or homo-sex is nonsense, by definition sexuality occurs only between different sexes.
all Roman Catholic monasteries are homosexual.
all German national soccer teams are homosexual.
The College of Cardinals is homo-sex-ual = the cardinals are all of the same sex.
I think one should be less abstract:
The College of Cardinals is male only
or: you have to be a man to become cardinal.
An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture produced outside the United States of America with a predominantly non-English dialogue track. oscar.org
flights can be inter-national, trade can be, telephone talks,
but not persons, books, songs. Once a Syrian told be: this song is international.
I contradicted. A fellow Syrian asked for a translation into Arabic.
In translation "inter-national" (بين دولي) became global (عالمي).
When I hear "international" on the radio, most of the time "foreign" or "global" is meant.
Weltliteratur is not "international literature." Conferences, meetings, tournaments.
radical means "from the roots"/"toward the roots," not extremist.
Apo-calypse means un-cover, open, brought into the open, re-velation, Offen-barung, كشف
Doomsday, the last day, the end of the world is es-chalon.
That the most famous book of revelation deals of the last days, is not reason to confuse the terms.
They have nothing in common.
Recently I read "as an audience I ..."
and "as a minority I ..." or "In
dieser Legisatur" when "as part of the
audience," "as a member of a minoriy,"
"in dieser Legislatur
periode"
is meant. f..k you! I hate it.
So it is not that I dislike the Amsterdam professor ‒ I do not know him, and a like him as an linguist ‒, I do not suffer wrong terminology.
an English bishop becomes a German Läufer, a French fou.
hüzün, Weltschmerz and saudade are not the same.
Of multiple origins. Partly a borrowing from French. Partly a borrowing from Latin. Etymons: French sexe; Latin sexus.
Etymology: Middle French, French sexe the genitals (c1200 in Old French as sex ), gender, state of being male or female (c1230, 14th cent. as a social category, 1546 with reference to plants), sexuality, physical lovemaking, eroticism (1856) and its etymon classical Latin sexus (u- stem) state of being male or female, specific qualities associated with being male or female, males or females collectively, sexual organs, of uncertain origin (perhaps compare secāre to cut (see secant adj.), though the semantic connection is unclear). Compare Old Occitan sexe (1420), Catalan sexe (1515), Spanish sexo (first half of the 15th cent.), Portuguese sexo (1572), Italian sesso (14th cent.).
Latin had also a form secus , neuter (indeclinable).
With the third sex at sense 1b compare French troisième sexe (1817 with reference to masculine women, 1847 with reference to homosexuals).
With the weak sex at Phrases 1a compare post-classical Latin sexus fragilis (c1455 in a British source), Middle French, French sexe fragile (1546), also sexe foible (1601). With the fair sex at Phrases 1a compare French beau sexe (1646). With the better sex at Phrases 1c compare post-classical Latin sexus melior (a1200 in a British source).
With the in sense 3a after Middle French, French le sexe women, the female sex collectively (1580).
A number of compounds from various semantic fields have earlier equivalents formed with sexual adj. (e.g. sexual organ at sexual adj. 3a, sexual discrimination n. at sexual adj. and n. Compounds 1, sexual offence n. at sexual adj. and n. Compounds 2).
a. Either of the two main categories (male and female) into which humans and many other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions; (hence) the members of these categories viewed as a group; the males or females of a particular species, esp. the human race, considered collectively. Occasionally with plural verb.
a 1896 J. A. Symonds Probl. in Mod. Ethics (new ed.) vi. 78 Burton..was led to surmise a crasis of the two sexes in persons subject to sexual inversion. Thus he came to speak of ‘the third sex’.
a 1720 P. Blair Bot. Ess. iv. 237 These being very evident Proofs of a necessity of two Sexes in Plants as well as in Animals.
a 1790 W. Smellie Philos. Nat. Hist. I. 245 There is not a notion more generally adopted, than that vegetables have the distinction of sexes.
a. The distinction between male and female, esp. in humans; this distinction as a social or cultural phenomenon, and its manifestations or consequences; (in later use esp.) relations and interactions between the sexes; sexual motives, instincts, desires, etc.
a 1924 J. Riviere et al. tr. S. Freud Coll. Papers II. xviii. 230 A very considerable measure of latent or unconscious homosexuality can be detected in all normal people
Joseph Bristow: Sexuality
Dip into the Oxford English Dictionary and you will see that the first recorded use of sexuality appears in 1836. The word turns up in an edition of the collected works of eighteenth-century English poet, William Cowper (1731-1800). Cowper’s editor notes that this eminent writer built his poem’ titled 'The Lives of Plants' upon their sexuality'. The OED suggests that in this editorial commentary sexuality means the quality of being sexual or having sex’. Yet ‘having sex’ in this particular instance refers primarily to botany. This example alone plainly shows that sexuality has not always belonged to an exclusively human domain.
A slightly later usage of sexuality may also strike us as a little surprising. The OED lists its third definition of the word in a quite familiar manner, as recognition of or preoccupation with what is sexual’. Yet here, too, the example employed to support this definition presents ‘what is sexual’ in an uncommon way. The example in question comes from the authorial Preface to Yeast: A Problem (1851), a polemical Condition-of-England novel by English writer, Charles Kingsley (1819—1875): 'Paradise and hell ... as grossly material as Mahomet’s, without the honest thorough-going sexuality, which you thought made his notion logical and consistent’. This sentence may well encourage us to ask why Kingsley should associate sexuality with argumentative rationality. Rarely, if ever, in the twentieth century has sex been thought to underpin the cognitive powers of the mind. To the contrary, some theorists are convinced that sexuality opposes reason because it exerts a hydraulic force which threatens to rise up and subvert the logical intellect.
If these two examples from the OED have any value, then it is to confirm that the contemporary perspectives from which we view sexuality have for the most part arisen in the past century — although there are one or two exceptions to the rule. The Supplement to the OED, for example, notes that the English poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772—1834) employed — the term bisexuality as early as 1804, in Aids to Reflection, where he
To Coleridge 1804 'bisexuality' evidently means containing both sexes in one body
Only by the 1890s had sexuality and its variant prefixed forms become associated with types of sexual person and kinds of erotic attraction.
J.R.Ackerley was asked after WWI: Are you a homo or a hetero?
Like are you Shi'i or Sunni, Protestant or Catholic, Beaujolais or Bordeaux, Catlover or Doglover, Callas or Tebaldi, Mercedes or BMW, Barca or Real
Here the first and last page of a book from the Bavarian National Library;
Japanese Tartars being the exception:
here a page from a Japanese YaSīn edition:
Here the first and last page of a book from the Bavarian National Library;
