Reddit reviews Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind

The core meaning here is "Animated audiovisual work (computer or hand-drawn), made in Japan." You can stretch any one of those criteria and you get less central examples--some grey area. (Does Korea count? Does panning over stills count? Does rotoscoping count? Do VNs count? Etc etc)

That's because it turns out that the way humans conceive of category is complicated and not the cut-and-dried in-or-out situation we're usually led to believe. If you're interested in a broader discussion of these topics, this is a very good book.

> I mostly find it frustrating though when foreign languages give a gender to just about every object. What's up with that really?

There is something you should know about language: often, it makes no sense. These developments are pretty arbitrary. Old English had genders, and Modern English has lost them, for no good reason.

Indo-European languages aren't the worst in that regard. The book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things is named for a noun category ("gender", if you will) in an aboriginal language of Australia.

/linguistics nerd

If you haven't already gone through one of the dozens of various intro to linguistics textbooks, go through one of them.

Some breadth readings:

• Campbell's Historical Linguistics
  
• The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography
  
• Duranti's Linguistic Anthropology
  
• Comrie's Language Universals and Linguistic Typology
  
• Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things
  
  For fun:
  
  
• Bickerton's sort-of biography, Bastard Tongues.

You might enjoy Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, Lakoff's thrilling tour de force about the language of categorization.

Thanks! I was just thinking back to my linguistics classes and discussions of how noun classes expand from non-arbitrary to arbitrary. Much mention was made of Lakoff's "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things."

One example that stuck with me through the years is (I can't remember which natlang it is) one language that puts "airplane" in the same noun class as "tree". It seems ludicrous at first until you follow the path it took. First, they started with trees and whatever noun class they belong to. Then from trees they made boats, which inherited the tree's noun class. Then later on came airplanes, and since an airplane is a vehicle, and a boat is a vehicle, airplanes inherited the noun class that boats belong to. And suddenly it all makes sense.

As to the title of the book, if memory serves (and this may or may not be the same language as the other example) one population's traditional division of labor had women tend the fire. And fire is a dangerous thing.

As my language's vocabulary grows, I look forward to finding things that I can classify in more arbitrary ways based on this natural drift.

Recommended reading for this thread:

• Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein
  
• Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff

I'm sorry if you took my comment spitefully as that was not my intent. Here is some reading you might find interesting:

• The Axemakers Gift - a chronicle of how technology has changed our perception of the world
  
  
• The Tree of Knowledge - a scientific and biological approach to philosophical questions about human perception and understanding.
  
  
• Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things - trying to understand human cognition through how we categorize things