How do you talk about Humanity...

...when there are no humans in your story? Also, how would Manly jokes work? If the word "Man" never existed what would replace it?

If there are no humans, why would you need to talk about humanity?

You need to clarify. Are you talking about humanity, H. sapiens, in the past tense? Or are you modifying statements of the "I fight for all of humanity" sort, wherein the speaker is doing it for his species, be it aliens, cats, rabbits, smeerps, or whatever? In the latter case, exactly what is speaking is rather significant.

Try calling us 'em Saps. Like Sapients. ("Boy, what Saps they are man!") And for the issues of Manly, you shall say 'Sappy!'

I tried to play with this idea in a story, using the word "elf" wherever "person" or "man" or any generic being would be mentioned. Everyone who read it said it sounded funny. Funny-strange, that is.

Could be an anthropocentric thing, the way everyone's name for their people is "the people." We're not comfortable being reminded that we're not the center of the universe. ... ?

I'm more or less trying to think of a good replacement. It's like regular Humanity just applied to another race. The best I've come up with so far is, in place of the Hindenburg incident's famous words "Oh the humanity!", is "Oh the profanity!" So yeah, it's not a very good one.

You could handwave it as Translation Convention. Presumably these non-humans aren't actually speaking English, and the term that they're really using translates best as "manly" or whatever.

We refer to "humanity", "manly", "the humanities", etc etc because those incorporate our name for ourselves (i.e. "human") or subsets thereof ("man", "woman").

If you're writing about a nonhuman race but still want to use those concepts... well... what's their name for themselves? Do they call themselves, say, Pwng'hdthx? With adult males of the species being gr'chxknlb and adult females being zqpal'htthy? If so, just find-and-replace. "Good heavens, man gr'chxknlb! Have you no humanity pwng'hdthxicity?!" "I was always more attracted to the humanities pwng'hdthxities; that's why I wound up majoring in Women's Zqpal'htthic Studies." Et cetera.

<.<

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edited 25th Jan '11 3:42:44 PM by aishkiz

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