Re: Another question: genders

> Date:         Wed, 9 Aug 2000 20:54:53 -0600
> From:         Brad Coon <bcoon@...>
> H. S. Teoh wrote:
>
> > OK, I guess I didn't make the genders in my conlang quite clear enough...
> > To put it simply:
> >         "masculine"     ==>     male
> >         "feminine"      ==>     female
> >         "ambivalent"    ==>     both
> >         "ambiguous"     ==>     either
> >         "neuter"        ==>     neither
> >
> > The "ambiguous" (or epicene, seems like that's a better word) gender is
> > used more often than ambivalent, and is used for most collectives. The
> > ambivalent gender is used in cases like words referring to married couples
> > (as already mentioned), or to hermaphrodite creatures (if there were a
> > noun for earthworms in the language, it'd be in the ambivalent gender).
> >
> > The difference between ambivalent and ambiguous is that the object(s)
> > referred to by an "ambiguous" noun must be either male or female, not
> > neuter or otherwise.
>
> Animate seems a good choice too.
Or perhaps common. It's traditionally used for languages like Danish
that only have two noun genders, common and neuter. (Some dialects of
Danish, but viz. not the standard, still have three genders --- and
all have masc. and fem. personal pronouns).

But that's no reason not to use it differently for your language ---
there's a long tradition for that in linguistics as well.

Or you could make one up out of whole cloth --- how about ambogenous
"of both kinds"? (Purists may want ambogenerous instead --- but note
that it's specifically not ambi-, since that means about, not both).

Then you could use common or epicene for the 'either' gender --- or
make up another. Utergenous "of any kind," perhaps.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)