Re: Another question: genders

From: "H. S. Teoh"

> 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.
This sounds quite similar to the gender system I outlined for early
Géarthnuns in my most recent monsterpost. Back then, I tried to expand on
the traditional IE three-gender system:

masculine
masculo-neuter
masculo-feminine
feminine
femino-neuter
neuter
omnial

(originally a four-gender system comprising "masculine", "feminine",
"neuter" ("neither"), "omnial" ("both, epicene [though I wouldn't have known
the term at the time]")(three other genders added to fill out the "seven"
system of the language)
which, I guess, roughly corresponds to your system (with some difference in
usage also)this way:

        "masculine"     ==>     masculine
         "feminine"      ==>     feminine
        "ambivalent"    ==>     omnial
        "ambiguous"     ==>     masculo-feminine
        "neuter"        ==>     neuter

plus two others.

I eventually abandoned the system because it didn't work for me and went in
a different direction, but I'm looking forward to seeing what you do with
something similar.

Kou