Re: Another question: genders

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.


--
Brad Coon
bcoon@imt.net

Somedays when you wake up, its just not worth chewing through
the leather straps.