Re: Another question: genders

On Wed, Aug 09, 2000 at 10:50:53PM -0700, DOUGLAS KOLLER wrote:
[snip]
> omnial
  ^^^^^^
AHA! That's the term I was trying to recall. Maybe somebody more
knowledgeable in linguistics can comment on the appropriateness of this
term. :-)

[snip]
> 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.
I've still a long way to go in working out my ideas, though once I get
past basic sentences and the various noun inflections, I should have
something ready to post on the web.

One particular idea I have with the gender system is to have some nouns
(perhaps demonstratives) that can be arbitrarily inflected to match any
gender/case/number of another noun. This in itself isn't new, but if the
other noun is, say, a collective noun in the "ambiguous" gender, the
demonstrative can narrow the focus of the discourse to, say, the feminine
part of the collective noun.

Of course, having a strict, cultural division between non-neuter nouns and
neuter nouns also opens up the possibility of interesting storylines
involving "neuter" objects that turn out to be either masculine/feminine,
causing the native speakers of the language a great deal of grief. >:->


T