Re: Another question: genders

On Wed, Aug 09, 2000 at 09:51:49PM -0400, Nik Taylor wrote:
> "H. S. Teoh" wrote:
> > Any comments/suggestions? "ambivalent" sounds OK to me, but "ambiguous"
> > seems somewhat awkward. (It does happen to sound like "ambivalent", that's
> > why I chose it in the first place.) I've seen a related word somewhere
> > that uses omni- but I forgot the exact word. (omniline? ominine? anybody
> > knows?)
>
> Well, epicene means "either gender" or "mixed groups", that would work
> for your "ambiguous".  Your "ambivalent" is kind of an unusual gender.
> >From what you describe, I suppose something like "collective" might
> work.  Could you describe it in greater detail?
[snip]

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.


T