Re: Class and case
| From: | Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, March 14, 2002, 20:47 |
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En réponse à Clint Jackson Baker <litrex1@...>:
> Simply put, what is the difference between noun class
> and noun case?
>
You know it already: grammatical gender, like in French, Spanish or German (to
take a language with cases) or even Latin, is a kind of class system (with only
two or three classes and partly semantic - but only partly, since there is
really no reason why a table should be female and a bra male, yet they are that
way in French :)) -). We talk of noun classes instead of noun genders when we
have more than three or four of them (IIRC Swahili has 10. But I may forget one
or two...).
Christophe.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.
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