Re: Class and case

On Thu, 14 Mar 2002 21:47:19 +0100
Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:

> 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...).
>

Hmm...  re: class systems

where would something like the classifier (aka 'measure word') system
in Chinese langs stand [basically when counting nouns or preceeding them by
demonstrative adjective(-equivalents) you must insert a classifier just before
the nouns which more or less indicates the semantic class of the noun]

My question is, would this be a *typical* example of how a class system works
and affects the grammar, or something quite above and beyond a class system,
or even some vestigal remains of a class system, in that its application is
quite resticted to a few (though v. common) constructions?

stephen

[who, if he ever speaks Mandarin, will be a one classifier guy - "ge".
 though I've heard that classifier errors can be quite amusing, and
 I'm beginning to get a taste for the wonderful semantic clashing that
 arises from something like "yi2 tiao2 ren2" or "liang3 ben3 ren2" ;)
 Any hui4 shou1 zhong1wen2 de ren2 {I don't care if it sounds stupid,
 or wrong - I'm addicted to that 'de' construction!!} here who find this
 kind of thing funny? ]

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