Re: Sarah's language.

Padraic Brown wrote:
> These two make a little less sense, as number is
> generally not considered a grammatical gender.
The Bantu languages traditionally consider singular and plural forms to
be distinct, so that one must refer to the 1/2 gender to mean "the human
gender" regardless of number.  Some of the Bantu languages have
eliminated one or more of the plural classes, so that, say, the plural
of a "gender 5" and of a "gender 7" are both "gender 6".  Those genders
would thus be called the 5/6 and the 7/6 genders (I'm not sure if that's
an actual example, but that kind of thing does happen in Bantu langs)

Of course, the main reason for that is to make cross-language comparison
easier in that family.

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