Re: Sarah's language.

--- Sarah Marie Parker-Allen
<lloannna@...> wrote:

> I think the thing I was going for in the
> separation of plurals into their
> own "genders" is that some designations don't
> extend to the plural.  That
> is, there are separate declensions for
> baby/animal versus child/youth, when
> the noun is singular -- but four babies, six
> animals, eight children, and
> thirty-six teenagers all get the same
> declension.
OK, I see. I would simply keep the genders the
same and distribute the same ending amongst the
plurals, with a note that plurals of these
different genders are identical. For me, that
would save a big headache! For thee, if you can
keep it straight, that's what's important. :)

> The same goes for
> adults -- there's different ones for one man,
> one woman, etc., but three
> women, six men, or fourteen adults (not gender
> specific) would all get the
> same declension.  I think that idea came from
> how in Russian, the plural
> form of "you" and the formal singular form of
> "you" are the same (that is,
> it's the same pronoun, and they're declined the
> same)  I have NO real
> linguistics training so I'm guessing when I say
> things like "gender."
Well, there's two kinds: natural and grammatical.


The first varies as to, well, what sort of
plumbing you have on board. The latter is simply
a category, having nothing to do with biology.

You could have any kind of "gender" that way: a
"round" gender for example, that encompasses any
number of semantic categories like "bread loaf",
"breast", "pot", "eye", "head" cos they're all
round; maybe even extend that to round emotions
like love or whatever. On the other hand,
"genders" can be entirely utilitarian like "I, II
and III"; where words are sorted by some
linguistic criterion into one of three groups.
This is the kind you have in Latin or Spanish,
where words that end in -a, -o a consonant or
whatever get sorted into different groups.

Padraic.


=====
Percumion farfer, ec nasteros em purfelos, polim ed siramet.
        -Pomperios Perfurios.




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