Re: Umlauts (was Re: Elves and Ill Bethisad)

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 14:30:27 +0000, Peter Bleackley
<Peter.Bleackley@...> wrote:

>At the risk of causing offence to people who are probably far too easily
>offended anyway, I'd like to point out that fanatical feminists are bad
>linguists in failing to realise that grammatical gender has nothing to do
>with sex (except possibly in some of Herman Miller's rodent languages,
>where practically everything seems to have something to do with sex).
Actually, it's the Zireen who enjoy talking about sex and frequently employ
sexual metaphors, not the Mizarian rodent people, although both cultures
have influenced each other to a certain degree. Zireen are more like
nocturnal primates, with their big round forward-facing eyes, although not
related to any specific primate.

Still, even in Zireen languages grammatical gender doesn't have much to do
with sex. The Virelli language, for instance, has five third-person
pronouns (te, kú, lil, rák, jen); while females tend to be associated with
gender III (lil), its primary association is with herbivorous mammals and
water; and gender IV (rák), which includes males, is also associated with
small flying dragons, burrowing mammals, and words with a final high-tone
vowel. Children are included in gender V (jen) regardless of sex. Both
animate and inanimate nouns are included in each of the five genders; males
and females of different animal species may be included in any of the five
genders, although if the male and female of a particular species are
different genders, the male tends not to be gender III and the female tends
not to be gender IV. So there ís a weak association of III=female and
IV=male, but they're traditionally named by colors: III is turquoise and IV
is indigo.