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

Andreas Johansson sikyal:

> Quoting Chris Bates <christopher.bates@...>:
>
> > There was an interesting study i read about somewhere, where they took
> > the same words (eg bridge) and translated it into lots of different
> > languages which all had grammatical (masculine/femine) gender, but which
> > didn't necessarily assign the same gender to it. So for instance:
> > [snip]
>
> I too saw an article about that. The authors took for granted that it was a
> case of preconceived notions about what is masculine and feminine "colouring"
> the perception of things that only happen to have one or another gender
> randomly assigned to it, but I'm not entirely happy about that conclusion.
> Surely there must have been _some_ grounds for the gender assignments,
> originally, no matter who random they may look after millennia of semantic,
> societal and technological change.
Yes, but whose to say that the original gender categories had anything to
do with gender? I mean, of the innumerable "gender" systems in the world,
only a few fit the IE-style masc/fem/neut, and in any more complex system
it doesn't make any sense to even ask this question.

Gender categories can grow out of phonological systems or any number of
other things, and in these cases it doesn't really make any sense to talk
about what properties of the bridge made it be called "masculine" or
"feminine".

> And _new_ words in languages with grammatical gender are often assigned gender
> for analyzable reasons -  my German grammar even has a section on how to
> predict the gender of new loans.
Yes, but those analyzable reasons usually have a lot to do with phonology.


--
Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/blog

Jesus asked them, "Who do you say that I am?"

And they answered, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground
of our being, the kerygma in which we find the ultimate meaning of our
interpersonal relationship."

And Jesus said, "What?"

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