Re: Genders (was:[OT] Re: Conlangea Dreaming)

From: "Nik Taylor"

> DOUGLAS KOLLER wrote:
> > Okay, if a nouns-ending-in-rs gender is a gender, then a gender it is.
> Well, what I meant was that it determines your choice of pronouns.  It
> depends, I suppose, on your definition of gender, but many would say
> that English has genders, which are only visible in pronouns.  Thus, by
> that criterion, Géarthuns sounds like it has gender, albeit one which
> does not appear to be *semantically* predictable.
Sorry for being so brusque in my reply last night, but the debate was about
to start and I wanted to get to the TV.

The notion of gender in Géarthnuns has shifted as my notion of gender in
real time has shifted. Back in the early days when I was back in high
school, Géarthnuns originally had four genders (with that usual linkage to
sexual gender): masculine (marked by -bs), feminine (marked by -ts), neuter
(neither) (marked by -ks), and omnial (both) (marked by -ths) (if I knew
then what I knew now, I probably would've opted for 'epicene'). As the seven
thing began to overtake the language, three new 'intermediate' genders were
added which were kind of sex-gender linked, but not so much, and led to
clunky new gender categories: masculine (marked by -bs), masculo-feminine
(marked by -rs), feminine (marked by -ts), femino-neuter (marked by -ns),
neuter (marked by -ks), neutro-omnial (marked by -ls), and omnial (marked
by -ths). Those behemoths stayed in place for years.

Later, as the language began to evolve, gender moved away from sexual gender
and took on broader categories: including but not limited to natural,
"green" things (marked by -bs), can't remember off-hand categories covered
by -rs and -ts, including but not limited to "pleasant" things (marked
by -ns), including but not limited to "unpleasant" things (marked by -ks),
including but not limited to language acts (marked by -ls), including but
not limited to celestial, religious, and philosophical things (marked
by -ths). Wade through that if you can.

Of course, the language is replete with vestiges of both these archaic
systems, and a Géarthçins with a high school education would be sensitive to
that. Genders did exist. They still exist in limited contexts; if a man did
a pratfall on a banana peel, we could say:

Trízh la söböt kupaiaz. Let's go help him.

where "söböt" is the default pronoun referring back to the understood object
('dhaubsöt' - 'man' or 'absöt' - 'gentleman'), hence "masculine". (Still,
though, one could use "sauraut" where the understood object is "person",
"íalörsaut"). Depends on the view of the speaker.

But by now, for all intents and purposes (officially), "gender" is strictly
limited to what two letters a given noun ends in. Knowing that gender is not
limited to sexual distinctions, knowing that gender can encompass other
classes like "plants", "purple things", "sentients", etc., and knowing that
we needn't be limited even by these constraints, I'm still reluctant to
banter the word "gender" about in Géarthnuns at this point. All those lines
were drawn so strictly along declension lines that the terms "gender and
"declension" had really conflated; there is no parallel in Géarthnuns to
Latin where "first declension" normally indicates feminine, but there are
exceptions like "nauta", "sailor" which is masculine so "to a beautiful
sailor" is "nautae pulchro", not "*nautae pulchrae" (that kind of crossover
just doesn't happen in Géarthnuns)(one wonders if there were speech errors
here in spoken Latin).

Your definition of "gender" seems a little broader than what I'm used to,
though I think I understand it. I guess I'd feel a little more comfortable
with "subclass" (much of a muchness), but have just expanded the term
"declension" to incorporate all of that. I'd be hard pressed to determine
what all nouns ending in -ls had in common at this point. Still, adjectives
must agree with nouns in declension, number, and case, and -ls nouns have
their own pronoun (though, as said before, it's not along he/she/it lines).
Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...?

Kou