Re: Gender (was: LANGUAGE LAWS)
| From: | Mathias M. Lassailly <lassailly@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, October 23, 1998, 18:36 |
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Mathias M. Lassailly wrote:
> > So those 8 categories do not classify items in the world into big
> > families through specific logics now forgotten ? :-)
>
> They do have general meanings, for example, in Bantu (and I'm assuming
> Xhosa is the same way, being Bantu and all), gender 1 is human.
> However, they are not fully consistent.
That's exactly what I mean : 'inconsistent' to nowadays' standards. But I truely
admire these people who did not have a clue about how universe was designed and
tried and designed themselves a system to order the world systematically. I
believe it took a high level of abstraction and speculation very similar to
nowadays' scientific reflexion. Of course this seems ludicrous now because this
classification is based on criteria that do not mean much in light of our
current knowledge, but I think this was a token of intellectual progress.
Classifying is a step forward into creating universal references : verb refers to
chrono-experience (=causality) while classification refers to compa-reason :-)
I don't know enough about the
> Bantu languages to give an explanation, but consider the Latin
> three-gender system. Theoretically, male and female were male and
> female animates, while neuter was inanimate, but there were *lots* of
> inanimate nouns which were classed as masculine and feminine, and of
> course, the modern Romance languages are even worse, having only the two
> genders. Almost all gender systems are like that. A generalized
> meaning can be summed up for a gender (or noun class as they're
> sometimes reffered to as), but there are nearly always exceptions. I've
> heard of a few languages (Tamil, I think, is one), with completely
> consistent gender systems (in this case, male-rational, female-rational,
> animate, inanimate; rational = human or divine, animate = other
> animate), but this is by far the exception, rather than the rule.
> Others, like Dyirbal, only seem inconsistent from a Western perspective,
> but are actually quite rational from their perspective.
Of course it's consistent at the time it's created. It's never whimsical then.
For example, in
> Dyirbal, birds are placed in the female-human gender, rather than the
> animate gender, because they believe that birds are the souls of dead
> females. But, if the culture changes, those reasons may be lost, so
> perhaps the exceptions in many languages may have been rational in
> earlier stages, but who knows? It's like Sally Cave's metaphor of the
> old city, you may have ancient buildings, built thousands of years ago,
> next to buildings built just a couple of years ago, built according to
> different architectures and for different technologies (pre-air
> conditioning buildings with high ceilings, for example).
>
> --
> "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father
> was hanged." - Irish proverb
>
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