Re: Gender (was: LANGUAGE LAWS)

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.  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.  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).

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