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Re: Gender (was: LANGUAGE LAWS)

From:Raymond A. Brown <raybrown@...>
Date:Friday, October 23, 1998, 19:12
At 1:57 am -0400 23/10/98, Nik Taylor wrote:
>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 correct on both accounts. And although the categorization must have followed some 'specific logics now forgotten', it was hardly scientific in the modern sense. [snip]
>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
Yes, and I've come across a theory that the familiar IE three gender system is the result of two 'different architectures' - an animate/inanimate division & a male/female division - but I don't recall which is thought to be the older system. It strikes me that this is also the problem with a_priori IALs that try to categorize all entities - they can do this categorization only in the light of the understanding of the culture & science of their times. As knowledge advances, their "philosophical" categories are going to start to show inconsistencies also. But I must abandon this discussion for a few days - I'm off to la Belle France. Ray.