R: Re: Genders

> On Tue, Sep 05, 2000 at 04:45:53PM +0200, Mangiat wrote:
> [snip]
> > And about a IE-like 3-gender system: is it common, or a peculiarity of
our
> > language-family? Are there other families with this kind of gender
system?
>
> *Our* language family? *ahem*. Oh, you mean exclusive first person
> plural... ;-) (just kidding)
Well, we're all speaking English here around, aren't we? So we can say IE is
our language family (although for some cases not a L1 langfam).

> English is the only language I'm fluent with that has gender built into
> it. (Well, I know some basic classical Greek, but I think others on this
> list are more qualified to talk about that!) Although some Mandarin texts
> differentiate between masculine and feminine in pronouns, they aren't
> pronounced differently anyway, so it doesn't matter. Malay doesn't have
> gender either AFAIK. It might've had it in older forms of the language,
> but unfortunately I was a bad student back in those days when I had to
> learn Malay... :-(
>
> But I *have* heard about European languages which assign genders to
> non-animate objects in a basically arbitrary way. IIRC, there's a
> masculine word in Spanish which is feminine in Portuguese. (I forgot which
> one it is now, and I don't want to make a big fool of myself by guessing
> what it might be :-P )
My beloved Italian does it as well, but, as every other Romance lang, the
choice of the gender is 90% based on the ending vowel (or, for French, the
old ending vowel - since a lot of endings disappeared in that tongue)

> As far as conlangs go, tho, my conlang has 5 genders, which I won't bother
> repeating here unless you want me to, since I've posted lengthy
> descriptions of it to the list before. But it's basically an extension of
> the masculine-feminine-neuter system from IE. Other conlangs also have
> other more interesting gender systems, but I'll let them speak for their
> own conlangs. :-)
>
Luca

> T
>