Re: Conlang Gender (was Re: Writing Systems and Biscriptal Children

Patrick>>>>>>
> nicole perrin wrote:
> > So, obligatory conlang reference:  those of you who do have gender in
> > your language, is it masc/fem?
I have an animate/inanimate gender distinction -- it works pretty well,
actually.  It's much easier thinking in terms of animacy than in terms of
sex, sometimes.
<<<<<<

I'll bite:

Wenetaic has a mixed person/gender system.  Syntactically, there's one class of
morphemes, but some provide Person information and some provide (grammatical)
Gender information.  "Sentient" is split between 1st, 2nd and 3rd person, while
"3rd person" is split between sentient, nonsentient and inanimate.  There's also
a "dummy" Abstract gender, used when no other gender is appropriate.  Every noun
and verb has obligatory Gender marking, but roots do not have any intrinsic
gender in their definition.

I've pretty much stuck with using the term "Gender", as I feel it best describes
the category as a whole, usage-wise.  The system is inspired by Elamite, though
Elamite has some extra complications, such as differentiating some (but not all)
possessable nouns from non-possessable nouns, IIRC.

The system is:

-m Speaker    1st Person Sentient
-s Addressee  2nd Person Sentient
-t Human      3rd Person Sentient
-r Animal     3rd Person Nonsentient
-p Inanimate  3rd Person Inanimate
-k Abstract   Used to form infinitives and certain types of attributes









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