Re: irregular conlangs -- Gender

Ed Heil wrote:

>And IIRC, "gender" just comes from "genus, generis," meaning "type;"
>its meaning of "sex" is entirely a consequence of IE languages sorting
>things into "types" according to which sex or lack thereof they
>belonged to.
>
>(I wonder whether "sex" itself has a similar origin?  I've no
>resources at hand to look it up...)
It probably does.  "Sex" is derived from the Latin root "seg-", meaning
"cut/divide", as in "segment", "section", and "insect".  So the original
sense of "sex" would seem to be "division" or "category".

Matt.