Re: Sex-neutral gender?

Nik Taylor wrote:

> David Starner wrote:
> >
> > I'm working on Sherall in my free time. Sherall is another language of
> > the Sherall, who I mentioned in posts about Llirine. Sherall is a
> > Germantic language, a direct descendent of modern German. In its
> > adaption to the Sherall, it became a gender-neutral language, but kept
> > the grammatical gender of German. So then what would the three genders
> > be called? I've thought of Red, Blue and Green, but I was wondering if
> > there were any natural examples of this, or if anyone had better ideas?
>
> So, what do these three genders mean, then?
Well, they do not have to mean anything, they are just grammatical features.
The Dutch language technically still has three genders, but since there is
almost nothing in the language to distinguish masculine from feminine (same
article, no unique endings with a few exceptions similar to german), the
distinction has become as good as lost.
The neuter gender still takes a different article, but otherwise, it is
treated as masculine, which often causes nouns which are traditionally
feminine to be treated as masculine/neuter, since most words fall into the
latter category.

In German, there already is a clear distinction between biological and
linguistic gender: "das mädchen" (the girl) is neuter (because all
diminutives are neuter). So I think the above is nothing special, but just
this effect taken to the extreme. You could as well still call them
masculine/feminine/neuter as well as anything else, since they are just
labels.

AFMC: In the Tetros language family on my world, there are two genders.
Tetrosian languages are spoken on an island continent and the outlyign
island in the southwestern part of the world. The inhabitants are elves who
live their lives on the shore of he seas. They are good swimmers and
sailors.
In the traditional philosophy of these elves, their world existed between
the air above and the water below. So everything they had either came from
air, or from the water. Their language has two genders: water-words and
sky-words and all nouns are genedered on the basis of their assumed origin:
"sun"", "bird" and "wind" are sky-words, "grave" is a water-word, as is
"death", "birth" and "child" since their women traditionally give birth in
the water.
Abstract concepts are also tied to either sky or water, although sometimes,
it is not very clear why a word is a sky-word or water-word. Even the script
of these elves was originally based on the water-sky distinction, since in
early days, priests used great bowls of water that were struck to produce
various types of ripples on the surface to communicate with the gods (I
wrote something about that in a thread a month ago or so).

Maarten

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