Re: Sex-neutral gender?
| From: | Stephen Mulraney <ataltanie@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, January 20, 2002, 18:06 |
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On Sun, 20 Jan 2002 02:16:41 -0600
David Starner <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?
IANAHL (I am not a historical linguist) but I read somewhere that the
indoeuropean genders evolved from an animate-inanimate gender system.
In fact the idea seems to have been that the neuters were not inflected
for e.g. nom and acc because they were inanimate and as such could not
be 'doers' or 'sufferers'. [Hence the way nom & acc are the same for
neuter-gendered nouns in many IE languages - Latin and Greek for e.g.]
Stephen Mulraney