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caselike gender system

From:Nokta Kanto <red5_2@...>
Date:Wednesday, December 18, 2002, 11:39
I vamped my harpelan page again ( http://www.geocities.com/noktakanto/ ).
It's funny, I didn't know just how much work I had put into the language
until I tried to describe it. I understand it, but it's hard to explain how
it works.

What do you think of the gender system? It ended up serving a lot of
functions. Several of the genders are defined in relation to a verb.
Esperanto has a similar thing: you can talk about a "mang'ato", a "thing
that is eaten", or a "mang'anto", a "thing that is eating". In Harpilan, the
word for food is "thing that is eaten". But, if I swallow a penny, then I
can now call that
penny a "thing that is eaten" -- same word, different ambiguity.

I'm kind of wondering whether my gender system really is a gender system, or
if I mislabeled it. What do you think?
(I'll want to ask a similar question about verbs, once I get that onto the
harpelan page.)

Reply

Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>