Re: caselike gender system

En réponse à Nokta Kanto <red5_2@...>:

> 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.
>
Hehe, describing something is always more difficult than using it ;) .

> 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 find it a neat system, which looks a little bit like the gender prefixes of
my conlang Tj'a-ts'a~n (the tj'a being one of those prefixes by the way ;)) ).
Like those, it is productive (i.e. you can use different gender marks with the
same root to produce different meanings).

> I'm kind of wondering whether my gender system really is a gender
> system, or
> if I mislabeled it. What do you think?
Actually, what you have looks more like a derivation system than a gender
system. Maybe you could call it a class system (or even a classifier system, a
bit like in some Asian languages). Gender systems are actually a subset of
class systems, but class systems often make differences that look like the ones
you make and they are sometimes productive. So I think the term "class"
or "classifier" would be best for your suffixes.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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