Re: Anadewism questions 1: Gender marking

On Fri, 06 May 2005 09:36:12 -0400, Carsten Becker
<naranoieati@...> wrote:

> Many languages only mark words for feminina and neuters,
> leaving masculina unmarked. But are there languages where
> males mark feminina while females mark masculina, maybe
> even with the same marker? Or is that *too* sexist? ;-)
> Things would become hairy in fairytales where objects such
> as stones and trees or so can also speak. I guess thus, the
> difference is only made for animates, in case the language
> also has m/f inanimates.
Slightly wide of the actual topic, but maybe interesting...

Elamite has three classes of words:

Indeclinables, about which no more needs to be said here.

Verbs, which can only take verbal endings:

1s -h
2s -t
3s -š
1p -hu
2p -ht
3p -hš

Thus |huttah| "I do", |huttaht| "y'all do".

Nominals, which can take verbal endings or noun endings, known fairly
uncontroversially (AFAIK) as "genders":

1st person -k
2nd person -t
3rd animate sg -r
3rd animate pl -p
3rd naturally inanimate -0
3rd inanimate derived from animate -me

Thus |sunkik| "I the king", |sunkip| "they the kings", |sunkime|
"kingdom", |murun| "earth", and verbally |sunkihu| "we rule".

AFMCL, this latter marking, slightly modified, is the pattern used in
Thagojian: all nouns are marked for their person/gender relative to the
current speech act (1st person, 2nd person, 3rd Animate, Inanimate). Case
complexes are marked according to the same set of genders. One day I'm
going to post properly on the case complexes. In short, nouns take
fusional infixes which combine the case of the noun relative to some other
noun (or verb) and the gender of that other noun (or the gender of the
subject of that verb).





Paul

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