Re: basic morphemes of a loglang

Paul Bennett wrote:
> Ah, but where's the line between classifier and gender? Does Uatakassi have
> genders, or obligatory classifiers? How about natlangs (there must be some,
> surely?) where adjectives morph for number, but nouns don't. Or, for the
> syntactic gender of the noun? Or, where adverbs morph for the gender of the
> agent of their verb, but adjectives are immutable?
>
> That a classificatory system shows up obligatorily and uniformly only in
> the numbers used to count things of different types should (in my mind) not
> mean it is automatically not considerable as either the start of, or last
> gasp of a gender system.
Of course.  Gender systems are thought to originate in classifiers.
But, the counters in Japanese are simply a consequence of the fact that
most nouns in Japanese are treated as mass nouns, thus, just as in
English you can't say "five cattle" or "two rice" but rather "five *head
of* cattle" and "two *grains of* rice".

Also, the counters aren't necessarily rigidly defined, either.  For
example, _hon_ is a growing category, and there are many nouns that some
use _hon_ with and others don't.

> ObQuasiDeepQuasiSillyQuestion: What does "gender" mean, when you distill
> the dictionary definitions into one word, but merely "type", after all?
True, true.  :-)  But, in linguistics, it generally refers to a
classification system which is rather broader in application.

> Yes. My point exactly. The thread was about the distinction between gender-
> marking, case marking and articles, and about how this may relate or not
> relate to pronouns. I gave what I felt to be an example of a language where
> the marking functions are indeed formally distinct.
Ah, sorry.  I misunderstood.  :-)

> Okay. I didn't think so, however, my knowledge of Japanese is sketchy, at
> best. I only knew less than half (even that might be generous -- maybe two
> or three (ish)) of the example pronouns you gave
Some of them are rather informal, and dependent on social context (for
example, kisama would only be used to address someone you really hate
:-))

Also, a neat thing is that pronouns vary from dialect to dialect.  Like,
in Osaka, _wai_ is used as a first person singular (I suspect it's
derived from the archaic _ware_)

> (in fact, the first time
> I embarked on learning Japanese, the instructional material was clear to
> explicitly state that Japanese has no pronouns whatsoever, which I later
> found out to be somewhat of an exaggeration (to say the least))
Indeed.  Though, I would go so far as to say that pronouns are a
subclass of nouns in Japanese.  The main morphological distinction being
that pluralization is obligatory rather than optional.

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