Re: My languages

I wrote:
>Nik Taylor wrote:
>>Adam Walker wrote:
>> > So what gender are infants and the mute?  If they aren't concidered
>>sentient
>> > are they gender 4???
>>
>>Yep.
>>
>> > That'd be pretty perverse, but the Utakassi are
>> > primatives, aren't they?
>>
>>I wouldn't call them primitive.  They're not at our level of
>>development, but they certainly have metal.  Bronze age or so.
>>
>>Lots of languages place infants in non-human categories.  For that
>>matter, I've even heard native English speakers refer to infants as
>>"it".  And unborn children are often called "it", especially by
>>pro-abortionists.  It's all a matter of where you consider the quality
>>of "human" to begin.  The Kassi consider that to begin with the
>>acquisition of speech.  In our culture, most people consider it to begin
>>either at birth or some point before birth.
>
>So there's strong correlation between what gender a word is placed in and
>what chategory the corresponding thing is in in Utakassi? I mean, Germans
>certainly don't consider girls inanimate, yet _Mädchen_ "girl" is neuter.
On closer thought, _Mädchen_ is a bad example, since it's forced to be
neuter by the dimunitive ending -chen. Better examples are _das Kind_ "the
child" and _das Weib_ "the wife", both grammatically neuter.

                                               Andreas

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