Re: CONLANG Digest - 21 Feb 2004 to 22 Feb 2004 (#2004-52)
| From: | michael poxon <m.poxon@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, February 25, 2004, 16:21 |
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Eh? Quoi?
Grammatical gender has nothing to do with sex gender. None of the
Finno-Ugrian langs have grammatical gender (well, Hungarian and Finnish
don't...) The basques think that "la difference" is sufficiently important
to have two separate words just like most languages: Gizon (is this, by the
way, a source of the English word "geezer"?) / Andere. We have to be very
careful in interpreting grammatical conventions as anything to do with
reality! ;-)
Mike
> What's very interesting is the Number; there is
> Singular, Plural, no Dual, but an Indefinite Number:
> *zoin hiritan* means *in what city* or *in what
> cities*. This is a very good idea I think. In
> counterpart, no Gender, so shall we suppose that the
> Basque think that the difference between man and woman
> is too insignifiant to be mentioned ? In that case
> there are probably wrong. Man and woman brains are
> very different, not to speak about the rest of it.
>
> --- Isaac Penzev <isaacp@...> wrote:
> > Christophe Grandsire eskriviw:
> >
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