CONLANG Digest - 5 Sep 2000 to 6 Sep 2000 (#2000-243)

>You might say nouns and adjectives are zero-marked for gender in English
>(yes, except on pronouns), but it's definitely there, even if it's only
>natural gender and not grammatical gender.   Frex:
That was the key... whenever people start talking about gender in English
and relating it to things in French or German or whatnot, I have to sigh and
explain the difference between natural and grammatical gender again... I
think the cases of non-natural gender are sufficiently few and far between
(ships, sometimes cars, and the semi-archaic third-person indefinite "he")
that I am prepared to attribute them to personification, personification and
a holdover, respectively.

(Oddly enough, ships with men's names are still called "she". Whenever I
think of this, I think about the hotel in Montreal called Le Reine Elizabeth
- "hotel" being masculine.)


>To lyanjenize foreign words,...
I should have mentioned that in cases like Masiu Makláklan, the second name
is treated as an apposite to the first one, i.e. it always is left alone in
the nominative, although the first one can be marked for case depending on
which declension it fits in (in the case of Masiu, the third one). E.G.

Masius Makláklan (of Matt McLauchlin)

> >Gee, just one?  Across the French/Spanish divide with which I'm a little
> >more familiar, the classic example is la fin/el fin
la mer/el mar

> > gender. For example, Death is a male;
Being a Wiccan, I usually think of Death as female (the Crone aspect of the
Goddess), and he-who-dies as male.


>Mike Adams wrote:
> > Anyone have words that are only used by their conculture/lingo? I know
> > there is others, such as Gaijin is not used by Japanese to mean
> > Japanese, or so I believe, but it is applied to only white/europeans
>
>Gaijin means "foreigner", "gai" = "outside, foreign", "jin" = "person".
Cri = shri; their animist life-force-deity, similar in nature to the Celtic
sidhe or Japanese kami.



Blessed be,                        Écartons ces romans
Matt McLauchlin                          qu'on appèle systèmes,
GM18, Montreal, Canada             Et pour nous éléver
English/français/esperanto               descendons dans nous-mêmes.
icq: 4420218                               -Voltaire
http://www.crosswinds.net/~montrealais

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