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

From: "Nik Taylor"

> Matt McLauchlin wrote:
> > 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'm not so sure that that is a fundamental difference.  English has
> gramaticalized gender.  It just happens that it's highly predictable,
> while in French or German the predictability is low.
Low predictability for whom? Native French and German speakers I know are
able to divine the gender of new words they've never seen before with
alarming accuracy. Even I, a non-native speaker of French (granted it's only
a 50-50 shot), nail the gender of unknown words with impressive frequency. I
couldn't recite the rules that get me there (beyond many feminine words end
in "e", all words ending in"-ment" are masculine, 99% of words ending in
"-ion" are feminine [don't know the exceptions]), but there does seem to be
a mechanism, intuitive or no, which helps one get it right.

Kou