Re: What's a gender?

On Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:17:01 -0800, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...>
wrote:
>At least as far as the Chinese languages go, classifiers are optional
If they're optional, they're not genders, according to Corbett's definition
as I understood and remember it.

>and aren't prevalent like gender marking in IE languages is.
Does this mean other words don't have to agree with the class?

>They are
>probably much better understood as units of counting rather than gender,
>and are closer to words like "pair", "dozen", or "pound" (as in, a pound
>of fish) in English, than to a gender-like system.
>
>> One thing is that a noun can't exist without gender, no more than
>> a human can exist without gender: it's either one or the other.
>> Nouns that take classifiers can, and can, in fact, sometimes take
>> different ones in different situations.
>[...]
>
>That's right. At least in the Chinese languages, classifiers can usually
>be omitted, and if not, a circumlocution that doesn't need a classifier
>usually exists.
@Mark: I forgot to mention that "genders" are _obligatory_.  That is, they
are concordial noun-classes such that every noun is in one and only one of
them, and can't change.

>Also, the classifiers may be used on their own once
>their referent has been established, which is unlike any gender system I
>know of (I don't know of any gender affixes that may detach from the
>noun and appear in isolation).
Isn't that a lot like a pronoun, though?

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