Re: What's a gender?

caeruleancentaur skrev:
 > <Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
 >
 >> What constitutes grammatical gender? Does there have to
 >> be an acknowledged connection to biological sex, as in
 >> most European langs?
 >
 >> Anyway, just wondering what the criteria are. If my
 >> conlang has noun classes, does it therefore have gender,
 >> or does it depend on more specific details of how the
 >> classes work?
 >
 > A good question. A corollary would be: How does one
 > differentiate, or reconcile, gender and declension?
 >
 > Latin has 5 declensions and 3 genders for nouns (4 if you
 > include the common gender), but only 3 declensions for
 > adjectives.
 >
 > Is gender determined by the adjective used with the noun?
 > If memory serves, only the 5th declension (-es) has nouns
 > only of one gender, feminine.
 >
 > 1st: puella bona - poeta bonus. Both nouns are 1st
 > declension, but the adjectives are 1st and 2nd.

I guess classical grammarians didn't employ any formal
or syntactic criterion, but rather their native speaker
knowledge; to them nouns 'were' of a certain gender,
end of story.

If I were to pick a syntactic criterion I'd probably pick
which form of certain determiners like _hic, iste, ille,
ipse, qui_ a noun takes, exactly because adjectives come in
two flavors, one of which (3d declension adjectives)
distinguish only two genders.

AFMOC none of my a-priori conlangs has gender as a category,
although the Sohloçan languages distinguish between animate
and inanimate categories, according to which different nouns
behave differently syntactically, and since there is no hard
and fast 'scientific' criterion a noun belongs to (e.g.
celestial bodies, fire, water, bodies of water, metals,
houses and musical instruments are animate, while bugs are
inanimate) I guess the distinction borders on a gender
distinction.
--

/BP 8^)
--
   B.Philip Jonsson mailto:melrochX@melroch.se (delete X)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Truth, Sir, is a cow which will give [skeptics] no more milk,
and so they are gone to milk the bull."
                                     -- Sam. Johnson (no rel. ;)