Re: What's a gender?
| From: | Eldin Raigmore <eldin_raigmore@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, December 21, 2006, 19:43 |
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Sorry I didn't get around to answering your questions before!
On Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:15:28 -0500, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
>What constitutes grammatical gender?
A concordial noun-class.
>Does there have to be an acknowledged connection to biological sex, as in
>most European langs?
No.
However some linguists (e.g. Aikhenvald) would like for at least one of the
genders to have something to do with biological sex, in order to use the
term "gender". This would be a change from the current use of the term.
>Chinese and Japanese have different "counting words" or "counters" for
>different classes of noun. For instance, Japanese, "one person" is
>"hitori", while "one fish" is "itibi", the suffixes "ri" and "bi"
>having no obvious connection with the normal nouns for "person" and
>"fish". I've sometimes heard it said that these classes constitute
>gender, but is that generally considered true?
Yes, those are generally considered "genders" by most linguists. But some
have various reasons for thinking otherwise.
1) In some languages these noun-classes aren't concordial -- that is, they
don't require agreement with the noun-class in significantly many other
words.
2) Some linguists don't like to use the word "gender" when there are "too
many" noun-classes.
>There are an awful lot of them, and several nouns are in a class by
>themselves.
See above.
>The fact that some Japanese counters take the native numbers and some
>the Chinese ones (hito vs iti) would seem to define two broad
>categories that might constitute gender...
Maybe so ... or, maybe, "supergenders"? There are such things
as "subgenders", according to Corbett.
>Anyway, just wondering what the criteria are. If my conlang has noun
>classes, does it therefore have gender,
If other words must agree with the noun's class, then Yes, that is the
majority view.
>or does it depend on more specific details of how the classes work?
Well, one specific detail it does depend on is; do other words have to
agree with the nouns' class?
Otherwise, there is a minority view that if there are "too many" classes,
they should just be called "classes" instead of "genders"; and there is an
even smaller minority which insists that at least one of the genders should
be (mostly) based on biological sex.
>--
>Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
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