Re: What's a gender?

Mark wrote:
<<
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?
 >>

Yes (to the first).  The way "gender" is used is it's supposed to be
a metaphor.
In humans, we have male and female genders, and you can tell
them apart by their reproductive organs.  In language X, there
are four genders, and you can tell them apart by the agreement
they showcase on the verb:

Gender 1: ma-/-m (subject/object)
Gender 2: se-/-s
Gender 3: li-/-l
Gender 4: ko-/-k

That exponence is equivalent to the reproductive organs of
humans, in this extended metaphor.  So you treat nouns themselves
like humans, and you divide them by gender, based on the
characteristics of the language.

The reason that gender is tied in with human gender is because
the gender systems that we looked at first (insert reference here),
are all Indo-European, and those were called masculine, feminine
and neuter, because the human male nouns would generally go
into the first category, and the female human nouns the second.
This is a coincidence, based on how the linguists I know would use
the term "gender".  The name for each gender is derived by looking
at the common theme for the prototypical members of each
category.  So let's say a language didn't distinguish between
male and female nouns morphologically, but instead the genders
were like this:

Gender 1: man, woman, child, professor, student, artist...
Gender 2: mouse, dog, horse, gnat, ostrich, elephant, cat...
Gender 3: rose, grass, ivy, tulip, palm tree, tomato, celery...
Gender 4: telephone, book, hoof, roof, rock, orchard, spider, actor...

If this were your distribution, it might be best to call the genders
"Human (or High Animate)", "Animal (or Low Animate)", "Plant"
and "Miscellaneous (or Other)".

Mark:
<<
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?  There are an awful lot
of them, and several nouns are in a class by themselves.
 >>

It would seem so to me, based on your description.

Now the difference between a classifier system and gender is
that I guess noun classifier systems are more limited, aren't used
in verbal agreement (?), and/or aren't used in derivation, whereas
noun classes/genders are (or can be).  I've never been comfortable
with the distinction, and every time I've heard it explained, I haven't
necessarily agreed with it.  Perhaps others can help fill us in.
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.  In practice, though, the
noun classifier system I created for Sheli is rather similar in many
ways to the noun class system of Zhyler.  In fact, in the dictionary
I define each word as a noun followed by the classifier it takes,
much the way I do with noun classes in Zhyler.  Here's an
explanation of both systems:

http://dedalvs.free.fr/sheli/nclassifiers.html
http://dedalvs.free.fr/zhyler/nclasses.html

-David
*******************************************************************
"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

Reply