Re: Epicene & neuter (Was: Re: The meaning of "ilicom" (perhaps hungarian?))

> My conlang has a neuter gender and an epicene gender.  The neuter is used
> for all non-living things, abstract nouns, and genderless living things.
> For gendered living things, the epicene is used when (1) the noun is a
> collective noun that refers to both males/females (2) the gender of the
> referent is unknown (3) the speaker is speaking in general terms and
> wishes the statement to apply to both males and females.
>
>
> T
>
Nice. What I am doing  - and why I at the moment prefer to call the gender
"unspecified" rather than "epicene" - is to have a sing. 3rd person pronoun
"ili" (probably accompanied by "ila" and "ilo" for fem./masc., and perhaps all
of them having double L instead of single L, not quite sure yet), which can
serve for
- expressing neuter
- referring to a person whose sex is unknown, perhaps because the person
iliself is not known yet ("The applicant for this position... he/she must have
the following skills...")
- all usages of 3rd pers. sing., especially for learners from language
backgrounds which do not have that distinction - just use "ili" for "he/she/it"
and you are correct

The second point is most important to me - in my native german, I sometimes
have to deal with texts which legally require gender neutrality, which is a
good thing IMHO, but not nice looking ("Der/die Bewerber(in) für diese
Stelle... er/sie muss über die folgenden Qualifikationen verfügen"). I do not want
such an uglyness in my conlang.

Oh, and another thing: calling this construction a "gender" is probably not
quite correct, because the lang does not really have grammatical gender, it
is more an option to describe the sex of the person or animal referred to.

Greetings

Cavallero

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