Re: Gender of rivers - and other waters.

> Lars Finsen <lars.finsen@...> wrote:
>
> It struck me that the Suraetuan rivers all have masculine endings,
> and I guess the Suraetuans must think of their waters as a kind of
> semen that fertilises the Earth. Maybe you people who have such wide
> repertoires of languages can tell me how common this is? Of course,
> many languages don't have a gender system. Of the languages I know
> anything about, at least German has a masculine word for river, but
> the majority of the others seem to be feminine. How are you dealing
> with this in your conlangs?
Senjecas has six classes of nouns.  All things being equal, rivers
would go in the -os class, the class of perceptible objects.

However, the mythology of the Senjecans puts certain natural phenomena
in the -es class, the animate class.  These phenomena include sun,
moon, stars, planets, earth, wind, oceans/seas, and rivers (brooks,
streams, etc.).  It looks as though "self-" movement might be the
criterion for including these phenomena in the animate class.

Charlie

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