Re: Animacy of nouns

On 9/10/05, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:
> Carsten wrote:
> <<
> My question is how do you know how animate a
> noun is compared to another one? Are there rules (maybe only
> rules of thumb), or is this completely up to the speaker, or
> are there groups of "objects with high animateness",
> "objects with an average animacy", "objects with a low
> animacy", "inanimate objects", i.e. some kind of noun
> classes for this?
>  >>
>
> First, this is language-specific.  So, for example, first person
> tends to be more animate than second person, but there's a
> rather famous native American language (I just can't remember
> the name) where second person is more animate than first.
I believe it is a Yuman language (Maricopa, Yavapai, Walapai, Mojave,
etc). I liked this feature, so I included it in Miapimoquitch.

Dirk
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