Re: Re : Re: Fw: irregular conlangs

Paul Bennett wrote:
> This strikes me as being the remnant of a complex Gender system in
> proto-japanese.
>
> Is there any truth in that?
From what I've read, Japanese borrowed counters from Chinese, which
developed them to distinguish between the increasingly large number of
homophones (even with tones, Mandarin had a lot of homophones until it
began to use disyllabic roots)

Besides, counter systems are one possibility of the ORIGIN of gender,
not the other way around.

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