Genders & Re: Elvish-Based Conlangs

On Wed, 9 Aug 2000 21:44:25 -0400 "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...>
writes:
> In a nutshell, the "ambiguous" gender serves as a kind of "wildcard"
> that
> can "become" either masculine and feminine (but not neuter) as
> needed.
> Any comments/suggestions? "ambivalent" sounds OK to me, but
> "ambiguous"
> seems somewhat awkward. (It does happen to sound like "ambivalent",
> that's
> why I chose it in the first place.) I've seen a related word
> somewhere
> that uses omni- but I forgot the exact word. (omniline? ominine?
> anybody knows?)
> Thanks!
> T
-

Rokbeigalmki has a similar system, except with only 4 genders: male,
female, common, and neuter.  The neuter gender is only used for inanimate
objects, while the common (formerly called "neutral" but someone
suggested i change it so it doesn't get confused with "neuter") gender is
used when you either don't know or don't care about the person/thing
you're referring to's gender, or it's a mixed group, or the thing is not
inanimate but doesn't have gender.

I like your idea of the "ambivalent" gender!


-Stephen (Steg)

PS- everyone seems to be supporting the term "epicine"....should i change
my _common_ to that, or is there a difference?


RE: ELVISH-BASED CONLANGS

PPS- just tacking this on here to save bandwidth, Rokbeigalmki isn't
Elvish-based, but it does have loanwords from Proto-Elvish and (to a
lesser extent) Nandorin, since the Rokbeigalm live in Tolkien's world.