Re: Nauradi

On Sun, 23 Nov 2008 14:30:14 -0700, Scotto Hlad <scott.hlad@...> wrote:

>I'm thinking then that as the anatomical sex endings are only used when it
>is necessary to differentiate gender that there should be only an animate
>and inanimate personal pronoun and when differentiation is necessary, the
>same male/female suffix could be added. Are there any natlangs that function
>this way?
I second this call for ANADEW.  Among conlangs it seems to be very prevalent
that languages profess not to mark the masculine / feminine distinction, but
then in the pronoun system there's a masculine and a feminine suffix that
can be added in case disambiguation is necessary, or in case the speakers
for some reason want to make a person's sex known.

Among the natlangs I can think of, though, this doesn't happen.  Mostly not
marking for gender means, across the board, not marking for gender;
sometimes instead the pronouns will show an extra gender distinction, but
that will be obligatory.  If one regards English as having singular "they",
then perhaps it's a case where there are contrastive genderless / masculine
/ feminine pronouns, but still "they" is the marked member of the
opposition, and I don't think anyone can use it completely freely, e.g. with
definite antecedents of a specified sex: *"[My mother_i] broke their_i hip
yesterday".  But I can't think of any case with a genderless / masculine /
feminine system where the genderless term is the unmarked one.

(Frankly, seeing this in conlangs kinda gives me the impression that the
author doesn't want the English masculine/feminine distinction but can't
quite stomach giving it up.  No reason to let this deter you, of course;
it's your lang.)

Alex

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