Re: feminine, masculine and... ?

On Fri, Sep 22, 2000 at 09:38:38AM -0500, Dan Seriff wrote:
[snip]
> Both my conlangs have non-Indo-European centered gender systems.
> Mungayöd has 4: human, animal, matter, concept. Ylank has 7: masculine
> human, feminine human, child human, animal, vegetable, matter, concept.
> I'm shooting for most of the languages on my planet to have primarily an
> animate/inanimate/conceptual distinction, although some languages will
> be more resolute in their distinctions.
[snip]

Hey, I like this idea of distinguishing between noun categories, more than
just physical gender. I especially like the idea of having a separate
grammatical gender for conceptual objects. Perhaps I should think about
incorporating more genders into my conlang, since currently, it's based on
physical gender, so most nouns are neuter -- it might be better to split
up this rather large category of neuter nouns so that at least abstract
nouns are distinguished from genderless physical nouns.


T