Re: feminine, masculine and... ?

On Fri, 22 Sep 2000, H. S. Teoh wrote:

> 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.
I saw a description of the Swahili gender system (7 categories, I
believe?) and thought, Hey, neat.  For Chevraqis I passed on the option;
the morphological structure enables me to encode cultural concepts fairly
well:

rasaru: to journey
rasaíru: swift (adjective, though adjectives are really verbs)
rasra: horse
rasrana: journey, migration
resra: wind

So saying "the horse is swift as the wind" (rasra resras rasaíras) is
almost a redundant statement.  :-)

If I ever get the chance to start a 2nd conlang, though, I'd love to have
a multiple-distinctions gender system.  I'm trying to think of one that
*isn't* animate/inanimate/abstract or some variation thereof, though I'm
too brain-dead to try to think of one right now.

YHL, signing off and wishing she could get sleep now instead of in 2 hrs