Re: feminine, masculine and... ?

Le cavallero wrote:
>
> I have been thinking about the possibility for a grammar with pronouns to
> have genders for masculine and feminine for people and animals according to
> natural sex and a third category which serves optionally either for the
> traditional neuter or for such nouns representing a person or animal where the
> gender need not or can not be named.
> Hardly an original thought, probably...
In fact, quite a number of others have used this in their langs,
including me:
Nur-ellen also has such pronouns (and, in addition to that, inanimate
pronouns which are distinct from all three of the above).

There also have been repeated attempts to introduce such
"gender-neutral"
pronouns into English.  An obvious solution would be using "it", but
people
apparently cannot get used to address each other that way, as "it" has
strong non-human, if not inanimte, connotations.  Another, more
successful
proposal is to use "they" as a gender-neutral singular pronoun.

That an idea is not new doesn't mean that it isn't good, however.

> I do have trouble finding an appropriate name for this third gender. Just
> calling it neuter would not really point out the additional possibility of
> use which you dont usually have in natural languages, at least not in those
> of west european origin.
An agreeable term would be "common gender", I think; at least I prefer
calling
it this way.  Another term occasionally used is "epicene".

Jörg.