Re: Genders

On Tue, Sep 05, 2000 at 04:45:53PM +0200, Mangiat wrote:
[snip]
> And about a IE-like 3-gender system: is it common, or a peculiarity of our
> language-family? Are there other families with this kind of gender system?
*Our* language family? *ahem*. Oh, you mean exclusive first person
plural... ;-) (just kidding)

English is the only language I'm fluent with that has gender built into
it. (Well, I know some basic classical Greek, but I think others on this
list are more qualified to talk about that!) Although some Mandarin texts
differentiate between masculine and feminine in pronouns, they aren't
pronounced differently anyway, so it doesn't matter. Malay doesn't have
gender either AFAIK. It might've had it in older forms of the language,
but unfortunately I was a bad student back in those days when I had to
learn Malay... :-(

But I *have* heard about European languages which assign genders to
non-animate objects in a basically arbitrary way. IIRC, there's a
masculine word in Spanish which is feminine in Portuguese. (I forgot which
one it is now, and I don't want to make a big fool of myself by guessing
what it might be :-P )

As far as conlangs go, tho, my conlang has 5 genders, which I won't bother
repeating here unless you want me to, since I've posted lengthy
descriptions of it to the list before. But it's basically an extension of
the masculine-feminine-neuter system from IE. Other conlangs also have
other more interesting gender systems, but I'll let them speak for their
own conlangs. :-)


T