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Re: Genders

From:H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...>
Date:Tuesday, September 5, 2000, 20:30
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