Re: Genders

On Tue, Sep 05, 2000 at 08:39:09PM -0400, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
[snip]
> Korean doesn't have grammatical gender even in pronouns (no "real" 3rd
> person pronouns, but demonstratives used instead).
Strictly speaking, Mandarin doesn't actually have grammatical gender at
all. I suspect the only place grammatical gender actually appears is in
*written* feminine pronouns, as I said before... AFAIK it doesn't happen
anywhere else. But IIRC, I've actually seen written pronouns "inflected"
(if you call it that) for ... umm... whaddya call it? Written differently
when it refers to God. In fact, that's how the "feminine" written pronouns
are: e.g., "ta1" (nasal, dunno what's the right notation) is written with
two parts; the "feminine" written form just replaces the "human/man" part
on the left with the logograph of "female"; and similarly, a part derived
from God(?) becomes the replacement in the written pronouns referring to
deity. But AFAIK, this makes absolutely no difference in pronunciation at
all, and so basically only exists in writing.

As for demonstratives... Classical Greek exhibits the same phenomenon,
too. The original 3rd person pronouns were dropped, and demonstratives
took their place. Also, in all cases except the nominative, "autou^" acts
as a replacement. Disclaimer: this is one of my blurrer areas in Greek, so
a better-clued person on the list please step up and correct me if I'm
wrong :-)

> My current conlang doesn't use gender because I wanted to experiment with
> case first.  :-)  I'd like to do a multi-gender system like that of
> Swahili someday, though, because categorizing things and associated
> culture-building sound like a lot of fun.
[snip]

I basically jumped right into full noun inflection in my conlang: number,
case, gender. And I was stupid/bold/crazy enough to start with totally
unconventional systems for these, too. Three numbers: nullar, singular,
plural; five genders(!): masc., fem., neut., double, epicene; five cases:
originative, receptive, instrumental, conveyant, locative.

I'm especially having LOTS of fun with the five noun cases, because I've
*ahem* *cough* skillfully crafted them according to my conculture; and now
I'm giving those five cases alternative functions in non-verbal sentences.
(I'll restrain myself from describing the cases when used with a verb
again, as I've done that before. :-P)

For example:
- a sentence with two locative nouns means identity, e.g.:
        pii'z3di esii'min       ("That man(loc) [is] Simon(loc).")
- a sentence with a conveyant and locative indicates a partitive
  relationship (eg. "red is a color", i.e., red is a kind of color) but
  also indicates ... umm.. sub-part? like "the house(loc) has many
  rooms(cvy)".
- a sentence with an originative noun and a conveyant indicates source:
  e.g., "he(cvy) is her(org) [son]". Also used for attributive
  descriptions: "she(org) is beautiful(cvy)", literally, "she shows forth
  beauty".

It's hard to appreciate the beauty (ahem) of these constructions unless
you understand the conculture behind it... but I hope to make my webpage
kinda ready for public consumption soon, so anyone who's actually
interested can find out more about my (weird?) conlang/conculture. :-)


T