Re: Genders

At 6:10 pm -0700 5/9/00, DOUGLAS KOLLER wrote:
>From: "H. S. Teoh"
>
>> 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.
>
>Gee, just one?  Across the French/Spanish divide with which I'm a little
>more familiar, the classic example is la fin/el fin
And
French has 'un pont' (a bridge) & 'le pont' (the bridge) - masculine;
whereas...
 Welsh has 'pont' (a bridge) & 'y bont' (the bridge) - feminine.
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At 9:45 pm -0400 5/9/00, H. S. Teoh wrote:
[....]
>
>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 :-)
In fact, you are basically correct  :)
The only error is:
"The original 3rd person pronouns were dropped, and demonstratives
took their place."

There were no original 3rd pers. pronouns!  What happens for _all_ personal
pronouns is that where we'd use subject pronouns they simply used verb
endings (as, indeed, is the case in most of the Romance langs still today).
Special forms were used for the nominative of the 1st & 2nd persons if
emphasis or clarity were required; in the case of the 3rd person pronouns
demonstratives were, as Teoh correctly says, used for this purpose.  Latin
behaved in the same way.

Where, however, Latin & Greek parted company was on the oblique cases of
the 3rd person pronoun: Latin also used the same demonstratives as for the
nominative forms; ancient Greek, as Teoh says, used autoû etc for the
oblique forms.

Ray.


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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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