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Re: Gender in conlangs (was: Re: Umlauts (was Re: Elves and Ill Bethisad))

From:Peter Bleackley <peter.bleackley@...>
Date:Thursday, November 6, 2003, 10:17
Staving Costentin Cornomorus:

> > > > Let's call them (temporarly) "subjectal" and > > "objectal". If you re-read my > > previous posts making the substitution, I think > > everything will become clearer. > >Mot especially - the problem presents. Subject >and object are intimately linked with case. > >If you want to construct a noun system whose >nouns change gender depending on their role in a >sentence, I think you would do to come up with >better names!
I came up with a similar system a while ago. http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0308A&L=conlang&P=R11509
> > If it doesn't work, re-try with > > "gender 1" and "gender 2". These > > are just (badly chosen) *names.* > >To be honest, I'll just stick with "subjective" >and "objective", replacing with animate/inanimate >or similar as necessary.
I used active, stative, passive, instrumental and receptive.
> > These grammatical genders are meant to separate > > what is or looks like a > > person from what doesn't. > > >Well, like I said, neologisms certainly have >their place. If you're using them to describe >existing subject matter (like if you come up with >the term "spanners" when talking about words like >"and"), you'd do us all a favour to also use the >accepted name (in this case, conjunction). > >Such speculation can be very fun when you've >discovered enough of the language's culture to >begin to see how native speakers would describe >their own language.
Suffixes in Khangaþyagon are called segunakar, literally "follow-parts". There are also terms for the different ranks of segunak (modsegunak, densegunak, radsegunak etc.) relating to their realtive position following the stem. Pete

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Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...>