hindupridemn wrote:Is it trueness that Sanskrit has four genders?
I believe it only has three.
Moderator:Ashucky
hindupridemn wrote:Is it trueness that Sanskrit has four genders?
Babelfish wrote:नमस्ते
(no ! or ? on Devanagari keyboard?)
I'm not actively studying Sanskrit just yet, only gathering bits and pieces out of curiosity... I've been practising yoga for the last couple of years, so I got familiar with some Sanskrit words and terms. I'm not sure how long I could stand the temptation to delve into an ancient language with a complex grammar, Latin & Greek cognates, various words I encounter in yoga and elsewhere, and generally written with an awesome script The script I'm already studying - speaking of which, I found the conjuncts table in Wikipedia more intimidating than useful, so I copied it and colored the conjuncts according to the rules they're based on. Please have a look!
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/67621112/Devanagari%20Biconsonantal%20Conjuncts.html
I'd love it if you tell me whether you think it's useful, needs improvements, or has errors. I might make one for the Ethiopic script too
mōdgethanc wrote:Genders are a type of noun class, but not all noun classes are genders.
Anyway, to answer Meera's question:
Some Slavic languages, including Russian, Czech, and Slovak, make grammatical distinctions between animate and inanimate nouns (in Czech only in the masculine gender; in Russian only in masculine singular, but in the plural in all genders). Another example is Polish, which can be said to distinguish five genders: personal masculine (referring to male humans), animate non-personal masculine, inanimate masculine, feminine, and neuter.
You can get more genders when you add features like animacy (whether something is living or not).
Yes, Bantu languages have complex systems of noun classes, which are like gender but more complex. Swahili has sixteen of them including ones for people, nature, objects and animals. Xhosa has fifteen. They work kind of like measure wordsin Chinese and Indonesian. If you look up Swahili you can see what some of the prefixes are. For example ki- is the noun class that includes languages, which is why the language is called Kiswahili, and its speakers are called Waswahili. In Xhosa the language is isiXhosa and the people are amaXhosa. I guess they're kind of like cases, but the difference is that cases show the grammatical function of words while noun classes cover their meaning.Meera wrote:Oh! I think Swahili and some other African langauges like Xhosa, does this also. I'm not sure if Sanskrit does this or not, but it does have eight cases I think.
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