Moderators:Ashucky, Dormouse559
Dormouse559 wrote:Worth remembering that the names are just names. If you want to put gods in the Things gender, that makes a lot of sense. Perhaps a different name would be more fitting. The labels aren't an inherent part of the genders; they simply describe a pre-existing phenomenon.
Atluk wrote:Like Dormouse said, I should rename them. Maybe Sentient, Animal, and Miscellaneous, or simply Class A, Class B, and Class C.
Atluk wrote:I guess I prefer animacy, but I'm creating an agglutinating language and the vast majority of those have gender based on animacy, so I want it to stand out from them.
Atluk wrote:I recall that the link to animacy you posted put plants between animals and objects, but I want to lump them into one class with the Concrete Objects. Idk if it makes sense to do it like that or not.
Typically (with some variation of order and of where the cutoff for animacy occurs), the scale ranks humans above animals, then plants, natural forces, concrete objects, and abstract objects, in that order.
Atluk wrote:Also, I have been toying the idea of having genders based on tangibility. There are tangible nouns like people, money, land, food, tools, etc., and then things like the sky are considered intangible.
English actually seems to have this with intangible nouns like love and bravery, so I don't think it's necessary for a language to make such a distinction.
linguoboy wrote:Atluk wrote:I recall that the link to animacy you posted put plants between animals and objects, but I want to lump them into one class with the Concrete Objects. Idk if it makes sense to do it like that or not.Typically (with some variation of order and of where the cutoff for animacy occurs), the scale ranks humans above animals, then plants, natural forces, concrete objects, and abstract objects, in that order.
Key word is "typically". I don't see an issue with the variation you propose.Atluk wrote:Also, I have been toying the idea of having genders based on tangibility. There are tangible nouns like people, money, land, food, tools, etc., and then things like the sky are considered intangible.
English actually seems to have this with intangible nouns like love and bravery, so I don't think it's necessary for a language to make such a distinction.
What's the difference for you between "tangible" and "concrete"?
Dormouse559 wrote:(Again, you don't have to keep the name "Humans". Why not "Sentient"?)
Dormouse559 wrote:1) They allow for more pronoun usage without introducing ambiguity. Speakers of most European languages probably take it for granted that they can introduce Dick and Jane, then use feminine pronouns/agreement and have everyone understand which person they mean. Larger gender systems (also called noun class) allow for even more pronouns. Imagine splitting "it" three different ways or more.
2) They let phonological material be recycled. Romance languages have plenty of word pairs that are differentiated only by gender agreement and maybe a thematic vowel. In French, "manche" means "handle" with masculine agreement and "sleeve" with feminine agreement. And in languages like Swahili, genders as derivation are even more productive.
3) They add redundancy, which is anathema to many a conlanger, but redundancy is how we can understand utterances despite interference, like loud noises or static. If I don't hear the noun, but I hear the adjective, and it's in the gender specifically reserved for fruit (or male adults or weapons), I might be able to guess the noun from context.
I mean either. I'm more familiar with the usage of "sentient" as a synonym of "sapient". Your source calls that a mistake; I call it semantic drift.Llawygath wrote:Because non-human animals are also sentient. You probably mean "sapient".
Dormouse559 wrote:I mean either. I'm more familiar with the usage of "sentient" as a synonym of "sapient". Your source calls that a mistake; I call it semantic drift.
Llawygath wrote:I might use genders based on animacy in a future project, but the one I'm working on now already has eleven cases and a few dozen declensions, so I don't think I'll add more complexity to the nouns. I have enough trouble keeping them straight.
Ashucky wrote:Talking about complexity, take a look at Archi
Serafín wrote:Dormouse559 wrote:1) They allow for more pronoun usage without introducing ambiguity. Speakers of most European languages probably take it for granted that they can introduce Dick and Jane, then use feminine pronouns/agreement and have everyone understand which person they mean. Larger gender systems (also called noun class) allow for even more pronouns. Imagine splitting "it" three different ways or more.
2) They let phonological material be recycled. Romance languages have plenty of word pairs that are differentiated only by gender agreement and maybe a thematic vowel. In French, "manche" means "handle" with masculine agreement and "sleeve" with feminine agreement. And in languages like Swahili, genders as derivation are even more productive.
3) They add redundancy, which is anathema to many a conlanger, but redundancy is how we can understand utterances despite interference, like loud noises or static. If I don't hear the noun, but I hear the adjective, and it's in the gender specifically reserved for fruit (or male adults or weapons), I might be able to guess the noun from context.
Elaborating on 2) with more examples:
- In Romance languages (where it's not productive at all and there's no pattern) you get cases like Spanish punto 'dot' and punta 'tip [of a pencil/spear]', Spanish puerto 'dock' and puerta 'door', French grain '(edible) grain' and graine 'seed'.
- Arabic, which has masculine and feminine gender, has a series of collective-singulative nouns where the collective is formed with the masculine and the singulative is formed with the feminine: shajar 'group of trees' and shajara 'a tree', laHm 'meat' and laHma 'piece of meat'.
- Bantu languages, with their many genders or "noun classes" (typically 7-12: one for humans, another for animals, another for diminutives, another for mass nouns, another for abstract nouns, another for infinitives...), similarly have examples of derivation across genders. Agent nouns are typically derived by taking an infinitive and changing its gender prefix to a human gender prefix, as in Sesotho ho-bina 'to sing' (infinitive gender) -> mo-bini 'singer' (human gender), se-bini 'professional singer' (professional attribute gender, also used for languages; corresponds to the diminutive/language gender in Swahili). This process naturally lends itself for abstract nouns too: ho-rata 'to love' (infinitive gender) -> bo-rato 'love' (abstract noun gender).
- We're getting out of the territory of what's usually considered "gender" now, but consider Chinese classifiers. These are not genders, since nouns can often take more than one possible classifier, with just a little nuance in meaning. The nuances can be made interesting though. There's the classic nuance of respect/formality: Mandarin 三位人 sān wèi rén 'three people' (wèi is a classifier for people that sounds formal) is more formal than 三个人 sān ge rén (using the generic classifier ge). But sometimes the classifier lets you specify a certain meaning: Mandarin 课 kè alone means either 'course' or 'lesson', but if you use classifiers you get 三门课 sān mén kè 'three courses' (using the subject classifier mén) and 三节课 sān jié kè 'three lessons' (using the segment classifier jié). You can easily imagine creating genders from this across time.
Also:
4) It can be used to support free word order (subject verb object, object subject verb...) without actually using cases, as in Swahili.
Atluk wrote:IIRC, the masculine nouns in Catalan seem to lack a suffix, while feminine nouns end with -a.
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