Gender in conlangs

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Avo
greek
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Location: Berlin, Germany

Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by Avo »

Most of my conlangs have an animacy distinction but no gender or noun classes, so I decided to make gender agreement an areal feature of the part of my conworld I'm currently working on.

My Puric language family has a system that goes back to Proto-Puric's four noun classes: A for humans, B for animates, C for inanimates and D for uncountables. In Classical Dinarean, one of its descendants and the main literary language of the region, the system was heavily restructured and the language ended up with 6-7 noun classes: class I includes mostly humans, class II mostly non-human animates, class III further animates, class IV and V various inanimates and class VI mass nouns and uncountables.
A small subset of words, most of them body parts, usually take class IV markers but can take class VI's markers under some circumstancens and thus could count as a seventh noun class. Another subset of nouns denoting female humans ended up in class II, these are loanwords from a neighbouring language. What happened here is that the definite article from the source language has been reanalyzed as a class II marker in Classical Dinarean.

The neighbouring Rheic languages used to have a simple animacy distinction, but the animate class split into male/female shortly before the proto-language broke up into different languages, and all animates have been redistributed into either one of those for purely phonological reasons.
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eldin raigmore
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Re: Grammatical Gender

Post by eldin raigmore »

Micamo wrote: 25 Sep 2015 06:30 ....
Second, there's an optional system where you can inflect a verb with a female human participant as indefinite rather than third person. Choosing to refer to a woman as indefinite is considered a mark of affection toward her. However it's impossible to refer to a male or animal participant this way, so it qualifies as a "gender" system if only a very weak one.
....
I think speaking in the indefinite of one to whom one feels affection could be the result of shyness.
A boy might speak of “a young woman” instead of “the young woman” or “that young woman” because he was or is shy about casually or habitually admitting his affection for her.
His listeners might pragmatically infer that if he’s shy about speaking of her as definite, it must be because he feels affection for her; such affection that he can’t help noticing it each time he speaks of her.
This might spread so that everyone who feels affection to any particular woman always refers to her as “a woman”, even if for instance they are a couple who have famously been married to each other for many years; for instance, maybe the old king refers to his Queen, the mother or grandmother of all the princes and princesses, as “a woman”.
And all the listeners who speak the language understand that implication.
....
Too bad Micamo is no longer likely to even see this post, much less respond to it.
Anyone know how she’s doing?
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