Gender in conlangs

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xroox
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Re: Grammatical Gender

Post by xroox »

Tnaaq has 4 genders: masculine, feminine, animate and inanimate. Masculine and feminine are almost conflated to a human gender. Nouns only show gender prefixes if they also have some definite prefixes (k- for specific things and q- for those already mentioned):
k-a-syranq: the (specific) old man (human)
q-a-syranq: the (already mentioned) old man
k-u-niixar: the sheep (animate)
k-y-kistar: the chair (inanimate)
BUT: syranq, niixar, kistar: a (non specific) old man, sheep, chair

Verbs don't show any gender agreement, "adjectives" neither since those are stative verbs.

The part of the grammar where gender shows more is when the noun is only one syllable long. Then a gender prefix (independent of the other gender prefix attached to definites) appears to make it bisyllabic.
naas: baby
ta-naas: a male baby (masculine)
na-naas: a female baby (feminine)
ua-naas: an animal baby/a 'no sex specific' baby/ some human or animal babies (this prefix is used for animates, to leave sex ambiguous and is the plural form of human and animate nouns, too)
a-qai: light (inanimate)
These prefixes don't get dropped if a definite is used:
k-a-ta-naas: the (male) baby
k-u-ua-hqtaiq (kuuhqtaiq): the rabbit
k-y-a-qai (kaaqai): the light
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Re: Grammatical Gender

Post by clawgrip »

Thank you for this thread. After posting about my language above, I started thinking about how gender would be represented, and I came up with some new ideas for marking gender on adjectives.

What I came up with:
Superclass gender (rational vs. irrational) will be marked on all adjectives, either by suffixes or ablaut arising from lost suffixes. It will be also marked by the dedicated superclass gender plurals.

Subclass gender (masculine vs. feminine and tangible vs. intangible) will be marked only on certain adjectives, and explicitly through suffixes. These will tend to be the more basic adjectives.

Derived and multimorphemic adjectives will not mark subclass gender at all.
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by Larryrl »

My conlang Nagala, has a suffix for feminine in nouns but it only refers to female persons.
Bu mac zoom pana shem.
Me too sexy for shirt.
Bu mac zoom pana shem.
Me too sexy for shirt.
Kle mac bu run
So sexyI hurt


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HoskhMatriarch
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by HoskhMatriarch »

Larryrl wrote:My conlang Nagala, has a suffix for feminine in nouns but it only refers to female persons.
That's not grammatical gender. If there are seperate pronouns for "he" and "she", that's semantic gender though, which may or may not count as grammatical gender, I don't know.

Iparxi_Zoi wrote:
Xing wrote:What genders/noun classes do you tend to have in your conlangs? Do you prefer to have few or many? Semantically or formally based? How are your genders/noun-classes manifested? (What kind of agreement do they trigger?)

If you don't have "pure" genders, do you tend to have something similar (like classifiers of various kind)?

An earlier stage of Wakeu made a distinction between animate and inanimate nouns, but I decided to scrap that distinction. Maybe I will reintroduce some kind of distinction between animate and inanimate nouns - though not a fully developed gender system.

I hope to be able to make a language with a masculine/feminine distinction one day.
Currently the only conlang that has gender is Classic Lathian, an Indo-European conlang. Unlike other Indo-European languages, the neuter gender is used with groups of mixed gender, and is also the default "unmarked" form of a noun (i.e. αυέο (m.) "maternal grandfather" αυέαα (f.) "maternal grandmother" αυέυ (n.) "maternal grandparent").

My a priori conlang, Proto-Meganesian, has no grammatical gender, and so far the only words that distinguish between natural gender are ʧetop "man" ʧijat "woman" zuloʧep "husband" and zuloʧit "wife".

I can understand the reason for having grammatical gender (i.e. noun classification) but I prefer not to. But then again, I'm more uptight about verbs that I am about nouns. :mrgreen:
You can have verbs agree with gender. I like doing that, mostly because I think there's no point in having a pro-drop language with gender if you don't.
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by Larryrl »

HoskhMatriarch wrote:
Larryrl wrote:My conlang Nagala, has a suffix for feminine in nouns but it only refers to female persons.
That's not grammatical gender. If there are seperate pronouns for "he" and "she", that's semantic gender though, which may or may not count as grammatical gender, I don't know.

Iparxi_Zoi wrote:
Xing wrote:What genders/noun classes do you tend to have in your conlangs? Do you prefer to have few or many? Semantically or formally based? How are your genders/noun-classes manifested? (What kind of agreement do they trigger?)

If you don't have "pure" genders, do you tend to have something similar (like classifiers of various kind)?

An earlier stage of Wakeu made a distinction between animate and inanimate nouns, but I decided to scrap that distinction. Maybe I will reintroduce some kind of distinction between animate and inanimate nouns - though not a fully developed gender system.

I hope to be able to make a language with a masculine/feminine distinction one day.
Currently the only conlang that has gender is Classic Lathian, an Indo-European conlang. Unlike other Indo-European languages, the neuter gender is used with groups of mixed gender, and is also the default "unmarked" form of a noun (i.e. αυέο (m.) "maternal grandfather" αυέαα (f.) "maternal grandmother" αυέυ (n.) "maternal grandparent").

My a priori conlang, Proto-Meganesian, has no grammatical gender, and so far the only words that distinguish between natural gender are ʧetop "man" ʧijat "woman" zuloʧep "husband" and zuloʧit "wife".



You can have verbs agree with gender. I like doing that, mostly because I think there's no point in having a pro-drop language with gender if you don't.
I can understand the reason for having grammatical gender (i.e. noun classification) but I prefer not to. But then again, I'm more uptight about verbs that I am about nouns. :mrgreen:
Hoskh, You are right about the pronouns being gender specific, if you have a different word for He than you do for She. I also understand the difference between the grammatical feminine ending -in that Esperanto uses and the -o -a that Spanish uses after much help from this forum of coutse [:)] . But, why have gender specific words like in Spanish? How does knowing that silla chair is a feminine gender noun, help my conversation any? Also, what is up with the la el thing? I know la is used with silla because both end in -a, but in German there is like "das" and "dar", and one or two other words for "the". How many ways do we need, to say the word "the"? :mrgreen:
Bu mac zoom pana shem.
Me too sexy for shirt.
Bu mac zoom pana shem.
Me too sexy for shirt.
Kle mac bu run
So sexyI hurt


Beef steak is good
wos pis ho tu
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by Egerius »

Larryrl wrote:Hoskh, You are right about the pronouns being gender specific, if you have a different word for He than you do for She. I also understand the difference between the grammatical feminine ending -in that Esperanto uses and the -o -a that Spanish uses after much help from this forum of coutse [:)] . But, why have gender specific words like in Spanish? How does knowing that silla chair is a feminine gender noun, help my conversation any? Also, what is up with the la el thing? I know la is used with silla because both end in -a, but in German there is like "das" and "der", and one or two other words for "the". How many ways do we need, to say the word "the"? :mrgreen:
The thing with definite and indefinite articles is, that when you have a language that does no longer have a non-ambiguous case marking in nouns (because, for example, all vowels reduced to one in unstressed, word-final syllables), different forms of articles help to tell things apart.

Take the German singular nominative and the accusative of the noun Baum 'tree': der/ein Baum (nominative), den/einen Baum (accusative).
Without the article, you couldn't know whether I'm talking about the subject or the object in a sentence.

Another example from Old English, accompanied by the same sentence in modern German:
Se cyning mēteþ þone bisceop. Der König trifft den Bischof.
Þone bisceop mēteþ se cyning. Den Bischof trifft der König.

Both mean 'The king meets the bishop', but the second one has the subject and object inverted (so if one didn't hear the second half, it would come first now, so it would be easier to hear).

Se and þone both mean 'the', but they have different cases to convey different functions in the sentence. In modern English, where only exists one form of the definite article, one has to use sentence structure to bring meaning across — and so, he has to scream the sentence a second time unaltered, with slight annoyance.
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by elemtilas »

Larryrl wrote:How many ways do we need, to say the word "the"? :mrgreen:
As many as it takes!

Avantimannish has 16 declensional slots for definite articles: four cases by two genders and two numbers. Some forms show up in more than one case or number. But basically, it's just a matter of historical accidence, just like it is from Latin's thirty some declined forms of demonstratives that would evolve into Spanish's six-and-a-half or seven definite article forms.

At the other end, Queranaran has no articles at all, nor definite nor indefinite. Other strategies are required to show definiteness where it's needed.

My old Romance conlang had several gradations of articles, in various genders numbers & cases and certain ones could be combined with others to form complex articles and which could in turn be further compounded with relative pronouns & regular demonstratives.
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by Qxentio »

Xing wrote:What genders/noun classes do you tend to have in your conlangs? Do you prefer to have few or many? Semantically or formally based? How are your genders/noun-classes manifested? (What kind of agreement do they trigger?)
Jagárh has three - feminine, masculine and neuter, though neuter also has aspects of epicene gender. You can refer to any person with a neutral pronoun without confusing or insulting them.
Noun and adjective inflection is largely fusional and most case suffixes begin with the same vowel for each gender and number. For example, fem.nom.sg. in -á, fem.gen.sg ends in -ath and fem.gen.pl ends in -aidh.
The difficult thing is that nouns can end in anything in their nominative singular form, so you won't know what gender a word has unless it is inflected or another word is in grammatical agreement.

Certain classes of things usually share a gender. For example, ground animals are masculine while flying and swimming animals are feminine. Tools and handheld weapons are masculine and ranged weapons are feminine. This has to do with the traditional distribution of gender roles among Jagárhí and with their beliefs about the origins of the world.
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by Lao Kou »

Larryrl wrote:How many ways do we need, to say the word "the"? :mrgreen:
In Géarthnuns, 56. [B)]
道可道,非常道
名可名,非常名
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by Xing »

Larryrl wrote: How many ways do we need, to say the word "the"? :mrgreen:
English needs at least two words. Apart from the definite "the", there is the indefinite "a(n)". Or should we count "a" and "an" as two words? In that case, English needs at least three words from what might be covered by one single word in other languages.
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by Qxentio »

Xing wrote:English needs at least three words from what might be covered by one single word in other languages.
Don't forget that "the" has at least two different realizations depending on context: /ðə/ and /ðiː/.
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by HoskhMatriarch »

Xing wrote:
Larryrl wrote: How many ways do we need, to say the word "the"? :mrgreen:
English needs at least two words. Apart from the definite "the", there is the indefinite "a(n)". Or should we count "a" and "an" as two words? In that case, English needs at least three words from what might be covered by one single word in other languages.
Or no words. Vir canem videt. Why say the at all? (says the person who has 25 words for "the" in their main conlang)
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by cromulant »

druneragarsh wrote:Masculine/feminine(/neuter) tends to ping my Romance bells, so I don't use that paradigm.
Most languages with gender have a sex-based system, if WALS can be trusted.
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by Corphishy »

Can somebody say derailment?

I tend to stray away from genders in my conlangs, or if I do, I tend to dislike calling them genders and prefer words like "class" because I'm usually dealing with degrees of animacy instead of degrees of masculinity/femininity. Usually this is because I like to think of things in a much larger picture than is necessary, so I find it hard to come up with a way in which a gender/class system would develop.
That being said, Saipačn, a language I try very hard not to historically linguistify, has a masc/fem distinction which is widely arbitrary and indecipherable just by looking at a noun, but verbs and adjectives agree to them. There are a few words, such as sev "skull" which have no gender and kOoKy ThInGs happen when that happens. (perhaps i should make a post about it) These too are pretty arbitrary.
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by elemtilas »

Corphishy wrote:Can somebody say derailment?

I tend to stray away from genders in my conlangs, or if I do, I tend to dislike calling them genders and prefer words like "class" because I'm usually dealing with degrees of animacy instead of degrees of masculinity/femininity. Usually this is because I like to think of things in a much larger picture than is necessary, so I find it hard to come up with a way in which a gender/class system would develop.
I've gone both ways. My old romlang had a clear-cut Latin-derived F/M gender system. Talarian has kept the ancient animate / inanimate gender system going strong. Avantimannish has a M/F/N gender system of sorts as far as concordance of pronouns with antecedant nouns goes. In several other conlangs, there are various noun classes, but things like animacy take precedence over gender. Queranaran has several noun classes, but no grammatical gender. It does have some instances of natural gender, again primarily in connection with pronoun-noun agreement.
That being said, Saipačn, a language I try very hard not to historically linguistify, has a masc/fem distinction which is widely arbitrary and indecipherable just by looking at a noun, but verbs and adjectives agree to them. There are a few words, such as sev "skull" which have no gender and kOoKy ThInGs happen when that happens. (perhaps i should make a post about it) These too are pretty arbitrary.
Yes, I think you should make a post about this!
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by eldin raigmore »

Thank you, @corphishy and @elemtilas, for returning the thread to the topic.
I think I've already said what I do or have done. I don't have enough conlangs to say I have a particular habit, though.
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by Isoraqathedh »

I did try a half-gender thing with Uvbraot. And by that I mean that each noun has to pick one from two lists instead of one.

The first list is a traditional masc-fem break, although I usually refer to them as Ʃ = {Aoʃ, Yyʃ}. The other is a semantic category T = {Tiðbᵛoñ, Taoʃrel, Tekᵖuu, Tiiħly, Tiñnla} (in English I can preserve the alliteration: {Sky, Sea, Stone, Space, Society}). They affect different things, sometimes jointly, sometimes separately. For example, adjectives come before Aoʃ nouns and after Yyʃ nouns, while the article come before, after, or on both sides of an adjective-noun combination depending on the T-gender. Sometimes the front article can shrink from aäd (Aoʃ)/ad (Yyʃ) to a' and the back article can shrink from aäd/ad to 'd; when each one happens is dependent on the T-gender as well.

It should be noted that naturalisticness has never been high on my priority list.

Unrelatedly, HI has four pretty normal noun genders (labelled P, Q, R, S; plus the special MX which doubles as plural), however, verbs have genders too, and the general rule is that in transitive sentences or above, subject and object must not match genders, whereas in intransitive sentences, nouns and verbs must not match genders. If you have to, you must circumlocute using a different noun or verb, or at the very least bumping a direct object into an indirect object (which fortunately has no gender restrictions!) and hoping that the intransitive verb doesn't hate the noun you want to use!

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eldin raigmore
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by eldin raigmore »

Isoraqathedh wrote:I did try a half-gender thing with Uvbraot. And by that I mean that each noun has to pick one from two lists instead of one.
…. (not quoting the most interesting stuff) ….
Ah, the joys of a language that works against you!
IMO that's very interesting, Isoraq. (Mind if I shorten your name? Would you prefer Raqathedh to Isoraq?) I like your ideas.
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by sangi39 »

I've tried out a few different gender/noun-class systems for the languages of Yantas.

Proto-Sirdic has a gender system that might be somewhat similar to those found in various IE languages. Nouns belong to one of six noun classes:

Class I: Animate, Masculine: Adult male humans, male “higher” animals, certain body parts (notably the penis, but also the fingers)
Number marking is obligatory
Number agreement is obligatory

Class II: Animate, Feminine: Adult female humans, female “higher” animals, certain body parts (the eyes and hands)
Number marking is optional
Number agreement is obligatory

Class III: Animate, Neuter: Adolescent humans, young “higher” animals, certain body parts (the arms and legs)
Number marking is null (there is no distinct plural form)
Number agreement is optional

Class IV: Inanimate, Masculine: Fire, air, tools, birds, predators, augmentatives, certain body parts (such as the brain)
Number marking is obligatory
Number agreement is optional

Class V: Inanimate, Feminine: Water, buildings, fish, herd animals, diminutives, certain body parts (notably the vagina, but also the nose)
Number marking is optional
Number agreement is optional

Class VI: Inanimate, Neuter: Earth, various geographical features, insects, spiders, etc. Unique in containing no human body parts.
There is no number marking
There is no number agreement

Where number marking is "optional", that noun will only appear in the plural if there is no "plural quantifier", otherwise that noun will appear in the singular.

Where number agreement is "optional", adjectives and nouns will only appear in the plural if there is no "plural quantifier", otherwise they will appear in the singular.

If number marking is obligatory, then that noun will appear in the plural form, even in the presence of a plural quantifier, while nouns without number marking always appear in the singular.

If number agreement is obligatory, then an adjective or verb will appear in the singular or plural, agreeing with the "underlying" number of the noun, regardless of whether that noun marks number optionally. If there is no number agreement, then adjectives or verbs associated with that noun will appear in the singular.

Verbs, unlike adjectives, do not agree with the gender of the subject, only the number, where it can.





Proto-Skawlas is a little bit simpler. There are no overt markings for different noun classes, but animacy does affect verbal conjugation.

The language has a direct-inverse system of marking on verbs, in which a verb agrees in person with the most animate of the subject, agent or patient, regardless of their actual grammatical role, and an inverse suffix is attached to the verb if the less animate noun is the agent rather the patient.

The trigger is based on an animacy hierarchy, which roughly appears as follows:

1s > 1p > 2s > 2p > ( 3s > 3p ) > human > domesticate > wild mammal > birds/fish > plants > geographical features.

More or less, anyway. The 3s and 3p in the hierarchy refer to the 3rd person pronouns, which appear higher in the hierarchy than nouns themselves, regardless of what they're referring to.

Beyond this, nouns show no difference in marking in terms of number of case, and don't trigger any sort of differences elsewhere on either adjectives or verbs.





Lesi Kirra goes in a different direction, with nouns belonging to one of 23 "classes", marked by means of a preceding "generic word" which themselves can stand alone as a sort of referent (a noun, or "specific noun", must appear with a generic word and cannot stand alone).

None of these trigger any kind of agreement, and the only difference seen in verbs is between an "egophoric" conjugation and a "non-egophoric" conjugation, which isn't affected at all by noun class.
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by Ahzoh »

You know, now I ponder having a gender system of masculine, feminine, mixed/uncertain and then ungenderable. The latter for non-animate nouns.
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