Gender in conlangs

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Dormouse559
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by Dormouse559 »

That's some nice links you got there. What's your point?
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by k1234567890y »

Dormouse559 wrote:That's some nice links you got there. What's your point?
just tried to give some related information that may help.
I prefer to not be referred to with masculine pronouns and nouns such as “he/him/his”.
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by eldin raigmore »

k1234567890y wrote:
Dormouse559 wrote:That's some nice links you got there. What's your point?
just tried to give some related information that may help.
Thanks.
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by All4Ɇn »

The language I'm currently making has 3 genders. All words fall into either masculine or feminine but can be changed into neuter for political correctness when wanting to remove any trace of gender such as when talking to someone who doesn't identify with any gender.
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by Xing »

All4Ɇn wrote:The language I'm currently making has 3 genders. All words fall into either masculine or feminine but can be changed into neuter for political correctness when wanting to remove any trace of gender such as when talking to someone who doesn't identify with any gender.
How is gender realised? In adjectives? Determiners? Articles? Verbs? Pronouns? How did the neuter evolve?
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by All4Ɇn »

Xing wrote:
All4Ɇn wrote:The language I'm currently making has 3 genders. All words fall into either masculine or feminine but can be changed into neuter for political correctness when wanting to remove any trace of gender such as when talking to someone who doesn't identify with any gender.
How is gender realised? In adjectives? Determiners? Articles? Verbs? Pronouns? How did the neuter evolve?
Articles, determiners, pronouns, conjugations, and many noun endings. So for example:

La is the feminine article for the and is used in the word La vÿ. The feminine conjugation for to be is ä.
Das is the neuter article for the and can be used to neuter La vÿ ä. After neutering it becomes: Das svÿs e.

To neuter the noun you simply add a silent s to the beginning and end. For the conjugation you add an additional e if the conjugation ends with consonant or take off the final letter (if it's a vowel) and replace it with e. It doesn't matter if you add it to the masculine or feminine conjugations because the only letter that differs in those conjugations is the final letter in conjugations that end with vowels (which is 99.99% of verbs)

There's also a whole separate set of pronouns and determiners for the neutral.

Also although it isn't a rule, most nouns that end with i are masculine to fit with the masculine article li.
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by Iparxi_Zoi »

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:
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by Xing »

Iparxi_Zoi wrote: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").
How is gender realised? In adjectives? Verbs?
Iparxi_Zoi wrote: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".
Having different words for referents of different natural gender has nothing with gender as a grammatical category to do. You could have regular systems to form words meaning "male" and "female" {noun}, regardless of whether you have grammatical gender or not.
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by felipesnark »

My current conlang, Shonkasika, has 6 noun genders, which are classified by both form (the stem vowel) and semantics (whether the noun is seen as animate or not).

Gender | Stem vowels | Animate?
Common | -e, -i, -u | yes
Masculine | -o | yes
Feminine | -a | yes
Neuter | -e, -i, -u | no
Celestial | -o | no
Terrestrial | -a | no

Typically, nouns are considered animate if they refer to a person or some other sentient being or an animal. Otherwise, they are considered inanimate although there are exceptions.
Animate genders differ from the inanimates in some of the plural case forms and in the choice of certain pronouns and determiners. In this language, adjectives agree with nouns in gender, number and case.
Visit my website for my blogs and information on my conlangs: http://grwilliams.net/ It's a work in progress!
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by Iparxi_Zoi »

Xing wrote:How is gender realised? In adjectives? Verbs?
Gender is realized in adjectives, pronouns, and nouns:
- Masculine nouns tend to end in -ο, feminine nouns in -αα and neuter nouns in
- Adjectives agree with the gender of the noun they are describing
- Gender distinction is made in 3rd person pronouns (αυτό, αυταά, αυτύ for masculine, feminine, and neuter respectively)
- Like other languages with grammatical gender, it doesn't always correlate with natural gender (i.e. όρσσισς "testicle" is feminine; τάσμοον "human being" is masculine, regardless of natural gender, etc.)
Xing wrote:Having different words for referents of different natural gender has nothing with gender as a grammatical category to do. You could have regular systems to form words meaning "male" and "female" {noun}, regardless of whether you have grammatical gender or not.
I'm very well aware of this [;)]. I just wanted to create a conlang that made as little reference to natural gender as possible, while still making enough reference to sound natural.
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by Larryrl »

In Yeerk, I do my gender by putting Fe as the prefix to the words like mother, sister grandmother etc.

In Easy Speak, I have each person in the conversation named Devil for man or Picture for woman. Each one gets a number going around in a circle clockwise. The person who started the conversation originally,is Devil 1 and the numbers follow 2 three and 4 etc.
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 HoskhMatriarch »

eldin raigmore wrote:
XXXVII wrote: ... but when/if I do use them, they are definitely not going to be of the completely arbitrary masc/fem system (á là Spanish).
A concordial noun-class system is called "sex-based" if either one gender contains all male humans or all male animates and no female humans or no female animates, or one gender contains all female humans or all female animates and no male humans or no male animates, or both.

If a language has a sex-based gender system, and one gender contains all male humans and no female humans, that gender is called "masculine".
If a language has a sex-based gender system, and one gender contains all female humans and no male humans, that gender is called "feminine".

(Since "das Mädchen" in German is neuter, I suppose some exceptions must be allowed? Or is German's gender-system not considered sex-based? Or perhaps even though its feminine gender doesn't contain all nouns referring to female humans, its masculine gender does contain all nouns referring to male humans and none referring to female humans?)

Even if a language's gender system is just Masculine and Non-Masculine, or Feminine and Non-Feminine, that still counts as a sex-based gender system.

And if a "Masculine" gender contains all nouns about male humans and none about female humans, or all nouns about male animates and none about female animates, or whatever, it still could contain other nouns about non-humans or about inanimates. (Sim. for "Feminine", mutatis mutandis.)

If you read Corbett's book on Gender, he observes that, in nearly every language that has genders, either all genders, or all but one gender, have a "semantic core", a group of nouns assigned to that gender for semantic reasons; but that for most such languages many or most genders also have other nouns that there is no semantic reason to assign to any of the genders, but that the nouns either sound as if or decline as if they belong to the gender to which they wind up assigned.

According to him, in his investigations he found that such assignments were not random; at least, not in the instances he reported on. For instance he explained, in half a page, how to tell whether a new noun in French would be masculine or feminine. And such an assignment in French is more complex than in most other familiar languages. It is from such complexity that the impression of "randomness" arises, (according to Corbett).

For most languages (with genders) there is a "default gender" or "emergency gender" into which a new noun will be assigned if there is no semantic nor phonological nor morphological reason to assign it to some other gender. That gender's membership may indeed seem "random" even to native speakers.

[hr][/hr]

If a language has two "major" genders (e.g. masculine and feminine, or any other pair of genders), there may be a gender whose semantic core is most of the nouns that don't fit the semantic core of either of the two major ones. Such a gender will probably be called "neuter" (from "ne uter" meaning "not either" or "neither").

If a language has two or a few major genders (e.g. masc and fem, or masc and fem and neut, or any other short list), it may have a gender whose "semantic core" is nouns for things that could belong in both of (or, more than one of) the more-major genders. If so such a gender will probably be called "common" or "epicene" or "mixed" ("epicene" is derived from a word meaning "common").

For instance, in a sex-based gender system, an individual might be epicene, not only if it were hermaphroditic, but also if it were a masculinized female or a feminized male; and not only that, but also if it were a neutered male or neutered female, or a masculinized neuter or a feminized neuter.
A group of mixed gender might logically be considered to have "mixed" or "common" gender in such a language; so the epicene gender might be the rarer gender in the singular but the more common gender in non-singular grammatical numbers.

And if the speaker wanted to refer to an individual person or thing without specifying its gender or without knowing its gender, s/he would refer to it in the epicene gender.

So the "semantic core" of the epicene gender could be "common, mixed, unknown, and/or unspecified" sex.
What's a language that has an epicene gender and isn't just common/neuter (e.g. it has masculine, feminine, epicene, neuter, or something like that)?

I like gender since it helps keep things straight in discourse and it's fun to play with assigning things to different genders and the process behind that, but I haven't exactly decided on a gender system for Hoskh, except that it's semantic and formal and many things are assigned half-semantically by association (e.g. the Sun is feminine, so a day might also be feminine since it's associated with the Sun, and the Moon is masculine, so a month might be masculine because it's associated with the Moon). A not-particularly-naturalistic conlang I made in a couple of hours called Spraka has 7 semantic noun classes that affect verb agreement, which are male people and animals, female people and animals, indeterminate, mixed, and other people and animals ("epicene" probably), neuter/diminutives/naturally small things, natural forces, inanimate objects, and abstract concepts.
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Re: Gender in conlangs

Post by eldin raigmore »

HoskhMatriarch wrote:What's a language that has an epicene gender and isn't just common/neuter (e.g. it has masculine, feminine, epicene, neuter, or something like that)?
I like gender since it helps keep things straight in discourse and it's fun to play with assigning things to different genders and the process behind that, but I haven't exactly decided on a gender system for Hoskh, except that it's semantic and formal and many things are assigned half-semantically by association (e.g. the Sun is feminine, so a day might also be feminine since it's associated with the Sun, and the Moon is masculine, so a month might be masculine because it's associated with the Moon). A not-particularly-naturalistic conlang I made in a couple of hours called Spraka has 7 semantic noun classes that affect verb agreement, which are male people and animals, female people and animals, indeterminate, mixed, and other people and animals ("epicene" probably), neuter/diminutives/naturally small things, natural forces, inanimate objects, and abstract concepts.
Look at pages 67-68 of Corbett's book.
Archi is a language with four genders, namely Fem, Masc, and two others, but I'm not sure those are Neut and Epicene.
http://wals.info/combinations/30A_31A#2/25.5/148.5 samples 11 languages with sex-based gender systems that have four genders; namely, Tsez, Bininj Gun-Wok, Zande, Archi, Lak, Marind, Dyirbal, Wambaya, Paumarí, Pirahã, and Burushaski. If you look up the "languoid" on each of them, it will tell you which references WALS got the information on the gender systems from. You can look up those references on Google Books or Google Scholar, but it will be more satisfying to check them out from a library. If you're in school your school library may have some of them and can get others through inter-library loans. So can your local public libraries; it took me a while to discover that.
Edit: BTW: IIRC there are some languages with five genders -- Masc, Fem, Neut, Common/Mixed, and another one. WALS.info doesn't help you separate the five-gender languages from the six-or-more-gender languages. (Likewise, it counts all languages with a sex-based four-gender system together, whether those genders are Masc and three others, or Fem and three others, or Masc and Fem and two others, or Masc, Fem, Neut and another.) I am sorry that I don't know where I saw that, or what the language(s) are(is). I suspect it was in Greville Corbett's book "Gender". But maybe it wasn't.
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Grammatical Gender

Post by HoskhMatriarch »

I've noticed that most a priori conlangs don't have any grammatical gender, and probably at least 90% of conlangs with gender are romlangs. This is probably because most conlangers are English speakers and most English speakers seem to be tormented by the idea of memorizing genders of random words (not even all gender works like that, some is generally semantic so you can know what gender a word is from what it means). However, about as many natlangs have gender as those that don't, and about half of those are actually animate/inanimate and not anything with masculine/feminine, so the "grammatical gender is sexist" argument doesn't even apply to half or slightly more than half of natlangs with grammatical gender since in those natlangs grammatical gender has nothing to do with sex (as well as languages like Bantu languages with 25 noun classes that also don't have to do with sex). I like putting grammatical gender or noun classes in my conlangs and I think I've actually put it in all the conlangs I've made so far that I have any grammar for/aren't just naming languages. I have a semantic noun class language, I have a mostly analytic language that is probably going to be a boring masculine/feminine/neuter one because I can't figure out how to justify having a bunch of genders in a language with no cases or verb agreement, and I have some other languages in my conworld that I'm trying to figure out systems for. For some reason I'm sort of fascinated by the gender systems that appear in a lot of Caucasian languages, where they're more or less arbitrary and seem to often include masculine and feminine as categories but there are still a lot of them, I'm not sure why though, probably just because they're nice and complex and they're different from what I've seen in all the European languages I've studied.

I don't get why people always think gender is useless though. An ambiguous sentence one person posted somewhere here was something like "Bob didn't understand why John was angry when he said he loved his wife." However, if it were "Bob didn't understand why Jean was angry when he said he loved her wife" that's not ambiguous at all, and you can do all 6 possible combinations of pronouns for that sentence and none of them are ambiguous. Also, there are a lot of Bantu languages with free word order and no cases because of the class systems. Gender is useful the same way obviation is, and the more genders you have, the more useful it is. In a proximate/obviate system without gender, "the hero saw a girl rest on a tree before a rock hit it" would be ambiguous between the rock hitting the girl or the tree because both of those would be obviate in the narrative about the hero, but even in English with its limited gender system it's not. If English only had masculine and feminine and tree were feminine, it would be ambiguous again, which is why more genders makes things less likely to be ambiguous.

TL;DR grammatical gender is cool and if you're one of the few conlangers who uses it outside of romlangs/other a posteriori please talk about it here

Edit: Threads merged -Aszev, 2020-05-05
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Re: Grammatical Gender

Post by Micamo »

Haneko, Sueri, Tazaric, and Amethyst all have non-trivial, but relatively straightforward gender systems. (The systems in Haneko and Sueri are mostly interesting in comparison, since Proto-Pakaran lacked gender and thus both languages developed it independently.)

Mithara is a special case as it has two overlapping gender systems that are both "soft" and practically vestigial.

First, some verb roots come with a special thematic prefix I call the "gender" prefix. The gender prefix restricts the possible direct objects a verb can take. If you want to use that verb with something that doesn't match the gender prefix, you just have to use a different, more generic root. A few verb roots can take a selection of gender prefixes, and the prefix needs to "agree" with the gender of the DO.

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.

Finally, there are differences in Mithara between how human vs. non-human nouns are inflected, but this is not strictly speaking a gender system: No agreement is involved, so it's really more of a declension system where the declensions are predictable from semantics.
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Re: Grammatical Gender

Post by Ahzoh »

Vrkhazhian has a masculine/neuter/feminine system, but it's completely biological-sex semantic, so most nouns, especially inanimate objects would be neuter.
Choosing to refer to a woman as indefinite is considered a mark of affection toward her.
This seems an interesting idea, I wonder if the same can be done with using a neuter suffix... on the other hand, I would not have a good reason for why classifying an individual person as neuter would indicate affection...
What is Mithara's reason behind the indefinite marking of a woman?
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Re: Grammatical Gender

Post by Dormouse559 »

I can't remember the exact details anymore, but in "Gender" by Greville Corbett, Corbett profiles a language where most nouns referring to women were in the human gender, but the word for "girl" was in a less animate gender. And over time, by association with "girl", it became a mark of respect or affection (something positive like that) to refer to a woman with that less animate gender. In modern times, all female nouns are in that lower animacy gender.
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Re: Grammatical Gender

Post by Micamo »

Ahzoh wrote:What is Mithara's reason behind the indefinite marking of a woman?
I got the idea from the iroquoian family: Proto-Iroquoian had a three-way system: Human, non-Human, and Indefinite. Most of the modern iroquoian languages have a Masculine/Feminine/Neuter system: The Human turned into the Masculine marker in all of them, but some languages turned the non-Human into the feminine and the Indefinite into the neuter, and others did it the other way around, turning Indefinite to Feminine and non-Human to Neuter.

Mohawk, Oneida, and Onondaga did something interesting though: *Both* the indefinite-descended prefixes and the non-human-descended prefixes can refer to feminine targets, but with different connotations. The indefinite-descended prefixes imply affection, while the non-human-descended prefixes imply deference and respect. (The Neuter gender is marked by non-human-descended prefixes.)

Mithara's system is inspired by this but with two differences.

1. There's no separate masculine gender at all, neuter/respected female/male are all merged together.

2. The indefinite prefix is still semantically active as an indefinite: The verb is interpretable both as "She (affectionate) ate the cake" and "Someone (I don't know who) ate the cake" depending on the context. An indefinite interpretation with the feminine prefixes is impossible in Mohawk or Oneida.
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Re: Grammatical Gender

Post by Ahzoh »

Dormouse559 wrote:I can't remember the exact details anymore, but in "Gender" by Greville Corbett, Corbett profiles a language where most nouns referring to women were in the human gender, but the word for "girl" was in a less animate gender. And over time, by association with "girl", it became a mark of respect or affection (something positive like that) to refer to a woman with that less animate gender. In modern times, all female nouns are in that lower animacy gender.
Well, if a gender system is based semantically on the sex of a person and male and female are more animate than neuter, wouldn't putting a known person into a less animate class be somewhat insulting, like you are classifying them along with unknown things and objects?
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Re: Grammatical Gender

Post by Dormouse559 »

Like I said, "girl" for whatever reason was in a less animate gender. That doesn't seem to have bothered the language speakers. Of course, your scenario is just as valid. (In English, try referring to a person as "it".)

But the way the language was portrayed, the key of the gender change was "girl", which caused the other nouns to be changed by analogy.
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