Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE

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Porphyrogenitos
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Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE

Post by Porphyrogenitos »

Does anyone know anything about non-Indo-European languages with masculine-feminine grammatical gender/noun class systems? Or any links to articles or papers discussing them, or (especially) their historical development?
Vai
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Re: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE

Post by Vai »

This Wikipedia article lists languages by gender systems. From the list of Masculine-Femine languages: Ancient Egyptian, Akkadian, Coptic, Amharic, Arabic (Kinda), Hebrew, Oromo, and Berber are not Indo-European.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_l ... al_genders
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Lambuzhao
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Re: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE

Post by Lambuzhao »

Ancient Egyptian and Coptic have M/F distinction.

Akkadian has M/F/Ndistinction.
Hebrew & Arabic have M/F distinction at least.
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DesEsseintes
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Re: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE

Post by DesEsseintes »

Are you specifically looking for languages that only have those two genders and no others?

The Iroquoian languages have a masculine gender and two feminine genders. Clifford Abbott's Oneida Teaching Grammar (2006) offers a fairly good explanation of the system.

The Papuan language Abau has masculine and feminine gender only, but combines these with a noun classifier system (and apparently so do its relatives, Iwam, Wogamusin, and Chenapian). Abau is worth checking out as it has a number of interesting features, like complex and obligatory topic marking, and lack of phonemic /t/.

I'm gonna check if the Arawakan languages have sth similar. I seem to recall sth like it.
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Creyeditor
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Re: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE

Post by Creyeditor »

Just wanted to mention that there are other Papuan languages that make reference to sex-based gender, e.g. Ekari where determiners are based on gender as well as 3rd person sg verb agreement.
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Frislander
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Re: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE

Post by Frislander »

Tiwi has just masculine and feminine as well though the contrast collapses in the plural.

Looking at WALS, combining maps 30 and 31 enables you to isolate the language with two sex-based genders, and brings up quite a few actually, including Tiwi as I just mentioned
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DesEsseintes
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Re: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE

Post by DesEsseintes »

Frislander wrote:Tiwi has just masculine and feminine as well though the contrast collapses in the plural.

Looking at WALS, combining maps 30 and 31 enables you to isolate the language with two sex-based genders, and brings up quite a few actually, including Tiwi as I just mentioned
Yay, Frislander is back!

And that reminds me: Maybe I should finally go and read about Tiwi properly...
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Lambuzhao
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Re: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE

Post by Lambuzhao »

Frislander wrote:Tiwi has just masculine and feminine as well though the contrast collapses in the plural.

Looking at WALS, combining maps 30 and 31 enables you to isolate the language with two sex-based genders, and brings up quite a few actually, including Tiwi as I just mentioned
Just looking at this as well.
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