[B-Greek] Gender

Randall Buth randallbuth at gmail.com
Mon May 14 20:01:50 EDT 2007


On 5/14/07, Dr. Don Wilkins <drdwilkins at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> I read the question differently. I would say that if we were playing
> Jeopardy!, the question to Randall's answer would more likely be, why
> do the Greeks use suffixes? It seems to me that Delbert is asking one
> of those "mind set" questions that are so difficult to answer.

I was trying to demystify it and get it out of the 'mindset' area
through a cross-linguistic perspective.

>On the
> surface, since Greek recognizes the neuter as well as masculine and
> feminine, you might expect grammatical gender to match the natural
> gender (e.g. boy/masc, girl/fem, table/neut). But there are always
> oddities, like way/fem, that leave one scratching one's head.

That was the point of my post. 'Gender' is not an absolute category
and when one steps outside of the metaphor one sees that these are
noun classes and can be compared cross-linguistically in ways that go
beyond gender.

>At
> least gender in Greek makes more sense over all than in many other
> languages, especially those that have only masculine and feminine.

'makes more sense ... than in many other languages' sounds like the
Euro-centric ideas from the 19th century.
Noun classes always end up with random insertiions in every language.
And languages closer to home always SEEM like they make more sense,
until you start from a different perspective completely and find
something "flawed" in IndoEuropean. [[You can read between the lines
that I am not iimpressed with the old Latin introductions that praise
Latin (or Greek) as some sublime creation head and shoulders above
mortal languages. Latin has its structural lines of beauty. So does
Muonyjaang (that's 'Dinka' to outsiders)]]

> >> Are there other reasons for the Greeks using Gender (Masculine,
> >> Feminine,
> >> Neuter) other than to indicate which word modifies which word?
> >>
> >> Delbert Flora
> >
> > You are correct. The reason is to keep track of which words go with
> > which words.
> >
> > Please note, the word 'gender' is actually a metaphor for NOUN CLASSES
> > for adjective agreement. Greek has three noun classes. Some languages
> > have less, either 1 or 2, and some have more, even many more. Bantu
> > languages are notorious for many. When a language has two or three
> > noun classes they are generally called 'gender'.
> >
> >
> > Randall Buth

Randall Buth


-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
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שלום לכם וברכות
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randallbuth at gmail.com


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