[B-Greek] Gender
Kevin Riley
klriley at alphalink.com.au
Sun May 20 21:03:37 EDT 2007
>From a historical point of view, the 3 gender system may be an innovation in
Indo-European languages. One common view of I-E is that it had a basic
division between animate and inanimate, and masculine and feminine grew out
of the first class, with a later rearrangement based on word endings. It is
possible that you do not find masculine words for 'woman' and feminine words
for 'man' because they are the words that categorise the class. You do find
words for 'boy' and 'girl' and 'child' that do not conform to sexual gender,
as you do in the case of many animal names. It would be worth surveying
languages with 3+ 'genders' and checking if 'man' and 'woman' are always in
different genders. Most 2 gender languages seem to be either masculine VS
feminine where they would be different if 'man' and 'woman' are used to
categorise the classes, or animate Vs inanimate, where you would expect 'man
and 'woman' to be in the same class.
Kevin Riley
-------Original Message-------
From: Dr. Don Wilkins
Date: 19/05/2007 4:20:58 AM
I appreciate James' argument as a point-of-view matter. I don't agree
That natural gender is a subset. Grammatical gender seems to be an
Extension of the natural, if I may use "extension" somewhat loosely.
Don Wilkins
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