[B-Greek] Gender
Randall Buth
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
Mon May 21 03:04:53 EDT 2007
Kevin Riley <klriley at alphalink.com.au> wrote:
>>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.>>
My understanding is that there are many multi-gender languages with
men and women together. Iver can correct me, since I never spoke
Swahili, but I think that people,men, women, and children all went
into the same grammatical gender class. I speak a Nilo-saharan
language that is not only mono-noun-class, it is mono-pronoun with
one pronoun for he-she-it.
Randall Buth
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
randallbuth at gmail.com
www.biblicalulpan.org
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