[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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