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From: "Paul J. Kriha" <kriha_p@actrix.gen.nz>
Subject: Re: Gender in the world's languages
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Date: Sun, 18 Dec 1994 03:48:17 GMT
References: <787603010.AA02984@clone.his.com> <3cslm6$jd3@newshost.lanl.gov> <1994Dec18.000850.7221@henson.cc.wwu.edu>
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n7420257@henson.cc.wwu.edu (Paul Tholfsen) wrote:
>
> In article <3cslm6$jd3@newshost.lanl.gov> tanmoy@qcd.lanl.gov (Tanmoy Bhattacharya) writes:
> 
> 
> >|> Further, my sense is that we have inherited the whole idea from ancient  
> >|> grammarians who were not asserting that _concepts_ had gender but rather
> >|> merely using a kind of mnemonic device to recognize that there was a finite
> >|> number of ways in which nouns in Greek or Latin were declined.
> 
> I think confusion often arises from the dual use in English of the word
> "gender" to mean either "sex" or "grammatical classification".  Some
> languages have numerous genders (masculine animate, feminine animate, young
> animate, long shape, liquid, etc...).  Indo European languages, I believe,
> have reduced this to one, two or three genders, from possibly considerably
> more in PIE.  Thus, there's nothing inherently masculine or feminine about
> the sun, moon, tables or water.
> 

Some IE languages, even though they have just the 'usual'
three grammatical genders, also have a number of other
bewildering grammatical concepts to complicate life.

For example, some Slavic languages form plurals differently
for animate and inanimate objects.
They also have up to 6 different 'declention patterns'
in each gender with adjectives declined as well as nouns.
The way each noun is declined depends on which 'pattern'
group it belongs to.

Czech, for example, would have at least 14 such sub-genders.

So is it really true to say that the number of genders in PIE
has generally been reduced in modern IE languages or are
we just categorising them differently?

Paul JK



