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From: mcv@inter.NL.net (Miguel Carrasquer)
Subject: Re: Gender in the world's languages
Message-ID: <D10BGI.4oA@inter.NL.net>
Organization: NLnet
References: <787603010.AA02984@clone.his.com> <3csoj4$md2@darkwing.uoregon.edu> <D0z400.vK@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Sun, 18 Dec 1994 12:45:54 GMT
Lines: 28

In article <D0z400.vK@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>,
Ivan A Derzhanski <iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>In article <3csoj4$md2@darkwing.uoregon.edu> delancey@darkwing.uoregon.edu 
>(Scott C DeLancey) writes:
>>Most Indo-European languages, except for the few like English that
>>have lost it, have grammatical gender [...].
>
>For the most part, the ones that have lost it have gone further than
>English and have also given up the distinction between `he' and `she'.
>I'm thinking of Persian (and some of its relatives) and Armenian here.
>Then there's Bengali, which (I'm told) has English-style `natural' gender.

An interesting case is Basque, which does not distinguish gender at all, 
*except* in the second person familiar conjugation:

hik duk	/ hik dun	"you have m./f."

Where hi (*ki) is "you", hi-k is the ergative form;
du is the verbal root, and -k/-n are the masculine and feminine 
suffixes.

(cf. Kabyle Berber k@cc/k@m (-k/-m) for 2nd.sg.m/f.  Berber, however,
distinguishes gender in *all* persons except 1.sg.)

-- 
Miguel Carrasquer         ____________________  ~~~
Amsterdam                [                  ||]~  
mcv@inter.NL.net         ce .sig n'est pas une .cig 
