Lingo Dunieŭ

[R.Rusanov]

Nouns are intrinsically members of either of two genders.

If you want to make the language easy to learn, why did you give it grammatical gender?

Because most international words end in vowels and, without word-final alteration, it would be very hard to express synonyms, names, and the like.

Like "bit" vs "byte", "Mario" vs "Maria/Marie", etc.

Also you'll find that a great many of the world's languages include gender, and those that don't almost always have some sort of noun class system to make up for it. It's not a purely Eurocentric thing, like a certain thread on this forum might make you think.

[2+3 clusivity]

I think what you are going for is that you want a regular derivation process for male v. female or big v. small. In the latter distinction, such distinction is easily handled non-grammatically by derivation through diminutives. Grammatical gender is much more than a derivation process, it adds a lot of unnecessary complexity to a language if you only want to generate lexical entires from common roots.

Consider <instrument> + <al> -> <instrumental> or <national> + <al> -> <national> does not require a seperate gender or noun class populated by abstracts/qualities(/adjectives). Similarly, <horse> + <ie> or <dog> + <ie> -> <horsie> and <doggie> does not require a diminutive gender/noun class.

Gender requires a lot more "machinery" than a simple derivational process. It will require agreement on adjectives, demonstratives or other items.

Consider meta-RomLang1 with gender agreement.

<lo tristo senoro> v. <la trista senora>
the sad man v. the sad woman

Consider how it could be more easily stated in meta-RomLang2 withOUT gender agreement.

<l'trist senor> v. <l'trist senora>

In meta-RomLang2, I have the advantage of quickly deriving woman, <senora>, from man, <senor>, by adding <-a>. I ALSO have the advantage of not having variable articles and adjectives.

[Salmoneus]

Also you'll find that a great many of the world's languages include gender, and those that don't almost always have some sort of noun class system to make up for it. It's not a purely Eurocentric thing, like a certain thread on this forum might make you think.

Sorry, but this is arrant misinformation you're spreading!

WALS's survey shows that of 257 languages, 84 had gender (sex based noun classes), 28 had other noun classes, and 145 had no noun classes.
Gender appears to be strong in Indoeuropean, Afroasiatic, and Northeast Caucasian, and there are also some clusters of Papuan, Non-Pamanyungan, and Amazonian languages with it. Non-sex-based nounclasses are basically a feature of Niger-Congo languages. Noun classes of all kinds are comparatively rare in the Americas, and in Asia outside India, Afghanistan, NE Caucasus and the Middle East. Three times more languages have no classes than have two, twice has many have two as have three, and twice as many have three as have four. Five or more is a Niger-Congo thing.
And if you mean noun classes that are determined by formal characteristics of the word as well as just semantics (eg by final vowel), you really are (with, obviously, exceptions here and there) the three language families of Indoeuropean, Nigercongo, and Afroasiatic.

[clawgrip]

I would also point out that even if your native language has gender, that does not mean another language with gender is going to be easier to use than one without it, considering that a lot of the gender assignment is going to be different in the new language. There's no way around the fact that you need to add a bunch of extra grammatical rules governing gender that a genderless language lacks. Even if it is just "a" for feminine and "o" for masculine, that is still opening up a whole lot of opportunities for people to make mistakes where they would never make mistakes if you had no gender.

[R.Rusanov]

Gender in Lingo Dunieŭ has nothing to do with sex, and is an inherent feature of the root. Considering it sex-based is very old fashioned, quite sexist, and frankly inexcusable in this day and age. Gender has literally nothing to do with biological sex, in linguistics or in our society at large. Any -e stem root is in the e-gender and any -o stem in the o-gender. As long as you can memorize which word in a minimal pair ends in which mid vowel you've got the gender down pat. It's not like in french where a given final consonant can be of any gender.

Say there were no genders and the word for bit was "bit" and that for byte, "bid" or something. How would that distinction be particularly different from the current one of bito and bite. If you can't remember which word ends in 'o' and which in 'e', how would you remember which ends in 't' or 'd'?

[Linguist Wannabe]

Gender in Lingo Dunieŭ has nothing to do with sex, and is an inherent feature of the root. Considering it sex-based is very old fashioned, quite sexist, and frankly inexcusable in this day and age. Gender has literally nothing to do with biological sex, in linguistics or in our society at large. Any -e stem root is in the e-gender and any -o stem in the o-gender. As long as you can memorize which word in a minimal pair ends in which mid vowel you've got the gender down pat. It's not like in french where a given final consonant can be of any gender.

Say there were no genders and the word for bit was "bit" and that for byte, "bid" or something. How would that distinction be particularly different from the current one of bito and bite. If you can't remember which word ends in 'o' and which in 'e', how would you remember which ends in 't' or 'd'?

So do adjectives, demonstratives etc. have to agree in gender with their head nouns?

[Kereb]

Gender in Lingo Dunieŭ has nothing to do with sex, and is an inherent feature of the root. Considering it sex-based is very old fashioned, quite sexist, and frankly inexcusable in this day and age.

do you really think you've uncovered sexist attitudes in your critics here, or are you just trying not to address the point about your conlang?

[Hallow XIII]

Gender in Lingo Dunieŭ has nothing to do with sex, and is an inherent feature of the root.

Yeah, that's even stupider.

Here's a quote from a learner of a language with arbitrary gender:

@#%! this @#%&?%! language and all the @#%@?%! who speak it and also their sisters and their mothers and their pets, and generally @#%! everyone who ever spoke a language that randomly decided to pretend @#%&?%! tables have @#%&?%! penises!

[WeepingElf]

Gender in Lingo Dunieŭ has nothing to do with sex, and is an inherent feature of the root.

Yeah, that's even stupider.

Here's a quote from a learner of a language with arbitrary gender:

@#%! this @#%&?%! language and all the @#%@?%! who speak it and also their sisters and their mothers and their pets, and generally @#%! everyone who ever spoke a language that randomly decided to pretend @#%&?%! tables have @#%&?%! penises!

Well put.

[R.Rusanov]

Gender in Lingo Dunieŭ has nothing to do with sex, and is an inherent feature of the root.

Yeah, that's even stupider.

Here's a quote from a learner of a language with arbitrary gender:

@#%! this @#%&?%! language and all the @#%@?%! who speak it and also their sisters and their mothers and their pets, and generally @#%! everyone who ever spoke a language that randomly decided to pretend @#%&?%! tables have @#%&?%! penises!

It has nothing to do with penises, mate, and it absolutely is sexist to claim that. If tablo ends in 'o' that's no more masculine or feminine, or any other arbitrary construct than anything else. If you insist on defining it that way based solely off the grammatical category having the same name as an outdated sexual terminology, then it's you at fault.

I assume if bit vs bid was the minimal set at play, you would still rail against the final sound being what distinguishes the two words? Because that's exactly what you're doing now.

[WeepingElf]

It has nothing to do with penises, mate, and it absolutely is sexist to claim that. If tablo ends in 'o' that's no more masculine or feminine, or any other arbitrary construct than anything else. If you insist on defining it that way based solely off the grammatical category having the same name as an outdated sexual terminology, then it's you at fault.

I assume if bit vs bid was the minimal set at play, you would still rail against the final sound being what distinguishes the two words? Because that's exactly what you're doing now.

You have understood nothing. The point is that an arbitrary gender category in a language is an unnecessary complication, because the language learner must memorize the gender for each word he/she learns. There are plenty of languages that operate finely without such a category.

But if you mean by "gender" just that some nouns end in -o and others end in -a, and this does not affect the shape of adjectives, the choice of anaphoric pronouns etc., you don't really have gender, and you are fine.

[cromulant]

Well...if each word ends in either an -o or an -e, then there is really nothing to memorize other than the word itself. If there is agreement (is there?), then that is a complication, but a minor one if there's nothing more to it than sticking on the matching vowel.

Still, Rusanov, no gender/agreement at all would be simpler than the very simple gender/agreement system you describe. What is the point, exactly, of having this feature in an auxlang?

Your umbrage about sexism is silly. Good for you that your language has a completely sexless gender system, but to insist that Romance languages are the same way is a willful denial of reality.

I assume there is no pattern whatsoever to the thematic vowels of words that are inherently linked to sex--man, woman, boy, girl, mother, father, etc.?

[Salmoneus]

Purely formal gender systems like this are incredibly rare. In fact, WALS doesn't just not have any examples, but specifically and repeatedly says that they do not ever exist.

[cromulant]

Oh, I see you answered my first question:

Nouns are intrinsically members of either of two genders.

If you want to make the language easy to learn, why did you give it grammatical gender?

Because most international words end in vowels and, without word-final alteration, it would be very hard to express synonyms, names, and the like.

Like "bit" vs "byte", "Mario" vs "Maria/Marie", etc.

I'm sorry, what is so "very hard" about vocalizing "Mario" and "Maria" in a genderless language without any such alternation? Looks to me like you pulled it off just fine.

[Basilius]

WALS's survey shows that of 257 languages, 84 had gender (sex based noun classes), 28 had other noun classes, and 145 had no noun classes.

I am curious if the ratio will be significantly different when one takes top N most spoken languages whose speakers make up, say, 50% of the world's population. Like, English + Mandarin + Japanese (etc.) vs. Spanish + Portuguese + Hindustani + Russian + Arabic (etc.). This may be more topical for an auxlang.

Purely formal gender systems like this are incredibly rare. In fact, WALS doesn't just not have any examples, but specifically and repeatedly says that they do not ever exist.

Sure; it would be strange for gender not to interact with lexical derivation at all, and words sharing a derivation pattern usually have something common in their semantics (like words in -al in 2+3 clusivity's example), so... (Also, one probably needs a purely semantic-based rule for deictic pro-substantives &like).

[Kereb]

It has nothing to do with penises, mate, and it absolutely is sexist to claim that. If tablo ends in 'o' that's no more masculine or feminine, or any other arbitrary construct than anything else. If you insist on defining it that way based solely off the grammatical category having the same name as an outdated sexual terminology, then it's you at fault.

I don't get how sexism enters into it. It may be inaccurate specifically regarding your conlang, to say that one word or another was assigned to a class based on anything to do with sex, but is that sexist?
And if we observe the strong correlation between sex and word class in some (of course not all) languages, is that sexist? Is it "sexist" to point out that in Latin a great number of words referring to females are first declension? How are you convincing yourself that you can derive your critics' attitudes towards gender politics from what they say about a goddamn conlang?

[masako]

How are you convincing yourself that you can derive your critics' attitudes towards gender politics from what they say about a goddamn conlang?

I may be wrong, but he seems to assume that when asked about morphological gender, some are assigning political gender to his conlang, at the very least hinting at it.

[Melteor]

I think putting the definite article after the noun makes it easier to use such a gender system, because then there's less anticipating the gender of the noun that follows the article as it is matching the thematic vowel of the article to the noun's. e.g.
Naoti+LV= naoti-li

Also, why are there fewer art-romlangs than rom-auxlangs? (It is a mystery.)

[Hallow XIII]

I need to tell you something, Rusanov. Either you have a noun class system based on human sex, in which case it is a gender system, or you have a semantic noun class system (Niger-Congo style or simply animate/inanimate), in which case it's a class system. In all other cases, what you have - and indeed what really seems to be the motivation for this so called "gender system" is derivational classes.

And goddammit, I don't see why nouns cannot be "e-declension" or "a-declension" without a purportedly "non-sexist radically progressive 21^st-Century gender system" entering into the equation. In fact, I propose that you call your system by what it is and not say "gender system", as a purely formal gender system cannot, by definition, be a GENDER SYSTEM.

It says GENDER right in the title. How hard is that to understand?

[clawgrip]

All I was saying about gender, noun classes, or whatever you want to call it, is that it adds an extra layer of complexity to the language (e.g. "white" will have two separate forms where English, Chinese, Thai, etc. get by with just one). Not all people are familiar with grammatical gender, so the gender system in a language designed to be easy to learn had better carry some significant benefits to outweigh this otherwise superfluous distinction.

I assume if bit vs bid was the minimal set at play, you would still rail against the final sound being what distinguishes the two words? Because that's exactly what you're doing now.

The problem here is you are implying that words not being homophonous amounts to grammatical gender, which is not true, even if lots of words end in those sounds (for example, all words in Japanese end in one of only six different phonemes, but that doesn't mean Japanese has six noun classes). There is no problem with bit and bid sounding different, but in order to be considered noun classification, those words have to agree with other words in some way. If the -t and -d represent gender endings that other words agree with, then yes, that is something that people would say is too complex.

If there is no agreement, then it is, as Hallow XIII said, a derivational system.

[Melteor]

Novial anybody?
^^Created by a professional linguist, Idist, English philologist and eventual co-developer of interlingua, Otto Jespersen. (Notably a Romance Germanic hybrid...like English.)

I fell in love with Novial after finding Jespersen's book outlining its grammar and the reasoning behind that. It feels close to what I think is the last, best opportunity for auxlangs: something very close to English yet more regular, simpler, and more international (though R. Rusanov is right about the Eurocentricity, which could be easily dealt with).

Novial is in my opinion the most elegant among the "major" IALs. But that is just a personal opinion, the differences between those euroclone IALs are not really that great. Yet, I am put off by all that zealousness in the auxlang scene, and doubt that any of these languages will ever play a major role in international communication. English certainly is a far cry from an optimal IAL, at least what regards its phonology and orthography, but it is used worldwide and has a huge head start over even Esperanto.

What do we want to do with these languages anyway? Do we want to talk over Skype, read books, record podcasts/radio dramas, translate, or travel the world? I don't think it should be about arguing about how to promote the language e.g. esperantists talking about esperanto in esperanto. Learning languages is challenging but it has a great deal to do with attitude and expectations, as well as time. I would bet quite a few people here have at least 2 languages under their belt.