Ean wrote:Chuma wrote:Yay for symmetric consonants! Lead the way by renaming yourself "Serafíng".
He is already xD. My dialect also has final -ng (bieng, pong, tieneng, carmeng,...), let's raise up against the dentals!
He was talking about actually spelling it <Serafíng>, recognizing it's distinct from <-n>. The problem here though is that TBH [n] and [ŋ] are in free variation for me, it's not like my dialect truly uses [ŋ] for /n#/. I pronounce the word [seɾaˈfiŋ] and also [seɾaˈfin].
I think I often drop the stop while nasalizing the vowel before a fricative too, e.g.
Si Serafín supiera [siseɾaˈfĩ suˈpjeɾa] (though in free variation with [...iŋ s..] and [...in s...] too).
Chuma wrote:Sure, but that's just a few words being of ambiguous gender. What I mean applies to basically all words, at least insofar as they can represent anything which has a physical gender. I don't think it's the same phenomenon at all.
I think it's the same phenomenon in the sense that
something agrees in gender in
some way. Regardless if it's just the pronouns (English), or pronouns, adjectives and verbs (Arabic), or articles, pronouns and adjectives (Spanish/French), etc.; and regardless if the gender agreement is almost purely semantic (English —well you know, a ship can be a she), or if it's is decided from a complex interaction of lexical/semantic information (Arabic/Spanish/French).
I don't know any Swedish though. Another question: looking at what's on Wikipedia's "Swedish grammar" article, is
björn 'bear' always common and is
lodjur 'lynx' always neuter? If the answer is yes, then we're not dealing with purely semantic agreement anymore, but something closer to what you find in Arabic/Spanish/French.
Chuma wrote:Altho technically we should then (in German, Swedish etc.) consider plural to be a gender, as indeed they often do in Bantu languages.
They do that in Bantu linguistics just out of convenience, in order to compare languages more easily, since different languages have different syncretisms and mergers of the reconstructed 22/23 combinations of gender+number in Proto-Bantu. I don't think you can justify the same in Germanic though.