Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE

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Porphyrogenitos
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Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE

Post by Porphyrogenitos »

Does anyone know anything about non-Indo-European languages with masculine-feminine grammatical gender/noun class systems? Or any links to articles or papers discussing them, or (especially) their historical development?

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Re: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE

Post by Soap »

Semitic has gender; I think it goes back to proto-Afro-Asiatic but it may not have survived in all branches.

The Ket language, which has been linked to Na-Dené, also has grammatical gender, but I think it's a three-way m/f/n distinction.

Some Khoisan languages have gender; e.g. Nama /nūb "leg" (masc), /nūs "wheel" (fem). I think they also have a neuter though.

Some Australian aboriginal langtuages have gender, but I dont know if there are any that have just a binary masculine/feminine gender setup.
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Re: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE

Post by Zaarin »

Soap wrote:Semitic has gender; I think it goes back to proto-Afro-Asiatic but it may not have survived in all branches.
It at least survived into Egyptian and Berber (so all of Boreoafrasian), though it got lost in Late Egyptian.
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Re: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE

Post by mèþru »

Most Dravidian languages have sex bases genders.

I suggest you look at WALS 31A
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Re: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE

Post by Vijay »

mèþru wrote:Most Dravidian languages have sex bases genders.
Uh

No they don't unless you mean words for 'he' vs. 'she'. :P

EDIT: Wait, maybe I misunderstood what you meant. Dravidian languages don't classify nouns by gender really. At most they'll be like "oh, if the subject of this sentence is a man and in third person, then you use this verb ending. If it's a woman instead, you use this other one, maybe you use something else if you want to leave the person's gender unspecified, and if it's none of those, then you use this one." And Malayalam doesn't even do that much lol

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Re: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE

Post by gach »

Masculine/feminine gender systems happen all over. Here's a paper on gender in some West Papuan languages,

http://papuan.linguistics.anu.edu.au/Do ... cation.pdf

Another place in New Guinea to look for masc/fem gender are the Sepik languages. At least in its Ndu branch there is a fair degree of transparency in the history of its gender marking. A large part of its verbal person/number/gender agreement morphology is clearly cognate with the independent pronouns and moreover the same material d(V) that appears in the SG3 masculine pronoun and agreement morphology is also suggestively similar to the independent noun du for "man" (this is also where the name of the family comes from, with the prenasalisation of the voiced stop spelled out).

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Re: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE

Post by Frislander »

mèþru wrote:I suggest you look at WALS 31A
Even better, combine maps 30 and 31, showing up specifically masculine-feminine gender systems. This shows up many non-European examples including many Nilo-Saharan languages and Tiwi.
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Re: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE

Post by Curlyjimsam »

What are described as masculine/feminine systems may not necessarily correspond terribly well to the typical IE model - e.g. you could have a system which distinguishes masculine/feminine for humans/animates only (English basically does this), which is somewhat different from the typical IE system where loads of inanimate nouns are classified as masculine or feminine as well. Or you might have a system which generalises masculine/feminine beyond animates, but does so in a way which is rather more semantically systematic than you get in IE.

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Re: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE

Post by Frislander »

Curlyjimsam wrote:What are described as masculine/feminine systems may not necessarily correspond terribly well to the typical IE model - e.g. you could have a system which distinguishes masculine/feminine for humans/animates only (English basically does this), which is somewhat different from the typical IE system where loads of inanimate nouns are classified as masculine or feminine as well. Or you might have a system which generalises masculine/feminine beyond animates, but does so in a way which is rather more semantically systematic than you get in IE.
Or third one of the "traditional" genders may just consist of nouns relating to that gender while the other is basiclly just a wastebasket for all othe nouns.
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Re: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE

Post by Soap »

Im not sure if this is attested in any natlang, but Ive been working on a family of languages that evolves from a Bantu-like noun class system with at least a few dozen different noun classes to a gender-based setup similar to IE but with more genders (it varies from one language to another). The minimal gender system is masculine/feminine/neuter, but most languages have other genders such as epicene (for groups of people and for pregnant women), unisex (yong babies and some animals; use varies by language), maiden (for young unmarried women, but also for a lot of other things such as snakes, fish, and birds that that came along for the ride), and supplemental feminine (no difference in semantics, just a 2nd conjugation pattern).

The original system marked noun classes by monosyllabic CV- prefixes. These disappeared in the Gold branch, meaning that the gender system that remained was not marked overtly on the word. However, it would still show up in inflections and some of the words had "trapped" prefixes that survived because the sound changes wouldnt allow them to disappear (mostly this is words whose roots began with vowels). Masculine nouns have inflections that mostly contain the consonants /t/ and /d/. Women have a stronger team, with an inflection paradigm dominated by /p/, /f/, /m/, /s/, /n/, and /ŋ/.

Details here if anyone's curious. This is not based on anything in any natlang but I think such a setup is plausible and could develop from, say, Swahili if the language were left alone for thousands of years to evolve with no external pressure.
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Re: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE

Post by So Haleza Grise »

Soap wrote: Some Australian aboriginal langtuages have gender, but I dont know if there are any that have just a binary masculine/feminine gender setup.
Kala Lagaw Ya is an example of one.

There's lots to say about gender systems in Australian language. Here I'll just note a few things.

Many languages have a four-way split into masculine/feminine/vegetable food/residue class (as is famously exhibited in Dyirbal). Typically, the first two classes contain all animates; "feminines" are often animates that are somewhat atypical or form their own subsection in some way (birds, for instance). Other languages do have more classes though (ten or so).

Australian languages often have special behaviours when it comes to classifying body part terms but relatively few languages have a gender or noun class specifically for body parts.

In Jingulu and often in other four-gender languages, at some level you can conceive of "masculine" as subsuming the other genders. So it would not necessarily be incorrect to use masculine agreement for one of the other genders, because it is considered primary/default in some sense. Likewise class 4, the residue, is in some sense the default class for all inanimates.

Other languages split inanimates into "lustrous" vs. "non-lustrous".
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