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Subject:Re: Help Systems & Gender Differences From:Karen Kay <karenk -at- NETCOM -dot- COM> Date:Mon, 11 Apr 1994 10:44:33 -0700
Mike Pope said:
> >Some of it is phonological, too.
> Grammatical, too: diminuitive suffix in German gets you a neuter gender,
> thus the non-intuitive gender of "girl" and "miss". Or is that what you
> meant?
No, I'd call that morphological. I thought about throwing that
in, but decided to simplify. You're right, though, that in languages
that mark gender, more is going on than the obvious-human-gender-type
stuff, and that's what I meant to indicate but didn't succeed.
> Who knows? Anyway, if you buy this theory, then yes, gender is a
> "basic human need" that would now have been superseded by new,
> improved ways to indicate grammatical functions of nouns.
Hm. So languages that don't mark gender? How do you account for
them? Or languages that have 20 or so noun classes?
