Noun classes (grammatical gender etc.)

[Randy Allen Harris <raha -at- WATARTS -dot- UWATERLOO -dot- CA>]

Mike Pope said (expanding on an earlier post, as part of an interesting
multiparty exchange also involving Karen Kay and Andreas Ramos):

>My point was that the "purpose" of gender was lost, however, its function
>taken over by other methods (case, say), and that it's therefore
>a bit of a fossil. And that even case marking has largely
>disappeared in a language such as English that uses word order
>to mark grammatical function.

Anything's possible, but I would strongly doubt if case and gender have a
historical relation in any language.  The whole point of case (or, at
least, of grammatical relations, with which case closely correlates) is to
give nouns the flexibility to fill many roles:  When Fred kisses Wilma, he
is the subject, she the object; when Wilma kisses Fred, the roles reverse
(ditto fur der Mann und das Frau).

On the other hand, noun classes definitely have historical relations with
*semantic* notions, not just sex/gender, as in many European languages, but
humanhood, animacy, edibility, and so on, as in many African and Amerindian
languages.

English, by the way, used to have up to 8 noun classes (it depends on who
is doing the counting, but there was masc, fem, neut, and a raft of
"irregulars").

                       -------======= * =======-------
                              Randy Allen Harris
                           raha -at- watarts -dot- uwaterloo -dot- ca

   Rhetoric and Professional Writing, Department of English, University of
Waterloo, Waterloo ON N2L 3G1, CANADA; 519 885-1211, x5362; FAX: 519 884-8995