Hallo conlangers!

On Monday 12 December 2011 16:34:31 R A Brown wrote:

> On 12/12/2011 07:12, BPJ wrote:
> > Dear Ray,
> >
> > it seems you and I never really disagreed.
> 
> No - I don't think we did.

Great minds think alike ;)  Both you and BPJ are to my experience
very reasonable individuals with a good knowledge of linguistics,
so it doesn't surprise me that you agree with each other a lot
(as much as I agree with both of you).

> [...]
> Ah - sorry, I missed that.  Yes, I think personification is
> too simplistic an explanation for the gender systems found
> in IE, Semitic and IIRC other Afro-Asiatic languages.  I
> don't know what the current thinking is on this.  I'm sure
> some of our Nostratic brethren have theories  :)

What I have heard is that Early PIE had only two genders, one of
which ("common") included all animate nouns and some inanimates,
while the other ("neuter") was all inanimate, and this is the
state of affairs seen in Hittite.  Obviously, that is basically
an animate/inanimate system in which some inanimate nouns were
moved to the former animate class for reasons that are not too
well understood (metaphoric animacy?  formal similarity to
animates?).  In Late PIE, the feminine gender was branched off
from the common which thus became the masculine.  This started
with designations of female beings, but as one of the most
productive feminine suffixes was *-h2, just about everything else
that ended in *h2 was also moved to this gender.

But the problem has not been solved satisfactorily yet.  The
messy residue is too large.

As for Afro-Asiatic, no idea.  I don't know what the Nostraticists
have to say on this matter, they probably don't have any useful
idea either.  (Bomhard doesn't treat grammatical gender in his
2008 book.)

ObConlang: My conlang Old Albic has a two-tiered gender system
with an animate/inanimate distinction and a masculine/feminine/
common distinction within the animate class.  Most nouns go where
one would expect them, but there are a few exceptions (e.g., the
Sun and the Earth are feminine, the Moon and the Sky are masculine,
books are common gender animate).

> [...]
> > I guess I overreacted to the above quote from GvdW
> > because I'm deeply allergic to using Mumbo Jumbo as an
> > 'explanation' to anything in anthropology -- clearly
> > that should be the last resort, if any last resort rather
> > than "we can't know" is really needed.
> 
> Yes, from an absolute point of view, "we don't know" is the
> only possible answer, short of time-travel.  But I guess
> there must be theories - some inevitably of the crackpot
> nature, but I wondered what more academically acceptable
> ideas might be.
> 
> But i get enough private emails from crackpots about
> Pelasgians, so maybe I should be more careful where I lead
> threads.

Ah, Pelasgians.  Will we ever know which language they spoke?

The less is known about a matter, the more crackpots write about
it ;)  Like the endless rows of volumes about Atlantis, alien
visitors (both in the past and the present), and other such topics.

There is of course nothing wrong with making up a Pelasgian conlang,
but don't try to sell it as the truth!
 
> > Yours,
> > 
> > /bpj
> > 
> > P.S. As for the Vedic root nouns they were assigned
> > gender based on their meaning/relation to the active
> > verb: action nouns were feminine and agent nouns were
> > masculine -- nothing to do with personification of
> > course! I'm deeply convinced that the association of
> > grammatical gender with biological gender in PIE was
> > secondary.
> 
> Very likely.

Perhaps.  AFAIK, it were the Greek and Roman grammarians who came
up with the terms "masculine", "feminine" and "neuter"; did the
Sanskrit grammarians also name the grammatical genders for
biological genders, or did they use entirely different terms?

> > Note that the Anatolian lgs had only a common and a
> > neuter gender, which probably reflects the original state
> > of affairs before _*H2_ fused with the preceding vowel.
> > But it's not there the controversy between us lies, I
> > hope!
> 
> No, there isn't.  I just have not kept up with current
> thinking regarding PIE.

It seems (as BPJ writes and I have written above) that the PIE
gender system emerged from an animate/inanimate system, but the
details need to be cleared up.  The Indo-Europeanists are busy
trying to find out.
 
> ========================================================
> 
> On 12/12/2011 11:35, Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets wrote:
> > On 12 December 2011 08:32, R A wrote:
> >> Why this the useful distinction between sex and gender
> >> has become confused, I don't know. It's almost as tho
> >> 'gender' is being used as a euphemism for the "vulgar"
> >> sounding 'sex' - which IMO is silly.
> > 
> > Mainly because sex and gender are not confused, but have
> > started to refer to different facets of sexuality: sex
> > is about the physical attributes, gender about the
> > psychological and social reality, which may or may not be
> > in line with the physical one.
> 
> Yes, yes - I've heard this before; but in practice this is
> not so.  The forms that have a box labeled "gender" accept
> only 'male' or 'female' as answers.  Surely something which
> referred to 'psychological and social realities' would allow
> answers that do not refer to physical attributes.

Indeed.  Psychological and social realities are that much more
complex.
 
> I heard just yesterday on the radio, a young girl taking
> about finding a baby and saying: "We had been taught at
> school how to tell the gender of a baby.  I looked; it was a
> boy."
> 
> I don't think she was looking at the psychological and
> social status of the baby - but at something quite physical!

Either the presence or absence of that body part with so many names,
or the colour of the baby's clothing - but I guess the former.
 
> Sorry - IME the word 'sex' in popular speech seems nearly
> always used to mean "sexual intercourse" - it's only in
> strictly biological contexts it gets used with other
> meanings.  Otherwise 'gender' now IME is used not only to
> refer to 'psychological and social realities' but to actual
> physical differences.

Yes.

> =========================================================
> 
> On 12/12/2011 13:19, Brian wrote:
> > Vulgar comment alert in this message!!! Not intended to
> > offend!!!
> > 
> > Okay, that explains the term 'gender' nicely. Thank you
> > for that. However, why are the terms 'masculine' and
> > 'feminine' used as opposed to other possible
> > class/type/kind/gender distinctions? I mean, we could
> > use the gender labels 'high' and 'low' or possibly 'class
> > 1' and 'class 2', etc.
> 
> Tradition - going back ultimately to the ancient Greek
> grammarians.  Because females tended to be denoted by nouns
> belonging to 'class 1', it was called θηλυκός (thēlykós)
> "woman-like, like a female", whereas males tended to be
> denoted by nouns in 'class 2' which they termed ἀρρενικός/
> ἀρσενικος (arrenikós/ arsenikós [according to dialect])
> "male"; 'class 3' just got called οὐδέτερος (oudéteros)
> "neither [of two]."
> 
> They got Latinized as _fēminīnus, masculīnus, neuter_
> respectively, and the rest is history ...

What are the Sanskrit names?  BPJ perhaps knows ...
 
> > I can't remember how many times I've been talking to
> > someone about grammatical gender and had to use the
> > phrase, "Just because it's called masculine doesn't mean
> > it has balls!"
> 
> There are many similar jokes     ;)

Like one I once poked at the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, namely that
putting a tablecloth on a table must have sexual connotations in
German because _Tischdecke_ is feminine and _Tisch_ is masculine.
Of course, it does not matter at all in German, especially
considering that the synonyms _Tischtuch_ and _Tafel_ are neuter
and feminine, respectively.  German tablecloths just don't have
sexual intercourse with tables.
 
> > I am being serious about this. I really don't understand
> > the purpose of the current terminology when other just
> > as suitable terminology could be used with less
> > ambiguity.
> 
> That, alas, can be said about much of linguistic
> terminology.  Two millennia and more of tradition is not
> easy to throw aside.  Trask, quoting Corbett, writes: "most
> European languages other than English have gender systems
> showing some degree of correlation with sex; as a
> consequence, many non-linguists (and some linguists!)
> needlessly confuse gender with sex.  This confusion should
> be avoided: sex is a matter of biology, while gender is a
> matter of grammar, and one which has no necessary connection
> with sex."
> 
> But, I fear, while the confusion should IMO have been
> needless, we now seem to be stuck with it.

Indeed.
 
> The Bantu languages were wise enough to have more than three
> grammatical genders and no one has bothered to think up new
> names for the extra genders, so they just termed 'class 1',
> 'class 2', etc.

Yes.

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