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Bugger, have been an idiot. Teach me to accidentally press send too soon. Am I right in believing Swedish uses both "den" and "det" to have a four way, rather than three way, distinction? Basically, ignore my last :) Sam Stutter [log in to unmask] "No e na'l cu barri" On 2 Dec 2012, at 20:37, Sam Stutter <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Uh... very willing to be proven wrong on this, but don't Nordic languages do this as well (han / hon / det)? As I understand things, Swedish nouns (speaking non-historically) don't really have "gender" as such, rather word classes. Looking for examples on Wikipedia, I'm at a loss to think if there is a genuine *gender* distinction between "ladder" (common) and "house" (neuter), but rather a grammatical one - like Romance verb classes. Am I being an idiot in saying that in Swedish you would use "det" for both "ladder" and "house"? > > Sam Stutter > [log in to unmask] > "No e na'l cu barri" > > > > > On 2 Dec 2012, at 19:19, Matthew Boutilier <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > >> are there NATLANGS, besides English, that use pronouns thus: >> "he", etc. = male humans/animals >> "she", etc. = female humans/animals >> "it," etc = all inanimate things (and, sometimes, babies of indeterminate >> sex) >> >> i am really hard-pressed to come up with more languages that work in >> exactly this way. most of the languages i am familiar with have a >> masculine/feminine distinction that spills over into the inanimate realm >> (Romance, Semitic); >> >> and then there are languages that *have* the tripartite gender distinction >> in their morphologies (with neuter), but inanimate objects are not >> inherently neuter, and are often masc. or fem. (Greek, Latin, German, >> Russian); >> >> and then there are some languages that don't distinguish grammatical gender >> at all (Turkish, Persian); >> >> but none of these resemble English in the way that i am asking about! >> >> [[i am mainly interested in non-Germanic languages (i suppose the English >> case is also the case dialectically in at least German and Dutch), but if >> you've got Germanic examples lemme hear 'em.]] >> >> are there any CONLANGS that handle things in a way similar to English? >> >> thanks! >> matt >