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This was in another thread, but I thought it might be the head of its own thread. Leading to it was a post mentioning that Bantu languages may have over a dozen genders (some have, I hear, as many as 35 or so), none of them related to sex, and a question, in response, asking if there was any meaning significance attached to the genders in those languages.
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Yes, there are rough meaning groupings. In Swahili, for example, with a few exceptions, all nouns referring to humans are in the M-Wa class. Most of the other noun classes are not so neat in their groupings, but meaning plays a role and sound plays a role.
The word "gender" in grammar originally meant noun class. Since the meaning of "gender" has been taken over by sexual gender, we usually use the word "noun class" to refer to other forms of grammatical gender.
I took Swahili, which is very representative of Bantu grammar, so I will use that as an example. Swahili has 15 noun classes or genders. In European languages, with two or three genders, basically all you have to worry about is making adjectives agree with the noun gender. In Swahili, not only adjectives but verbs and prepositions must agree with the gender.
And every gender has its own distinct forms of singular and plural. For example, M-Wa class means that the singular form of each noun begins with the prefix m- and the plural form with wa-. Example: mtoto = child, watoto = children. Ki-Vi class: kichwa = head, vichwa = heads. Adjectives, verbs and prepositions must agree in gender (noun class) and number, by way of prefixes which are usually the same prefixes as for the nouns. This results in many sentences which are highly alliterative. Like, a sentence about a noun in Ki- class can have every word beginning with ki-.
Noun classes (in languages that have them) are partly governed by sound and partly by meaning. The historical evidence is that gender in Indo-European languages was originally sound-governed -- classes of nouns with certain ending sounds taking adjectives that agreed in sound, and only gradually did these noun classes become identified with sexual gender. In the Bantu languages, the relationship with sound as well as meaning is obvious, because whoever came up with Swahili really loved sound patterns and alliteration.
As a beginning Swahili student, it's like, why all these noun classes to make things difficult, it would be a pretty easy language without them. But it doesn't take long before the noun classes become part of the whole flavor and texture and charm and rich quirkiness of the language.
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Yes, there are rough meaning groupings. In Swahili, for example, with a few exceptions, all nouns referring to humans are in the M-Wa class. Most of the other noun classes are not so neat in their groupings, but meaning plays a role and sound plays a role.
The word "gender" in grammar originally meant noun class. Since the meaning of "gender" has been taken over by sexual gender, we usually use the word "noun class" to refer to other forms of grammatical gender.
I took Swahili, which is very representative of Bantu grammar, so I will use that as an example. Swahili has 15 noun classes or genders. In European languages, with two or three genders, basically all you have to worry about is making adjectives agree with the noun gender. In Swahili, not only adjectives but verbs and prepositions must agree with the gender.
And every gender has its own distinct forms of singular and plural. For example, M-Wa class means that the singular form of each noun begins with the prefix m- and the plural form with wa-. Example: mtoto = child, watoto = children. Ki-Vi class: kichwa = head, vichwa = heads. Adjectives, verbs and prepositions must agree in gender (noun class) and number, by way of prefixes which are usually the same prefixes as for the nouns. This results in many sentences which are highly alliterative. Like, a sentence about a noun in Ki- class can have every word beginning with ki-.
Noun classes (in languages that have them) are partly governed by sound and partly by meaning. The historical evidence is that gender in Indo-European languages was originally sound-governed -- classes of nouns with certain ending sounds taking adjectives that agreed in sound, and only gradually did these noun classes become identified with sexual gender. In the Bantu languages, the relationship with sound as well as meaning is obvious, because whoever came up with Swahili really loved sound patterns and alliteration.
As a beginning Swahili student, it's like, why all these noun classes to make things difficult, it would be a pretty easy language without them. But it doesn't take long before the noun classes become part of the whole flavor and texture and charm and rich quirkiness of the language.
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Unsu...
Re: Fifteen genders
Tue, March 29, 2005 - 7:15 PM"The word "gender" in grammar originally meant noun class. Since the meaning of "gender" has been taken over by sexual gender, we usually use the word "noun class" to refer to other forms of grammatical gender. "'
What I want to know is how come my spanish teacher never told me that! I probably wouldn't have thought Spanish speakers were so wierd for assigning a gender to, say, a rock. It just made no sense. -
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Re: Fifteen genders
Tue, March 29, 2005 - 8:40 PMYour Spanish teacher probably didn't know that. Indo-European languages have identified noun classes with sex for a very. very long time. -
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Unsu...
Re: Fifteen genders
Tue, March 29, 2005 - 8:56 PMWhy though, it's so stupid (I know, very unanalytical of me). Not that English doesn't have it's stupid points. -
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Re: Fifteen genders
Tue, March 29, 2005 - 9:11 PMWell, nouns identified with females and males tended to have the respective endings that placed them into certain noun classes, and as a result, over time, those noun classes became identified as masculine, feminine and neuter (the last of which has been lost in contemporary Romance languages).
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Re: Fifteen genders
Wed, March 30, 2005 - 5:23 PMWell, maybe gender, number and case (and other things like word order) just help to make the sentence as redundant as possible to insure that communication is successful. Gender is a rather common grammatical category. We may not know why, anymore than we know why a rose is called a rose.
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Unsu...
Re: Fifteen genders
Sun, April 17, 2005 - 3:24 AMBecause a geneder makes you have to store something in your memoory that carries no real information about what your talking about.
It's not very elegant. If you were making a language from scratch that was to be maximally descriptive, precise, and effiecient then putting arbitrary genders to noun classes would do nothing for any of those areas. As a matter of fact I can't think of any way it improves communication. It's not really redundant because the gender carries no information. All genders do is make the language more cumbersome as far as I can tell. -
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Re: Fifteen genders
Sun, April 17, 2005 - 7:09 AMYes, it's not practical, but it adds to the charm and color of the Bantu languages. "Efficiency" may be the highest ideal of this culture, but not of everyone.
However, I have to nitpick one phrase: "putting arbitrary genders to noun classes." Gender and noun class are synonyms.
(In linguistics, that is, not in popular usage.)
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Re: Fifteen genders
Sun, April 17, 2005 - 3:42 PMI disagree. It is practical. Redundancy of information in the message insures that the message makes it through to its intended audience in spite of a noisy channel. -
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Re: Fifteen genders
Sun, April 17, 2005 - 4:27 PMThat's true. And it certainly has an aesthetic value in Swahili and Bantu languages. Like:
kitabu kidogo kimoja kinatosha - one small book suffices
vitabu vidogo vitatu vinatosha - three small books suffice
mti mdogo mmoja mnatosha - one small tree suffices
miti midogo mitatu minatosha- three small trees suffice
mtoto mdogo mtatu analala = one small child is sleeping
watoto wadogo watatu wanalala - three small children are sleeping.
The people who invented Bantu languages were evidently really into alliteration and the musicality of sounds. A similar impulse, but with suffixes instead of prefixes, seems to have been the original impulse behind the noun class (gender) system of Indo-European. -
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Re: Fifteen genders
Mon, April 18, 2005 - 7:46 AMOops, made a mistake,
mtoto mdogo mmoja analala = one small child is sleeping
mmoja (-moja = one) not mtatu (-tatu = three) -- m- is a SINGULAR prefix, so "mtatu" would be an impossible word.
Anyway, anyone with a love of languages should have fun figuring out the patterns behind those Swahili sentences.
kitabu kidogo kimoja kinatosha - one small book suffices
vitabu vidogo vitatu vinatosha - three small books suffice
mti mdogo mmoja mnatosha - one small tree suffices
miti midogo mitatu minatosha- three small trees suffice
mtoto mdogo mmoja analala = one small child is sleeping
watoto wadogo watatu wanalala - three small children are sleeping.
The noun classes and the alliteration (alliteration because noun classes and most other things are marked with prefixes, prefixes which are put on verbs, prepositions, and numbers as well as ordinary adjectives) are part of what makes Swahili fun.
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Re: Fifteen genders
Mon, April 18, 2005 - 1:20 AMverb agreement when the subject is explicit...noun declension when the roles are already given by position or particles...asymmetric phonetic profiles...divergent word meanings...irregular verbs...
most of the way natural language is structured has little to do with elegance in any meaningful sense as far as i can tell...
i agree with the redundancy piece jheem mentions.
additionally, i like to think of natural language like i think about any natural system: as a complex ecology made up of layers and subsystems with multiple and evolving and semi-autonomous--if not contradictory--purposes...not at all like a machine built from a blueprint.
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Re: Fifteen genders
Thu, May 12, 2005 - 10:11 AMNot that English doesn't have it's stupid points.
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I've always wondered why we have so much redundancy in plurals. I mean, if you have Two of a thing, then it must be plural, why bother with the silly "s". ;-)
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Re: Fifteen genders
Thu, May 12, 2005 - 10:08 AMAlso, depending on her native heratige, she may not have even recognized it as a class, per say.
That is, when i talk with my russian or french friends, they don't say "ah, apple is female", nor do they think that there is something enherantly masculine about a key. But, because we have to learn "do not forget to use the 'male' pronoun when saying 'it is red' for the key" we fix on that as if it meant something beyond just a classification for "spelling rules".
Both Hopi and Navajo have very um... "odd" (to the western european mindset) set of classifications. in hopi, there are "things that are alive and straight." "things that are alive and round" "things that are not alive nor blue".
No wonder we ask ourselves about "why" and "worldview" when we see such classifications. :-)
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Re: Fifteen genders
Wed, April 20, 2005 - 6:27 AMEast Asian languages also have a large number of noun classes, though the classifiers are usually only used after numerals. -
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Re: Fifteen genders
Wed, April 20, 2005 - 11:21 AMEast Asian numeral classifiers are not really considered noun classes, though they are allied to them in a way. That discussion did come up in some of my ling courses. Part of the reason is that they don't grammaticize other elements of the language.
Also, they have parallels in English, which are not considered noun classes in English. Nouns in East Asian languages are all treated as uncountables, like "bread," which cannot take a numeral unless a unit is specified. East Asian numeral classifiers act like units. We don't say "two breads," we say two "loaves" of bread, two "slices" of bread, two "crumb" of bread. Two drops of water or two gallons of water -- not "two waters." Two skeins of yarn or two balls of yarn -- not "two yarns." Etc. -
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Re: Fifteen genders
Wed, April 20, 2005 - 2:19 PMInteresting, I studied Mandarin, and I always felt they were noun classes. It is my understanding that languages tend to have a small number of noun classes (as in Germanic or Romance languages), or else a fairly large number of them (as in American Sign Language or Mandarin). Typically, I hear the former called "gender" and the latter called "classifer."
Then again, my definition of a noun class didn't include the need to grammaticize other elements of the language. I thought of them more as linguistic divisions of nouns into arbitrary categories, which are often (but not always) based on semantics, a la the book "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things." So maybe I'm thinking semantics and you're thinking morphology.
Defining noun classes as something that grammaticizes other elements of the language seems a little odd when I think about Mandarin, because Mandarin has almost none of that type of grammaticization in the first place. Most of it is found in the classifier system itself. Do other East Asian languages which use similar classifier systems have richer morphology?
I also studied American Sign Language, which has a classifer system very similar to Mandarin. It doesn't grammaticize other elements, but again, that's fairly consistent with the overall morphology.
The comparison to English is interesting, but I'm not sure why anything in English should influence whether something in a non-related language should be considered a noun class. -
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Re: Fifteen genders
Wed, April 20, 2005 - 3:29 PM"Do other East Asian languages which use similar classifier systems have richer morphology? "
Yes, Japanese does. I believe that Korean (which has a structure like Japanese) also uses classifiers.
You know, you can always go ahead and try to make the case that classifiers represent noun classes. It's just a matter of how you define noun classes, and definitions in linguistics change with time, especially if someone writes a great article in some scholarly journal that convinces everyone of a new definition. I mean, I can see myself how East Asian noun classifiers might be considered noun classes.
In fact, I am not positive that my professor's views (in the class where this question came up) represent the "official" views current in linguistics. It may have been just his personal opinion, as a linguist who specializes in African languages (he has even written a book about African languages). If you are going to study Bantu languages, you had better LOVE noun classes. They are woven throughout the texture of the language. As in the Swahili examples, they govern not just adjectives but verbs and numbers, as well as prepositions. Once you get past the fact that they do make the language somewhat harder to learn, you can see how they add richness and color and even alliteration and rhythm to the language.
So I could just see how someone who comes from an African languages background would look at East Asian noun classifiers and say, "You call THAT a noun class? It hardly does anything!"
So, as I said, I'm not sure if my professor's opinion on that subject is truly the current linguistic gospel.
I do know that I got my essential insight about the nature of East Asian noun classifiers not in a linguistics class but in Chinese class -- that Chinese nouns are not, as often said, "the same for singular and plural" but rather are all treated as uncountables, like water or bread, and cannot be counted unless a unit (classifier) is used. -
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Re: Fifteen genders
Wed, April 20, 2005 - 3:39 PM"Defining noun classes as something that grammaticizes other elements of the language seems a little odd when I think about Mandarin, because Mandarin has almost none of that type of grammaticization in the first place. "
Well, a language doesn't =need= noun classes. A lot of languages do perfectly fine without them. (English, for one.)
"I also studied American Sign Language, which has a classifer system very similar to Mandarin."
That is very interesting! One would think that classifiers are dispensable, and yet here is a language where it would seem they are included by choice. Do you have any insight as to why?
"The comparison to English is interesting, but I'm not sure why anything in English should influence whether something in a non-related language should be considered a noun class."
Well, it's because if we don't call x a noun class in English, we probably wouldn't call x a noun class in another language.
What makes it harder is that the term "noun class" itself is of relatively recent coinage, replacing "gender," which now almost exclusively refers to sex or masculine/feminine/neuter classes. Would you say that East Asian noun classifiers represent a type of gender system in the language?
Anyway you are free to make the case that the term noun class or gender =should= be defined in such a way as to include East Asian noun classifiers ("noun classes" and "noun classifiers" even sound similar!) Fashions change in linguistics, as in every science. -
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Re: Fifteen genders
Wed, April 20, 2005 - 8:22 PMOops, I said that sloppily and should clarify, the classifiers in ASL are not used similarly to Mandarin (required for counting), which is how that sounds. I was calling them similar because they're as prevalent and usually refer to categories based on shapes like "stick/pole shaped object" or "thing shaped like a tube." There are classifers with very limited sets of objects they can represent (e.g. a classifier just for airplanes/jets).
Also, ASL does have a fair amount of morphology, but it's simultaneous rather than across signs.
The classifers in ASL are used to form predicates, so you'll produce a one syllable sign that means "object shaped like a stick fell down" by using the "object shaped like a stick" handshape, moving it in the manner that means "fell down."
Apparently, natural sign languages tend to use this kind of classifier system and not just ASL. My intuition is that at least some things that signed languages tend to have in common (like this one) are there to save time, exploiting the simultaneous morphology that's possible with visual language, but some other elements may fall out from those as constraints of universal grammar (if a language does X, it tends to do Y, or does not do Z). For example, signed languages tend to be topic prominent languages, but I'm not sure that that takes advantage of the visual mode. But why else would it be so common? -
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Re: Fifteen genders
Wed, April 20, 2005 - 8:28 PMNoun classes in Navajo are similar to what you describe -- usually referring to the shape of an object and rigidity vs flexibility (for example, a class for long thin rigid objects like a stick, a class for long thin flexible objects like a rope, and so on).
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Re: Fifteen genders
Wed, April 20, 2005 - 7:39 PM<snip>"You call THAT a noun class? It hardly does anything!" <snip>
LOL!
<snip>So, as I said, I'm not sure if my professor's opinion on that subject is truly the current linguistic gospel<snip>
I should have also said that I haven't studied linguistics since 1992, and have not kept up with it before landing here, so I'm rusty myself. -
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Re: Fifteen genders
Thu, April 28, 2005 - 3:44 PMIf "grammaticize" means to require agreement in some other place(s), then Chinese has no grammar. -
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Re: Fifteen genders
Thu, April 28, 2005 - 4:04 PMOr to affect it in some way. However, it is not "grammar" that Chinese does not have, but morphology -- that is to say, changes in word form.
Grammar also includes syntax (which is very important in Chinese), and, as used in linguistics, the phonological system as well. What we call "grammar" in common usage is called "morphosyntax" in linguistics -- the structure created by the interaction of word changes (morphology) and word order (syntax).
Most languages fall somewhere along a spectrum of depending more upon morphology or more upon syntax to convey the relationships among the elements of a sentence. For example, Latin has much freer word order than its descendants, the present-day Romance languages, because of the case marking on its nouns, which has been lost in present day Romance languages. Chinese, having no changes in the words themselves, is way over on the syntax end of the spectrum.
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Re: Fifteen genders
Thu, May 12, 2005 - 10:42 AMSo I could just see how someone who comes from an African languages background would look at East Asian noun classifiers and say, "You call THAT a noun class? It hardly does anything!"
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this is why good ol' saphi/whorf (I always get the spellig wrong and either turn a linguist into a klingon, or a grumpy star ship officer into a geek of a lingustic archivist. ;-) ) hold such appeal to me.
If you are going to have noun classes, it stands to reason (to me) that somewhere in your world view, those classes serve a purpose. If i am going ot classify "all living things" as one noun class, this makes sense to most people. I am distinguishing by my speach, relationships. So if my classifiers are "round things" or "weapons" seperate from all other "things" - this must say something about the nature of weapons and round things against the rest of the nameable world at large.
I think it's a place we can beging to explore the nature of thier world view. "why are weapons a set of things that needs to be distinguished?"
"what is it about the ablity to move that makes things not only distinct in idea, but in encoded importance".
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Re: Fifteen genders
Thu, May 12, 2005 - 11:45 AMI agree with you.
I remember a French woman, living in the US, who told me that even while speaking English she would correct her children's gender according to French gender. Like, they were at the zoo, and one of her children said of the giraffe, "He's so tall," and she corrected, "SHE'S so tall." I asked if the giraffe in question was actually male or female. She said she didn't even look, all giraffes were female to her. I asked her if tables and chairs and such were male / female to her, and she said yes.
There are ample studies that show that masculine gender bias in language has an effect on people's perceptions and that "man" does not suggest "man or woman" in people's minds. The classic example is the fact that it doesn't sound right to English speakers to say, "Man, like other mammals, suckles his young." But you could probably get by with "Man, like other mammals, has external genitalia."
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