Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE
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- sinic
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Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE
Does anyone know anything about non-Indo-European languages with masculine-feminine grammatical gender/noun class systems? Or any links to articles or papers discussing them, or (especially) their historical development?
Re: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE
This Wikipedia article lists languages by gender systems. From the list of Masculine-Femine languages: Ancient Egyptian, Akkadian, Coptic, Amharic, Arabic (Kinda), Hebrew, Oromo, and Berber are not Indo-European.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_l ... al_genders
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_l ... al_genders
Re: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE
Ancient Egyptian and Coptic have M/F distinction.
Akkadian has M/F/Ndistinction.
Hebrew & Arabic have M/F distinction at least.
Akkadian has M/F
Hebrew & Arabic have M/F distinction at least.
- DesEsseintes
- mongolian
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Re: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE
Are you specifically looking for languages that only have those two genders and no others?
The Iroquoian languages have a masculine gender and two feminine genders. Clifford Abbott's Oneida Teaching Grammar (2006) offers a fairly good explanation of the system.
The Papuan language Abau has masculine and feminine gender only, but combines these with a noun classifier system (and apparently so do its relatives, Iwam, Wogamusin, and Chenapian). Abau is worth checking out as it has a number of interesting features, like complex and obligatory topic marking, and lack of phonemic /t/.
I'm gonna check if the Arawakan languages have sth similar. I seem to recall sth like it.
The Iroquoian languages have a masculine gender and two feminine genders. Clifford Abbott's Oneida Teaching Grammar (2006) offers a fairly good explanation of the system.
The Papuan language Abau has masculine and feminine gender only, but combines these with a noun classifier system (and apparently so do its relatives, Iwam, Wogamusin, and Chenapian). Abau is worth checking out as it has a number of interesting features, like complex and obligatory topic marking, and lack of phonemic /t/.
I'm gonna check if the Arawakan languages have sth similar. I seem to recall sth like it.
- Creyeditor
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Re: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE
Just wanted to mention that there are other Papuan languages that make reference to sex-based gender, e.g. Ekari where determiners are based on gender as well as 3rd person sg verb agreement.
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- Frislander
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Re: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE
Tiwi has just masculine and feminine as well though the contrast collapses in the plural.
Looking at WALS, combining maps 30 and 31 enables you to isolate the language with two sex-based genders, and brings up quite a few actually, including Tiwi as I just mentioned
Looking at WALS, combining maps 30 and 31 enables you to isolate the language with two sex-based genders, and brings up quite a few actually, including Tiwi as I just mentioned
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Re: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE
Yay, Frislander is back!Frislander wrote:Tiwi has just masculine and feminine as well though the contrast collapses in the plural.
Looking at WALS, combining maps 30 and 31 enables you to isolate the language with two sex-based genders, and brings up quite a few actually, including Tiwi as I just mentioned
And that reminds me: Maybe I should finally go and read about Tiwi properly...
Re: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE
Just looking at this as well.Frislander wrote:Tiwi has just masculine and feminine as well though the contrast collapses in the plural.
Looking at WALS, combining maps 30 and 31 enables you to isolate the language with two sex-based genders, and brings up quite a few actually, including Tiwi as I just mentioned
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