[Multilingual Monday] Grammatical Gender

[aadroma]

Today the topic is grammatical gender. If you've ever studied a language like German, Russian, or Spanish, you know about grammatical gender. While, in English, we think of everything as "it" except for living beings (which then become "he" or "she"), in several languages like Spanish your only choices are é and ella, or "he" and "she". This

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[gullinbursti]

Ojibwe is gendered, but along an animacy/inanimacy axis. There is no difference in the 3rd person verb forms when a man is the subject vs. when a woman is the subject, but the verbs change drastically if something grammatically animate is the subject vs. when something inanimate is the subject. I think I remember reading that this is a feature in the whole Algonquian family.

(edited because I can never remember the Algonquin/Algonquian difference)

[aadroma]

The one Amerind language I DO have experience with, Cherokee, differentiates between an animate and inanimate in a healthy number of verbs ("I-find-him/her" vs. "I-find-it"), but would this count as being a gendered language?? Rarely is gender otherwise mentioned, even with siblings (which use words depending on the speaker -- you would refer to your sister as "the sibling of opposite gender of me").

[muckefuck]

As pgdudda points out, "grammatical gender" can be just another ways of saying "noun class". Some linguistics differentiate the two by reserving "grammatical gender" for any system requiring agreement with parts of speech other than nouns. In such a view, English would be said to have noun class but not grammatical gender because the only kind of agreement that exists is between nouns and pronouns (which in English are a type of noun). To the extant that Cherokee verbs show agreement with nouns according to some sort of class membership, it could be said to have both

[aadroma]

... and I understand that, and have seen several languages that make non-gendered noun class differentiations and it affects multiple levels of the grammar.

My question is whether or not certain aspects of Cherokee indeed count as a noun class. Do inanimate objects count because, when made the object of a minority of verbs, they use a different object pronoun than animate objects? Do animals count because they specifically have no plural forms themselves? Do liquid objects count because they have specific forms in certain verbs like "to have"?

[muckefuck]

At a guess I would say "yes", "no", "no", but I'd need to know more. In the first case, does the object pronoun in question have any other use or is it solely for inanimate objects of those particular verbs? What distinguishes this "minority of verbs" from the rest or is there no common factor beyond pronouns selection?

Unless there's some link between plural formation and agreement that you haven't told us about, I don't see what the second case has to do with gender at all. Some English animal nouns (e.g. deer, sheep, carp) specifically have no plurals either. So?

For the third case, could you tell us more about the specific forms of "liquid objects"? It could be that, like English mass-nouns, Cherokee liquids form a proper subcategory of nouns, but that's not necessarily the same thing as a "noun class" in the way we've been using it here.

[aadroma]

1.) There are a few possible object pronouns, depending upon which class the verb is in, and which other pronouns it links up with (as "I .... it" is different from "you ... it", etc.). "I see it" and "I see himher" are both tsigotia, but "I know him/her" is tsiyoliga, and "I know it" is golia. Once you get into the plural (as a subject, NOT an object!) this isn't an issue (for some reason), and again, this is fairly uncommon

[gullinbursti]

In Ojibwe it's definitely a property of the noun; every noun is either animate or inanimate, and much like other gendered languages, you can't necessarily tell which it is just by looking at it. People and animals are always animate, but so are drums, playing cards, rocks, trees and cars. Fire, houses, and rivers are inanimate. It matters most with verbs, since most verbs have separate forms depending on whether the subject is animate or not. They also get different plurals (which is in fact how you tell them apart -- animates have plurals ending in -g and inanimates have plurals ending in -n.)