[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

Comments

[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.

Etymologically, "gender" is the same word as "genre" and "genus". There's nothing inherently sex-linked about it. It just happens to be the case that in Latin and other Indo-European languages, noun classes became associated with the natural gender of animate beings. But if you go back far enough in the history of Proto-Indo-European, the distinction was simply animate/inanimate. Most animate nouns subsequently became "masculines", but a new class of "feminines" was carved out of what was originally the inanimate plural declension, a class which absorbed the feminine animates.

(This is why, for instance, basic Indo-European vocabulary referring to female animates declines so differently from the bulk of feminine nouns in the descendant languages. Originally, *mater- "mother" and *pəter- "father" would've declined identically, both being animates, but then *mater- was assigned to the new class and its declension underwent various forms of analogical change.)

[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.

What distinguishes these verbs? Probably the big difference is that a vast majority of verbs in Cherokee don't make sense with an animate object or versa. "I taught something to a chair"? No. "I ate Becky"? Even if you DID eat Becky, it's her SKIN or some body part that you ate. If there's an instance where you WOULD be directly affecting both animate or inanimate objects, most verbs don't differentiate.

The second? I haven't any idea why I even mentioned that. Seriously.

As for the third? Well, it's not just liquid; verbs like "have" or "hand someone" depends on physical description, and are separated specifically by: living, flexible, liquid, long, or indefinite. Again, there are only a handful of verbs that mark this difference and in NO OTHER INSTANCE is this mentioned. Because of their rarity, these are taught as separate verbs.

Now what do you think?