3 ms·

> several-hundred-gender languages I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing. My understanding is that Fula, with ~24 noun classes, is widely agreed to have the mo

• hprotagonist 5y ago
  “Gender” is related to “genre”, and means merely a group of nouns lumped together for grammatical purposes. Linguists talk instead of “noun classes”, which may have to do with shape or size, or whether the noun is animate, but often rules are hard to see. George Lakoff, a linguist, memorably described a noun class of Dyirbal (spoken in north-eastern Australia) as including “women, fire and dangerous things”. To the extent that genders are idiosyncratic, they are hard to learn. Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 of them. https://medium.economist.com/we-went-in-search-of-the-worlds-hardest-language-95a27c2cff3 https://medium.economist.com/we-went-in-search-of-the-worlds...
  • tom_mellior 5y ago
    > To the extent that genders are idiosyncratic, they are hard to learn. Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 of them. Interesting. Wikipedia says that Bora has more than 350 "classifiers", but that doesn't seem to be the same concept as genders. There is a specific section at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_(linguistics)#Noun_classifiers_versus_noun_classes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_(linguistics)#Noun_... contrasting classifiers and "noun classes", of which grammatical genders are a special case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_grammatical_genders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_g... lists one language with "50–140 noun classes", several Bantu languages with 16-20 of them, and apparently all other languages of the world have significantly fewer. (I am not a linguist.)
    • bradrn 5y ago
      I’m not a linguist either, but I’d say most of this is correct, though incomplete. There’s a bunch of different ways of classifying nouns, including those you mention. A complete list: • Noun classes/genders: usually a fairly small set (<7 in most cases outside Africa), are marked on multiple words at once, commonly distinguishes male/female or animate/inanimate • Noun classifiers: commonly small (<20) but may be a larger set, most commonly occur as free words next to the noun • Numeral classifiers: can be a very large set, occur next to numerals to specify what you’re counting • Possessive classifiers: occur in a possessive construction to show the exact relationship between two nouns • Verbal classifiers: incorporated into the verb to show what kind of object it’s acting on • Deictic classifiers: incorporated into deictic words (like ‘this’ or ‘that’) to precisely specify the kind and orientation of the object you’re referring to And then of course these overlap somewhat. Tuyuca — the language with ‘50–150 noun classes’ — has a set of classifiers which act simultaneously as numeral classifiers, possessive classifiers and deictic classifiers, as well as modifying adjectives. GP’s example of Bora seems to use numeral classifiers. (All this is taken from Aikhenvald’s Classifiers, which is probably the best resource if you want to know more about this.)
      • Tainnor 5y ago
        linguists rarely agree on definitions, unfortunately. Greville Corbett, for example, who has written a textbook about "Gender" (in the linguistic sense), defines gender as a type of noun classification which triggers agreement. In that sense, he doesn't require that it be centered around male/female or animate/inanimate. Other linguists will use different terminology.
        • bradrn 5y ago
          > linguists rarely agree on definitions, unfortunately. Aargh… I don’t want to think about it. Just don’t get me started on the literature on SVCs, alright? (My favourite linguistics quote, from Anderson’s A-Morphous Morphology: ‘Linguistics will become a science when linguists begin standing on one another's shoulders instead of on one another's toes.’ Oddly enough, he spends the rest of the book stepping on the toes of everyone else.) > Greville Corbett, for example, who has written a textbook about "Gender" (in the linguistic sense), defines gender as a type of noun classification which triggers agreement. Aikhenvald concurs, though she prefers the term ‘noun class’ over ‘gender’.