Sui was talking about having five genders in another thread. I have a question slightly related to that.
To what do you assign your gender?
In English, gender is reserved for people.
That was his chair.
or
That was her chair.
Easy. However, that's not always the case. In other languages, like French, an item is either masculine or feminine. A chair (chaise) is feminine, but an armchair (fauteuil) is masculine.
So the chair could belong to a man or a woman, but I would still say sa chaise. Sa is a feminine pronoun. We say either 'her' 'his' 'their' or 'the'. Even the equivalent of 'the' is either 'la' or 'le' depending on whether the object in question is feminine or masculine.

So, to what do you assign gender? Is something 'his' or 'hers', or are they 'la' or 'le'? Why?

I'd do 'his' and 'her', personally. It just keeps things. . . simpler for me.

The genderized words in a language make things . . . interesting, to say the least. Spanish is like that, with ownership or reference words being masculine or feminine. Personally, I prefer keeping my own languages simple (whether out of pure laziness or not has yet to be decided). I like the English context, where referring to him and her stays him or her, and objects are just objects.

What about you, Aldara?

I've never made a language before -but I should be working on one.
I think I would prefer the English way as well -it's way simpler. But the French was is such a fun idea. If one had endless time to figure that out, of course.

Sorry for my mediocre thinking, but when you are creating a language yourself, the simpler the better. My language only has 'his' and 'hers' because I don't want to confuse anybody, since I can't exactly explain it to them face-to-face.

I've always thought that giving objects linguistic genders was far simpler and more straightforward than the way English does it---as, instead of having to have one set of rules for "persons" (a category that may or may not include children, cats, apes, horses, robots, God, or anything the speaker wishes to personify, depending on the speaker's background, philosophical assumptions, or rhetorical purpose, among other innumerable possible factors) of at least two genders and another for "objects" that is effectively a third gender, "neuter", you simply ensure that every noun in the language has a gender---but, then, I have a noted fondness for inflected languages in preference to position-based ones like English.

*stumbles upon thread*

Genders are a really cool way to add authenticity to a language without getting too complicated. I've decided that I'll be assigning many of the different objects or ideas with one of the five genders used in the language. Feeding troughs would be assigned the male animal gender. Something like a kitchen pot would be assigned the female human gender.

Love's gender would vary depending on what kind of love was being described. Love shown by a human would be given a human gender. Love shown by an animal would be given an animal gender. Love shown by God would be given His gender.

I've enjoyed thinking through this part of language making a lot.

Wow, this is so cool. I've never really wandered too far into the Scriptorium thingy, for fear of utter confusion. I admit, I am a little confused, but I find this thread fascinating and very much want to get involved.



What exactly do you mean by human gender. Could you show me an example maybe to show what you mean?

Hmm... well, it doesn't translate well into English. xD

The easiest way to explain, I think would be to point out the difference between "...his love" and "...His love". Except you have to imagine that "his" and "His" are two completely different words. For what I was saying, if a human expressed love or (if we delve into poeticism and essence) if human love is expressed (but in the interests of simplicity let's leave that out of the equation for now) the love would be assigned a word or syllable that shows the human nature of that love. But if the Divine is expressing love, then the language would use a different word or syllable to show that difference. The human gender idea would take difference in gender to another level -- assigning differences beyond male and female. I could say: "Gomer loved her". But in English, you can't tell if I'm referring to a male human, a female human, or perhaps even a pet that loves "her". If I said "El loved her," then you would be probably be in the same predicament, except that another possibility is added to the list. I could be referring to the divine! My assigning a human gender, there would be no danger of confusing human with animal or with God.

Did that help? I don't think I explained well.

I'm afraid my brain is much too small to comprehend what you said. I don't know about in English, but I totally understand the concept of each word having it's own gender. I took Spanish I last year and I loved the way my teacher explained different genders to me. However, I think that's the closest I get to understanding the whole concept.

This is a very interesting linguistic concept, if not quite new to me, but it's unnecessarily confusing to us the term "gender" to describe it. This is actually a "dimension" (to speak somewhat metaphorically) that a language can have, in addition to gender, case, and mood as well as the as-far-as-I-know-nearly-universal person, number, and tense. (Not all of which are relevant at once---some only apply to nouns and adjectives, while others only apply to verbs.)

In talking about a roughly-equivalent (if not quite as detailed) feature of some Asian languages, I think the term "politeness level" is what I've heard; in fiction (describing the Roknari language in The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold, and Yamani in the "Protector of the Small" quartet by Tamora Pierce, which are admittedly the full extent of my relevant experience) that I've read, the term "mode" (and only that term) is used to describe something that's essentially identical to what you've outlined above.


Does my analogy of additional dimensions help? English is unreasonably simple grammatically, as languages go; I'm not sure I could have made head or tail of this before I'd had a year and a half of Latin (in college, where language courses move about twice as fast as high school).

In Latin (and, I've heard, German) nouns (and adjectives, to match) are "declined" according to the necessary "case," "number," and (for adjectives) "gender" ("masculine nominative singular," for example), similar to how verbs are (in Latin as well as in Spanish) conjugated according to the necessary "person," "number," "tense," "voice," and "mood" (e.g. "first person present active indicative").

Here's a worked-out example of what I mean by "dimensions." The Latin word "amare" is the verb "to love." If someone asked what the word "love" was, wanting to use it in a sentence, there would be on the order of at least thirty-six possibilities. If I learn that the subject is a group of people, that cuts the number about in half, because we know that the verb is plural rather than singular. If I learn that the speaker is part of the group ("we" rather than "y'all" or "them"), that further reduces the possibilities by about two-thirds. Looking at what would be "helping verbs" in English, if I establish that this is indicative rather than subjunctive ("would love") or imperative, that reduces the possibilities by (I think) another two-thirds or so. If I find that we're telling a story in the normal way ("loved" rather than "love"), that reduces the number further, and knowing that it's "we loved" rather than "we were loved" narrows it to one: "amavimus."

A language with "politeness levels" or "modes" would have at least one, and probably two, more questions that would need to be covered in that process: "which of my 'hats' am I wearing for this conversation?" and "who am I addressing, and what is he or she in relation to me?"

Does that help?

Hooray! Someone who knows what they're talking about!

Interesting. That makes a ton of sense. *mentally files away that bit on "mode" for future reference*

In portuguese chair has only one gender: feminine "cadeira". Objects have gender and that gives some confusion for some people, but is so natural that I haven't even though about it yet xD

Same here, Isaac. Morei para dez anos no Rio Grande do Sul, então para mim gramatíca é tudo automático tambem em Português como em Inglês. Não falo perfeitamente, mas dá para entender Anyways, prazer te conheçer

Andrew

Haha, prazer em te conhecer também. The second person that know portuguese around here. Não me sinto tão sozinho agora xD