Re: [lojban] Re: ki'a

["Jorge Llambías" <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

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gen·der
n.
Grammar.
A grammatical category used in the classification of nouns, pronouns,
adjectives, and, in some languages, verbs that may be arbitrary or
based on characteristics such as sex or animacy and that determines
agreement with or selection of modifiers, referents, or grammatical
forms.

gender

n 1: a grammatical category in inflected languages governing the
agreement between nouns and pronouns and adjectives; in some languages
it is quite arbitrary but in Indo-European languages it is usually
based on sex or animateness [syn: grammatical gender]


clas‧si‧fi‧er
3. Grammar. (in Chinese, Japanese, and other languages) a word or
morpheme that corresponds to a semantic class of nouns and regularly
accompanies any noun of that class in certain syntactic constructions,
such as those of numeration.

clas·si·fi·er
n.
A word or morpheme used in some languages in certain contexts, such as
counting, that indicates the semantic class to which an item belongs.
For example, hon is used in Japanese in counting long slender objects
such as sticks or pencils.
> >

So, if Lojban has gender in the normal linguistic sense (a grammatical
category governing agreement), then it has 23 genders, the abu-gender,
the by-gender, the cy-gender, etc.

The rafsi classifiers are somewhat more like classifiers, but not quite,
as they are not used only in certain contexts. They are much more
as Pierre says like the "fish" in "killifish" or the "berry" in "raspberry".
I don't know what they are called, but not genders.

mu'o mi'e xorxes