Re: [lojban] gender

[Craig Daniel <craigbdaniel@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 12:59 PM, vitci'i <celestialcognition@gmail.com> wrote:
> One gismu for all of them, with a place to specify which one you're
> talking about.

I'd say all except grammatical, using tanru to specify what kind you mean.

Not grammatical because it's a kind of klesi that has nothing to do
with sex; connecting the others to grammatical gender is a very
eurocentric thing. Most IE languages have masculine/feminine or
masculine/feminine/neuter. Dyirbal has masculine, feminine, vegetable,
and neuter, a system not entirely atypical for indigenous Australian
languages; calling "vegetable" a gender in the way that "male" and
"female" are is odd. Furthermore, neuter nouns in all of these
languages do not lack grammatical gender, though being neuter in
social gender means "none of the above." And that's not even getting
into languages like Dutch, which has two genders, neither of them
usefully describable as masculine or feminine. (They're common and
neuter, with the latter so called because it's derived from the
proto-Germanic neuter gender while common originates from a merger of
masculine and feminine. The result of this is that, synchronically,
there are two genders, neither of which has any clear-cut semantic
domain such that they can be described as relating in any way to
anything like social genders at all except for the fact that a
significant majority of things that have a social gender are common
regardless of what social gender that may be.)

 - mi'e .kreig.daniyl.

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