asakiyume: (shaft of light)
[personal profile] asakiyume
The Tikuna language has five genders (these aren't genders like people having genders; these are just linguistic genders--like how French and Spanish have two** and German has three. Speaking of, it's fascinating to me when Spanish and Portuguese genders don't agree, like for "computer," which is masculine in Portuguese but feminine in Spanish. And "tree" is the opposite: masculine in Spanish but feminine in Portuguese.)

Anyway, Ticuna's five genders are feminine, masculine, neuter, salient, and nonsalient. What's interesting to me is that the prefixes for these only come in three variations: one for feminine, one for masculine, neuter, or nonsalient, and one for salient. It's a taxonomy that would make Borges smile! There are things in the feminine category, things in the masculine/neuter/nonsalient category, and things in the salient category. (Things owned by the emperor would be .... let's guess salient.)

... This information comes from the 2020 online course, not from work with my tutor. She, however, continues to teach me fun words and phrases, like michi pucuum na muum--the cat is afraid of the rain.

**Not so fast, Asakiyume--and readers! [personal profile] mount_oregano points out that actually Spanish has five genders (see her comment here; she links to an explanation.)

Date: 2024-02-18 06:37 am (UTC)
sovay: (Haruspex: Autumn War)
From: [personal profile] sovay
What's interesting to me is that the prefixes for these only come in three variations: one for feminine, one for masculine, neuter, or nonsalient, and one for salient.

That's so interesting!

Date: 2024-02-18 08:45 am (UTC)
amaebi: black fox (Default)
From: [personal profile] amaebi
Do "salient" and/or "non-salient" have meaning, aside from being names of grammatical classifiers?

Date: 2024-02-18 12:04 pm (UTC)
lokifan: black Converse against a black background (Default)
From: [personal profile] lokifan
This is my question too!

Date: 2024-02-18 02:54 pm (UTC)
amaebi: black fox (Default)
From: [personal profile] amaebi
Thank you! Korean does the same thing, as a marker, for “what’s the sentence focus.”

Date: 2024-02-18 03:51 pm (UTC)
lokifan: black Converse against a black background (Default)
From: [personal profile] lokifan
Ahh, I see. V interesting! So it's sort of a way of giving emphasis/lack of emphasis? Do you use it much, or would you mostly use masculine/feminine/neuter?

Doing emphasis/salience grammatically is pretty difficult in English, I guess. You can use the passive to turn an object into the subject as way of saying it's this thing, but otherwise I feel like it's mostly pronunciation (emphasis & intonation) and then italics for written English.

Date: 2024-02-18 05:12 pm (UTC)
lokifan: black Converse against a black background (Default)
From: [personal profile] lokifan
Ah, so interesting! Thank you!

Date: 2024-02-19 06:01 am (UTC)
amaebi: black fox (Default)
From: [personal profile] amaebi
Now you're reminding me of Hebrew verbs. So beautiful.
Edited Date: 2024-02-19 06:01 am (UTC)

Date: 2024-02-18 04:54 pm (UTC)
heleninwales: (Default)
From: [personal profile] heleninwales
That's interesting. So the Tikuna language uses an actual marker for the thing that English does with stress and Welsh does with word order.

Date: 2024-02-18 06:25 pm (UTC)
raven: [hello my name is] and a silhouette image of a raven (Default)
From: [personal profile] raven
Oooh! We have this in Hindi and I never knew what it was called. At home we refer to it as the "unfortunate implications" construction.

Date: 2024-02-18 06:40 pm (UTC)
raven: [hello my name is] and a silhouette image of a raven (Default)
From: [personal profile] raven
Ah! I think it's both a different form of construction and a slightly different meaning. We use the word "bhi", which you can to any other word in the sentence. So if I do that in an English sentence it looks like this:

We-bhi booked a nice hotel room [we did, even though you said you would, you bastard]
We booked-bhi a nice hotel room [we did book it, man at reception, so please check again]
We booked a nice-bhi hotel room [This room is absolutely filthy]
We booked a nice hotel room-bhi [yeah, you're right, we should've gone for an AirBnb instead]

Date: 2024-02-18 09:37 pm (UTC)
raven: [hello my name is] and a silhouette image of a raven (Default)
From: [personal profile] raven
Yes! Perfect! Not quite the first one because Hindi doesn't have articles, but I could imagine it with "one" in a similar way: "They bought one-bhi pizza" to mean "but there were twenty people at the party!!"

Date: 2024-02-26 07:41 am (UTC)
ethelmay: (Default)
From: [personal profile] ethelmay
An Airbnbhi? :)

Date: 2024-02-18 10:13 am (UTC)
cmcmck: (Default)
From: [personal profile] cmcmck
English only manages three and one of them seems to have gone out of fashion.

Hungarian is ungendered which rather annoys an old friend of ours, Laura, who is Hungarian speaking and happens to be a trans woman.
Edited Date: 2024-02-18 11:35 am (UTC)

Date: 2024-02-20 12:17 am (UTC)
squirrelitude: (Default)
From: [personal profile] squirrelitude
The distinction I've heard is personal gender vs. grammatical gender. In Spanish, most nouns have a single grammatical gender, but (some) nouns that refer to a person take on the personal gender of the person. That's where you get a bit of a confusing gray area between the two concepts.

(I took a couple linguistics courses in college but don't have any training beyond that.)

EDIT: I saw mount_oregano's comment, but rather than struggling through semi-technical Spanish, I went here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender_in_Spanish It's interesting, I don't think this is the way I would divvy up the notion of linguistic gender. It feels like a category error to say "a word of common gender can change its gender". There are clearly two levels here, and "gender" is being used as the name for both levels! Here's how I would put it: There are three gender-formations of words in Spanish (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and six gender-patterns of how words have those gender-formations applied (masculine-only, feminine-only, epicene, common, ambiguous, and neuter).
Edited Date: 2024-02-20 12:49 am (UTC)

Date: 2024-02-20 03:15 am (UTC)
squirrelitude: (Default)
From: [personal profile] squirrelitude
Hah, I just hope it's correct, then. 😅

Date: 2024-02-18 07:55 pm (UTC)
sartorias: (Default)
From: [personal profile] sartorias
I so wish I could go back in time and take linguistics!!!

Date: 2024-02-18 10:01 pm (UTC)
sartorias: (Default)
From: [personal profile] sartorias
!

Speaking of, (blush) I found a book I borrowed from you, Paths to my Africa n Eyes, which I will get in the mail to you. (This is why I should never borrow books)

Date: 2024-02-18 10:37 pm (UTC)
sartorias: (Default)
From: [personal profile] sartorias
It has a note on it in my handwriting "Return to Francesca."

But if you want to donate it...let me know!

Date: 2024-02-18 10:58 pm (UTC)
sartorias: (brain)
From: [personal profile] sartorias
Thank you! Will do. And my apologies for the, *kaff* long hiatus.

Date: 2024-02-18 08:14 pm (UTC)
mount_oregano: portrait by Badassity (Default)
From: [personal profile] mount_oregano
Spanish has five genders: masculine, feminine, epicine, common, and ambiguous.

This is explained in relentless detail here:
https://www.rae.es/dpd/g%C3%A9nero

Date: 2024-02-18 10:08 pm (UTC)
mount_oregano: portrait by Badassity (Default)
From: [personal profile] mount_oregano
I especially like the ambiguous gender. "The sea" is el mar or la mar, your choice, per the Royal Spanish Academy. These days gender-free articles are coming into use, so I suppose you could call it le mare, too, although the Royal Academy hasn't caught up yet.

Date: 2024-02-19 10:08 am (UTC)
amaebi: black fox (Default)
From: [personal profile] amaebi
Thank you so much! That lays out for me grammatical issues I was just mumbling my gums against, nipping them out nicely and specifying their nature.

And for anyone whose Spanish, like mine, is not academic-- the relevant section isn't at all a pain to read.

Date: 2024-02-20 01:38 am (UTC)
yamamanama: (Default)
From: [personal profile] yamamanama
Interesting that they'd have masculine/feminine and not the animate/inanimate distinction.

I took Chinese which has no gender and has male, female, animal, divine being, and inanimate object pronouns along with several nonbinary neologisms, all pronounced tā.

Worrorra has "masculine, feminine, terrestrial, celestial, and collective."

Date: 2024-02-23 02:32 pm (UTC)
med_cat: (Default)
From: [personal profile] med_cat
Very interesting :)

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