Tikuna update: genders

[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! mount_oregano points out that actually Spanish has five genders (see her comment here; she links to an explanation.)

Comments

[asakiyume]

Linguistically English *only* genders people and animals, and does it based on sex. Maybe it would be better if the term for this category of linguistic marker wasn't called "gender" because it doesn't really have to do with that thing called gender that we talk about all the time relating to people. And I mean, I can see Laura caring, personally, to be identified as feminine/female in Hungarian, but it can't really matter to her that that computers and tables don't get gender markers, right?

ETA: Or okay: it's true we sometimes imply gender to things by using gendered pronouns (like "she" for a ship), but the nouns don't go around marked with a gender all the time the way they do in Romance languages--that's the linguistic distinction I'm trying to make, but I'm not a linguist, so I'm probably not using the right terms.

[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).

[asakiyume]

I like that way of explaining it very much!

[squirrelitude]

Hah, I just hope it's correct, then. 😅

[asakiyume]

Well it makes pragmatic sense, regardless about what linguists would say! There are only three genders in play (and really only two and an artifact), but, as you say, several ways of using those.