LINGUIST List 14.3367

Sun Dec 7 2003

Disc: Re: Grammatical Gender

Editor for this issue: Sarah Murray <sarahlinguistlist.org>

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1. Michael Beard, RE: 14.3341, Disc: Re: Grammatical Gender

Message 1: RE: 14.3341, Disc: Re: Grammatical Gender

Well said, Prof. Foster. Perhaps an addition to this line of
reasoning would be to examine other languages' terms for "gender" and
whether or not there are any biological associations due to an
unfortunate/accidental case of synonomous ambiguity. The term
"gender" itself is the main problem here, not nominal classifications
in languages. Is anyone familiar with, for example, the old Sanskrit
grammarians' term(s) for how nouns were classified? I'm not, I'm
sorry to say, but I'm sure there are plenty of examples from other
languages that show there is no association between biology and noun
classification systems. Obviously, I'm speaking here of words like
CLASS, not qualifying terms that might, indeed, reference biology,
such as "Male CLASS" and "Female CLASS."

Regards,
Michael Beard