Not a bar, but plays one on TV

5:50 AM

Swahili has like a dozen, plus plural forms, with the exact number varying by particular dialect.

There's an interesting twist to grammatical gender the way I know it, though: there is usually no single correct genus for a given word. In eg. French, you can switch masculine to feminine to denote biological sex or social gender in animals and people, but that's about it; in Swahili, one can ship nouns between genders while deriving predictable (within the usual human language standards) meanings.

mtoto means "child". Switching the gender gives us eg. kitoto (dimimutive, so "little child" or "infant"), utoto (abstraction, so "childhood") etc.

Finnish has some suffixes one can slap on nouns for roughly the same effect but nearly as formal.

English, too, to some extent: suffixes -dom, -hood, -city etc can describe various forms of abstraction

vicky_molokh

7:19 AM

@kviiri Some words are 'shippable' in some languages, some aren't. E.g. war is firmly feminine in East Slavics, and sun is firmly neuter, even when used to refer to non-neuters (and thus correspondingly neuters the linked verbs and adjectives of the sentence).

kviiri

@vicky_molokh If you have a word that can be switched between genders, does its meaning stay predictable when you change it to another genus?

I can conceptualize situations where there exists a mechanism for changing the same root noun to different genders but the new meanings are not really predictable even in the majority of cases.

vicky_molokh

If I understand your question correctly, yeah I guess. Some examples would be:
- vorona (ворона), is feminine and means 'a crow'; you can amputate the -a and it becomes voron (ворон), and means 'a raven';
- волосина is feminine and means 'a single hair'; you can neuter (and gather) it into волосся, and now it means 'hair' (i.e. some number of single hairs, easily up to the whole head or more);
- but you also have etymologically unrelated pairs, like how рушник (rushnyk) is masculine and means towel and рушниця (rushnytsya) is feminine and means shotgun (or at least longarm).

kviiri

I think the middle case is the closest one to what I intended. Does it work like that in general, that taking the neuter form forms collective nouns?

vicky_molokh

(I do emphasise that those two are different words that just happen to have structure that makes them look like genderal variations of the same one, but aren't.)

@kviiri In some cases. E.g. trousers are just plural, but a single trouser is feminine. A single leaf is masculine but plural leaves are a neuter gatheral word.

And water is just singular and waters are just plural, even though surely everyone knows that water is uncountable (which would logically warrant making it a gathering noun, but it isn't).

kviiri

Okay, so nouns can translate between genders but it often affects semantics in ways that require knowing in advance to understand the meaning?

vicky_molokh

7:36 AM

@kviiri Sometimes. Most of the time there's nothing complicated about it though. E.g. with feminitives of professions you can usually just expect the changed word to behave like a normal feminine word, accept normal feminine verbs, adjectives and numerals, and carry the same fundamental meaning.

kviiri

I reckon "traps" still exist in languages with more widely-applying rules, due to the language evolving if nothing else.

@vicky_molokh In those cases, it is like the kind I described for French, that it corresponds with the biological sex / social gender?

vicky_molokh

@kviiri That's a thing you can do if you want (e.g. you can turn няня, a normally feminine word into the rare нянь [masculine] if you really want to emphasise that your nanny is socially and/or biologically like this), but it's not strictly enforced.

kviiri

@vicky_molokh Yeah, sounds similar to French. But I reckon there's no/few cases where masculine(profession) and feminine(profession) are completely different things?

I swear I have a real life actual inspiration for this question but can't remember what it was...

vicky_molokh

@kviiri There's probably a handful of ones that are radically different, but I have a hard time recalling examples. Bride/groom are different but those are non-professional 'occupations'.

I'm off for almost an hour (I think), so you've got time to try recalling if you want to. I'll be back and try to answer any subsequent questions.

kviiri

7:52 AM

I actually came up with one in Finnish... we have a few now-seldom-used suffixes for indicating femininity in professions and similar roles. One of them is -ssa which I think comes originally from Latin and is directly related to the English -ess, eg. in "waitress", "princess", "actress". It's a fairly uncommon gender suffix in Finnish, being used only in loanwords, with other cases using the more indigenous "-tar" or "-tär"

So we have the word "diakonissa", meaning "deaconess". Except here it means, through some peculiarity, a deacon (church post devoted to work of charity, no or minor liturgical role around here) with added training in nursing.

Healthcare-nursing, not breastfeeding.

It's a bit borderline because since -ssa is used only in loanwords (and not too many of them) it could be construed as not being a general rule. Regardless, I'd count it because I recall myself being surprised by this very fact --- you can be a female deacon but not a "diakonissa", and a male "diakonissa".

kviiri

8:19 AM

In other news, on November 15 Darude's Sandstorm turns 20 years. A local radio station has announced they will celebrate by playing only Sandstorm through the entire day.

vicky_molokh

8:35 AM

@kviiri That's probably a bit more interesting than any examples I could think of.

Discussion on Con-langs

Transcript for

Not a bar, but plays one on TV