23:02
@Robusto No, it is not. Call it NOMINAL_CLASS_ONE and NOMINAL_CLASS_TWO and stop freaking out about sex. This is not sex but genre, which is just a classification system unrelated to your gonads. It has nothing to do with sex. It is simply two or three or more different classes of nouns and those noun modifiers that must match their modified noun's class, like determiners and adjectives. It means nothing else.
It isn't generative organs.
In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as sex, animacy, shape, but counting a given noun among nouns of such or another class is often clearly conventional. Some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", but others use different definitions for each. Noun classes should not be confused with noun classifiers.
== Notion ==
In general, there are three main ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into noun classes:
according to similarities...
This is about agreement, about concord.
> The Dyirbal language is well known for its system of four noun classes, which tend to be divided along the following semantic lines:[2]
I — animate objects, men
II — women, water, fire, violence
III — edible fruit and vegetables
IV — miscellaneous (includes things not classifiable in the first three)
There you have four noun classes.
With men and women falling into distinct classes, but not classes exclusive to either men or women.
That language has four different genres. This one has just two:
> Hawaiian (Austronesian)[5] The genders are kino ʻō (o class) and kino ʻā (a class). Kino ʻō nouns concern anything that you can go into (e.g., houses, cars, planes) and put on (e.g., clothes and other personal effects), as well as anything you have no control over (e.g., the weather, time, space, politics, etc.) including the generation of family you are born into (e.g., your siblings, your cousins) and all preceding generations (e.g., your parents, grandparents, etc.).
> Kino ʻā nouns make up for everything you do have control over, which includes your actions, which further extends to the people you "choose" to live life with (e.g., your spouse, your children and all descendants, as well as your friends and teachers). The genders are paramount in possessive noun phrases and prepositional phrases, in particular where English favors subordinate clauses.
So there you have two genders, the o-class ones and the a-class ones.
You need to keep these straight for grammatical agreement.
Note that your parents and your children are of differing genders here.
Basque also has two genders. However, these are not masculine and feminine but rather animate and inanimate.
> As a rule, the local case suffixes given above are not used directly with noun phrases that refer to a person or an animal (called animate noun phrases).
> An inessive, allative or ablative relation affecting such noun phrases may be expressed by using the suffixes inessive -gan, allative -gana, and ablative -gandik, affixed to either the possessive genitive or the absolutive: nigan 'in me', irakaslearengana 'to(wards) the teacher' (irakasle 'teacher'), zaldiengandik 'from the horses' (zaldi 'horse'), haur horrengandik 'from that child', Koldorengana 'to(wards) Koldo'.
As you see, Basque has an interesting case system, and you have to keep track of animate-vs-inanimate gender to use it properly.
Many, many, many languages use varying sorts of agreement.
Imagine a Chinese speaker who thinks that our singular–plural agreement rules are nonsense. This is the very same thing you are doing here, @Robusto, when you're all annoyed by gender agreement in languages that have it. I never realized you were Chinese, though.
Adjectives in Basque have four degrees, not three: positive, comparative, superlative, and excessive. Isn't that interesting?
By which I mean that they're inflected into four possible forms.
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
