Ya got me,Anaptyxis , Congagate=Verbs , Declension+Nouns.
Guess those Jebbies were’nt pounding on me hard enough!
I have to nitpick on the gender/sex issue: they mean two different (though closely related and usually analogous) things to a lot of people. “Sex” is physical, “gender” is more related to various personality characteristics typically associated with one sex or the other. It’s valuable to have that kind of distinction.
Apparently not.
amare: to love
amo - I love
amas - you love
amat - he loves
amamus - we love
amatis - y’all love
amant - they love
The case names you listed alongside your conjugation of amare have nothing to do with the verb forms you listed.
So does that mean a person could be at the same time of the male “sex” but the female “gender”?
I’ve never heard “gender” used in this way–rather, always as another word for “sex.”
I believe that a pre-op MTF transsexual would be classed as being male in sex but female in gender (NB: I could be wrong about this particular). Obviously it’s not something that’s common–but even so, the word “gender” is also useful in talking about non-physical traits that are typically associated with a particular sex, specifically because it makes it clear what you’re talking about.
As for forms that ask for gender–who knows which one they’re really asking for? I mention this because I think in that instance you’re probably right, and it’s just a way to avoid saying “sex”. [insert sound of small child giggling here]
There is status and relationship, too.
Well, Excaliber , I did say it was “useless crap”. I got that part right, didn’t I? My apoligies! :smack:
I know Slovenian has the dual (and I believe all of the Slavic languages did at one time, although I can be wrong), but which languages have the trial as well?
Yep, a dual number is assumed for the common ancestor of all Slavic languages. Several modern Slavic languages use it; almost all have some remnant of it. See here.
As for languages with a trial number, I did a fair bit of Googling and found a few places where people mentioned their existence, but no names were named.* Finally I went to Wikipedia, who gave me the name Tolomako, a language spoken in Vanuatu. Apparently its only claim to fame, because there’s nothing else in the entry!
*Oooh, and I also found mention of a “paucal” number, as in a separate number when you have a “few” of something. How cool is that!
How about REGISTER — the choice of words expressing the levels of mutual social interaction between speakers, or the social status of the language itself.
Example of the former: Javanese has five levels of politeness, so your choice of words depends on your social status relative to the person you’re speaking to. This extends throughout the whole language and goes way beyond the difference between tu and vous. Japanese and Korean have something like this, though IIRC with fewer than five registers. It can make you conjugate verbs differently, use certain inflections, or use different words for the same things.
The latter: Modern Arabic, Modern Greek, and Tamil have (Greek did have, but not any more, though) two widely-separated levels of status, the colloquial register for everyday use and a literary-based register for highfalutin language. This situation is called diglossia.
pasunejen, thanks for the explanation of transsexuality. English has provided us a way of talking about gender as a sociopsychological concept apart from the sex of the body. It’s a fairly recent neologism for the word gender ni English, and unfortunately I haven’t found any other languages yet that have learned to make the distinction as English speakers have.
Astute as always. How does the situation of languages with very different colloquial and formal varieties compare to places where there are two different languages occupying those roles? Did everyone who spoke demotic Greek have the ability to read and write karth . . . uh, karth-whatever-it-is?
Has anyone mentiones EVIDENTIAL markers? These are special verb endings, in certain Amerindian languages and others, that indicate how the speaker knows about what she’s saying. She’d use a different ending, for example, if her declaration were based on hearsay, rather than direct observation.
Cite: John McWhorter, The Power of Babel, p. 180