gender assignment

[Larry Trask]

On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, Nicholas Widdows wrote:

[on the introduction of sex-marking into Basque]

> Most interesting. Are there any cases of it happening on non-o/a
> stems, e.g. *<zaharro> 'old (man)' or *<txikio> by reinterpretation
> of the native <-a>?

I am aware of no such case. Sex-marking of the o/a sort in native words
(as opposed to borrowed ones) is still extremely rare, in my experience.
Sex-marking in native words is not particularly prominent at all, and,
where it does occur, it is usually expressed either by a lexical
distinction or by a sex-marked suffix.

> Or is it a restricted lexical thing, the way we have in English with
> fiance/e and blond/e?

So far, it is heavily lexically restricted.

> Of course these are pronounced the same but being literate we have
> to decide how to write them, and do consistently mark gender. Words
> where there's a spoken difference are so rare that perhaps we don't
> have to decide. He is always nai"ve, as is she, but she is a...
> faux-nai"f? I would say 'a Filipino housemaid', because if I decide
> that maids are Filipin-a, what is the Filipin-o/a language, culture,
> etc... Rather than having to think "now what gender is <lengaje>?"
> it's easier to force gender out, they way we have with employee,
> divorcee, naive. The influence of French is small enough that these
> will remain oddities like foreign plurals rather than influence the
> grammar.

Yes, these things are unnatural and a nuisance.  A couple of years ago,
I used the word <manque'> (as in "he's a poet manque'") with reference
to a woman.  I could find no mention of this in the usage handbooks, and
all my English dictionaries give <manque'> as the only possible form, so
that's what I wrote, but my copy-editor changed it to <manque'e> anyway.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk