Bill Bright's response to 'gender agreement in adjectives derived from nouns'

[Lise Menn]

(in response to Shoba Bandi-Rao, from William Bright, to whom I forwarded
her query - LM)

hello shoba; other romance languages have much the same phenomenon as in
french. but in spanish, for instance, it's even more conspicuous, e.g. (in
mexico) _los calzones rosa_ 'the pink panties'.

as i'm sure you know, hindi and other indo-aryan languages have two large
classes of adjectives; one agrees with nouns, the other does not, e.g.
_acchaa aadmii_ 'good man', _acchii aurat_ 'good woman', but _hindustaanii
aadmii_ 'indian man', _hindustaanii aurat_ 'indian woman'.

i don't know the detailed history of this; but from a descriptive
viewpoint, it seems to me that the division of hindi adjectives into 2
classes is similar to that in romance, except of course that in hindi the
"genderless" class is much larger. happy holidays! bill
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Beware Procrustes bearing Occam's razor.

	Lise Menn 			office phone 303-492-1609
	Professor			home fax     303-413-0017
	Department of Linguistics
	UCB 295
	University of Colorado
	Boulder, CO 80309-0295

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