[Lingtyp] Query re pronoun inventories

[David Gil]

Two points on this topic.

First, I would like to amplify what I think is a very important point 
made in passing by Rikker:

On 26/02/2018 04:51, Rikker Dockum wrote:
> Responding to Ian's comments on Thai (which is often classed as a 
> 'natural gender' pronoun system but has no grammatical gender),
Indeed, it would be very strange to think of Thai as being a "gendered" 
language in the same way as, say, French or Hebrew, in which the 
masculine/feminine distinction permeates the grammar. Rather, the 
limited distinction between what are perhaps more appropriately referred 
to as "male" and "female" forms in Thai would seem to be more akin to 
the various terms of address in a language such as Malay/Indonesian, 
which reflect distinctions in biological sex, as well as age, social 
status, race and other features — and nobody would say that 
Malay/Indonesian has gender, any more than it has, say, race.

Secondly, and going out a bit on a limb here, because I'm not an expert 
in gender studies, it seems to me that although Southeast Asian 
languages have monomorphemic terms to denote the "third" sex (e.g. Thai 
"kathoey", Tagalog "bakla", Malay "pondan", Indonesian "bencong"), I 
suspect that the *conceptualization* of the third gender in the 
respective societies still involves elements of hybridization, combining 
male and female features rather than starting afresh with a new 
primitive gender.  (In other words, a bit more like the kind of 
conceptualization reflected by English-language terms such as 
"male-to-female transgendered".)  To the extent that this is the case, 
one would perhaps be less likely to encounter a language with a 
three-way grammatical paradigm for male/female/3rd-sex.

It's a bit like gender-resolution for mixed plural NPs.  If I remember 
my Corbett correctly (I'm currently miles away from his books), given a 
sentence such as "JOHN AND MARY CAME-AGR", there is no language with 
gender agreement in which there is a special gender for mixed 
male-and-female groups; usually, and sexistly, the resolution is to the 
masculine. (I vaguely half-remember some Daghestanian(?) language in 
which the resolution is to some 3rd or even 4th gender with other 
inanimate(?) meanings, but this still doesn't constitute a special 
gender for "male-plus-female").

David

-- 
David Gil

Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany

Email: gil at shh.mpg.de
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