[Lingtyp] Query re pronoun inventories

[ENRIQUE BERNARDEZ SANCHIS]

A brief note on David's comment. When there is reference to a mixed group
(male-female) the neuter plural is used, both of the personal pronoun
(thau) and possible articles. On the other hand this does not point to a
three-gender system but is just a matter of reference. Remember also that
Icelandic has three fully active grammatical genders (masculine, femenine
and neuter) and that Icelandic society is considered to be the least sexist
society in the world. The relation between sexism and grammatical gender
doe not seem valid. Another point: some Indian (=First Nation, Native
American) cultures, especially in North America, recognised the "two
spirits" people (man and woman at the same time, without any correspondence
in the pronominal system. Also, the Samoan "fa'afafine" are referred to
without any reference to sex/gender, as Samoan does not have such
distinction.

2018-02-26 5:52 GMT+01:00 David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de>:

> 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
> Office Phone (Germany): +49-3641686834
> Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81281162816
>
>
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-- 
Enrique Bernárdez
Catedrático de Lingüística General
Departamento de Lingüística, Estudios Árabes, Hebreos y de Asia Oriental
Facultad de Filología
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
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