[Lingtyp] Query re pronoun inventories

[ENRIQUE BERNARDEZ SANCHIS]

I forgot: my "brief note" is about Icelandic.

2018-02-26 8:33 GMT+01:00 ENRIQUE BERNARDEZ SANCHIS <ebernard at filol.ucm.es>:

> 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
>



-- 
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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