Gender

[Mikel L. Forcada]

Basque or "euskara", my mother tongue, has gender marks in the verb.
Basque is a language which is spoken in a small area of Spain and
France, in the western part of the Pyrenees. It is pre-indoeuropean,
and it hasn't been successfully related to any other language in the world.

The verb in basque carries information about the passive subject
(nominative), the active subject (ergative), the indirect object
(dative) and, in the case of the "familiar" treatment, a mark for the
sex of the listener. When the active subject or the indirect object
is the 2nd. sing. person, the sex mark appears as the person mark.
Some examples (from my mother dialect as spoken in Azkoitia, Gipuzkoa)

male listener female listener

nauk naun I am
zauzkeat zauzkenat I have them
esan ziguk esan zigun He/she said it to us
dakik dakin thou knowst it
esan diat esan dinat I have said it to thee

However, no other gender marks appear in adjectives, nouns or
pronouns. The word for "he" and "she" is "hura". One could say that
basque does no have "gender" but "sex", adn only that of the listener.

[Tapani Tarvainen]

Finnish for one does not have grammatical gender of any kind.
There are some sex-specific nouns (professions and the like)
and a suffix for building feminine forms of nouns exists
('-tar', e.g., 'tarjoilija' waiter, 'tarjoilijatar' waitress),
but it isn't used much these days (I can't remember when I've last heard
it, and the only case I can think of where the basic or "male" form of
a noun couldn't be used of a woman is 'kuningas/kuningatar' king/queen).
Other than that, there are no sex-specific words, inflections etc.
If you want to specify a persons sex you'll have to do it explicitly.

--
Tapani Tarvainen BitNet: tarvainen@finjyu
Internet: tarv...@jylk.jyu.fi -- OR -- tarv...@tukki.jyu.fi

[Teruhiko Kurosaka - Sun Intercon]

In article <6...@tukki.jyu.fi> tarv...@tukki.jyu.fi (Tapani Tarvainen) writes:
>Finnish for one does not have grammatical gender of any kind.

Same as Japanese. Japanese doesn't have any gramatical way of
differentiate nouns from one group to another.

By the way, Japanese doesn't have a gramatical way of
distingueshing singular and plural nouns either. (There is a
suffix that you CAN use to emphasize the pluralness but you
are not required to use this. You never can tell if somebody
has one dog or more dogs unless that person specifically
using a number.) How many languages in this world requires
the user to distinguish "one" from "more than one"?

T. Kurosaka

[Hubey]

In article <103...@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> ku...@toejam.Sun.COM (Teruhiko Kurosaka - Sun Intercon) writes:

> In article <6...@tukki.jyu.fi> tarv...@tukki.jyu.fi (Tapani Tarvainen) writes:
> >Finnish for one does not have grammatical gender of any kind.
> Same as Japanese. Japanese doesn't have any gramatical way of
> differentiate nouns from one group to another.

Neither do the Turkic languages. There is only one form of a noun.

> By the way, Japanese doesn't have a gramatical way of
> distingueshing singular and plural nouns either. (There is a
> suffix that you CAN use to emphasize the pluralness but you
> are not required to use this. You never can tell if somebody
> has one dog or more dogs unless that person specifically
> using a number.) How many languages in this world requires
> the user to distinguish "one" from "more than one"?
>
> T. Kurosaka

In Turkic languages, if the number of things is included, then you do
not use the plural form of a noun. It is considered redundant.
However, if a number is not specified and you mean the plural sense,
then you must use a plural ending since not doing it would create an
ambiguity. i.e.

kopek===dog
kopekler==dogs
on kopek==ten dogs

--mark
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