Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2001 18:31:20 +0200 From: Neil Blakey-Milner <nbm@mithrandr.moria.org> To: Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org> Cc: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>, "G. Adam Stanislav" <adam@whizkidtech.net>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Gender, animation, and other random titbits about Xhosa Message-ID: <20010210183120.A70514@rapier.smartspace.co.za> In-Reply-To: <xzpy9ve8vub.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no>; from des@ofug.org on Sat, Feb 10, 2001 at 03:18:52PM %2B0100 References: <20010209095838.E11145@wantadilla.lemis.com> <3A81DDC9.EF6D7D84@originative.co.uk> <3.0.6.32.20010207223155.009d42a0@mail85.pair.com> <20010208110159.E2429@lpt.ens.fr> <xzpzofxffa2.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no> <20010209095838.E11145@wantadilla.lemis.com> <20010209114704.A62359@lpt.ens.fr> <3.0.6.32.20010209085026.009e28e0@mail85.pair.com> <20010210101652.Q16260@wantadilla.lemis.com> <xzpy9ve8vub.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no>
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On Sat 2001-02-10 (15:18), Dag-Erling Smorgrav wrote: > Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> writes: > > > Slovak does not need to say he, she, etc. Instead, it just uses the > > > verb in the third person, and implies the appropriate pronoun. > > This is typical of the slavonic languages, of course. > > Ooh, that reminds me. > > Finnish doesn't have gender. At all. Just for interest's sake, neither do the isiNguni linguistic family spoken in Southern Africa (Xhosa, Zulu, Swazi, and others). I'm also relatively sure the majority of Central-African derived Bantu languages of the same region are similar. And now a tangeant... Xhosa has generic third person, somewhat integrated (with some major exceptions) with one of the six sets of singular-plural noun class pairs (which sometimes have multiple levels, just to make things more fun): 1/2 - "u(m)"/"aba" 1a/2a - "o"/"aba" 3/4 - "u(m)"/"imi" 5/6 - "(il)i"/"ama" 7/8 - "isi"/"izi" (also "i"/"ii", iirc) 9/10 - "in"/"izin" 11/10 - "(ul)u"/"izin" two "abstract" noun classes 14 - "ubu" - "ubuntu", humaneness, and concepts like that. 15 - "uku" - infinitive, non-pluralisable words (In English, things like "food", "sheep", "fish"), and others. Most tense and class identifiers are prefixed or suffixed to the verb (one exception I can think of is the negative form eating the initial vowel of objects), making extremely complex verb forms. ``Akumbethani?'', with the verb form "-betha" (hit) with the negative second person singular (or 1/3 class noun) subject prefix form "aku-" (you not), the inline object form for third person singular (or 1/3 class noun) "-m-" (him/her), and the "-ni" interrogative suffix. I get the impression I've forgotten the "recent past tense" form for the verb for the example (which may suffer from other problems too); Xhosa has recent past and "long-time-ago" past tenses. Getting back to gender and (in)animates; some nouns are inherently female (imfazi/young woman, umama/older woman) or male (umntwana/boy), and some are in somewhat of a generic masculine (utitshala for teacher, but utitshalakazi for when addressing a woman teacher), the -kazi extension applies to things like dogs (inja -> injakazi), but isn't a generic way to indicate feminine (at least as far as I remember). The pronouns don't denote gender, though. As an aside, pronouns include an "automatic" inline subject prefix to verbs, leading to "ubhuti uhamba esikolweni", "The boy, he goes to school". There isn't an inanimate/animate distinction either, but some classes have preportionately more human or animates in them (1/2 comes to mind for people, and 7/8 for general animates). I'm not sure why I'm mentioning all of this, but this is -chat. Neil -- Neil Blakey-Milner nbm@mithrandr.moria.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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