Looking for gender/noun class info

[anke]

Does anybody here know a good website with info how different noun classes can manifest in a language?

I mean, there's as one possibility different suffixes for nouns.
And/or different articles ("the" and "a" having one translation per noun class)
Noun-adjective agreement.
Noun-verb agreement.
Different pronouns, including demonstrative pronouns.

And I don't know what I'm missing.

I don't know, I guess I'm kinda looking for a collection of examples.

Comments

[inventrix]

I don't have an actual list of examples, but! For the purpose of the exercise (i.e. where else would inflected nouns manifest grammatical effects), I would say, really, anything that has a connection to the noun. Which depends enormously on how your language is structured.

I generally think of words as having four potential functions. One, generally considered verbs, represent changes in things (or lack of changes). Two, generally considered nouns, represent the things being affected. Three, generally considered adjectives or adverbs, are modifiers. And four are purely grammatical, like prepositions.

So, essentially, anything that the nouns could affect, grammatically, are anything that is directly grammatically related to the noun in the sentence, which are generally anything in groups one, three or four. Verbs happening to the nouns, modifiers modifying the nouns, prepositions et al. indicating the grammatical function of the nouns.

In short, the only thing I know of that can't be modified grammatically by a noun's gender/class is another noun.

[anke]

Thank you.

I'm having some trouble wrapping my head around syntax stuff yet, so I'll let it perlocate a bit longer.

[aldersprig]

In short, the only thing I know of that can't be modified grammatically by a noun's gender/class is another noun.

...Hrmm. But wouldn't it be neat (and complicated) if it could?

The girl's shoes? The mountain's rocks.

[inventrix]

I had to think for a while while writing that (oh wow hello awkward words) about that case specifically; genitive/possessive nouns.

The thing is, if you have let's call it gender in the first place, then both nouns are going to have their own specific genders. In order for one noun to cause the other to inflect according to the first's gender, you'd basically be needing to replace the gender of the second noun with the gender of the first noun.

e.g. for ease of example, if you have girl = feminine and shoe = neuter, and you have the girl's shoe, either the girl is going to become neuter or the shoe is going to become feminine.

Which you could do! It would be confusing and I'm pretty sure no existing languages do that, but it could be fun to experiment with.

[aldersprig]

Taking this out another step - Rin's qitari is a useful human's qitari, whereas Girey's qitari is an unuseful human's qitari, and they are different for that category.

Man, that would be complex!!

[anke]

mh, but those quitaris are differently cut, aren't they? So you'd have two different things that could have two different words, anyway, without having a general rule that an owned object must grammatically agree with the owner. Those could be differentiated by gender/noun class, if you make one for useful and one for unuseful humans/things/whatever.

zompist of gender
incl. "It gives language (in John Lawler's terms) another dimension to seep into. In French, for instance, there are many words that vary only in gender: port/porte, fil/file, grain/graine, point/pointe, sort/sorte, etc. Changing gender must have once been an easy way to create a subtle variation on a word."
port/porte = harbour/door, grain/graine = grain/seed
German has a few of those, too, e.g. der See (the lake) vs die See (the ocean)
(all examples here male first, female second word)

[aldersprig]

Okay, you have a point on the quitari (note to self: learn to spell your own words).

Hrrm. This makes a fun way to evolve a language, I think.

Thanks!

[becka_sutton]

I believe the bantu languages - with their shedloads of genders - tend to show them with prefixes. *Checks wiki on Swahili* Yup prefixes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swahili_language#Noun_classes.