anke: (Default)
anke ([personal profile] anke) wrote in [community profile] noviceconlangers2011-11-26 05:27 pm

Looking for gender/noun class info

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.
inventrix: (Default)

[personal profile] inventrix 2011-11-27 01:02 am (UTC)(link)
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.
aldersprig: (tea3)

[personal profile] aldersprig 2011-11-27 01:12 am (UTC)(link)
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: (Default)

[personal profile] inventrix 2011-11-27 01:34 am (UTC)(link)
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: (LynKnitting)

[personal profile] aldersprig 2011-11-27 01:36 am (UTC)(link)
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!!
aldersprig: Photo of an upside-down cat, with the words "Tales for the Sugar Cat" (SugarCat)

[personal profile] aldersprig 2011-11-27 04:01 pm (UTC)(link)
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: Becka's default icon (Default)

[personal profile] becka_sutton 2011-11-27 02:10 am (UTC)(link)
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.