Re: how does a language develop gender??

From: Jacques Guy (jguy_at_alphalink.com.au)
Date: 03/30/05 

Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2005 11:37:39 +1000

sonjaaa@gmail.com wrote:
> I can think of a few cases where a language has evolved and loss
> grammatical gender where it had it before, e.g. Dutch has lost one
> gender.

> I'd love to examine cases where a language has developped gender where
> it didn't have it before. How does a language develop gender? I'm
> especially curious about languages with grammatical genders for
> non-human and non-sexed nouns, what kind of transitory steps a language
> goes through to have something like this grow through the whole
> grammar.

You should not ask embarrassing questions like that. They only
go to show how much we still don't know.

Better tell us about x-bar raising and discipline and bondage
in the Hiw dialect of Ureparapara. (Yeah, I know. I hope
you guessed what I was referring to by "discipline and bondage"
though?)

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