Re: Lesbianism and IE gender distinction

Glen Gordon wrote:

>
> >Gerry: But Mandarin and Cantonese do.
>
> According to the traditional Dene-Caucasian theory, Burushaski falls in this
> grouping with SinoTibetan (Burushaski is spoken to the north of India in the
> Jammu and Kashmir state). We see quite clearly the use of many kinds of
> pronouns for the 3rd person in Burushaski (It has 4 "genders" or "word
> classes"... same thing).
>

Gerry: So in the Burushaski "dialect" there are 4 genders. Are these
genders actually class related i.e. untouchable, worker, warrior, and ?
elite (or whatever the upper class is called).

> What gets weird is when you compare Burushaski grammatically to the state of
> affairs in Bantu languages in Africa which employ the exact same prefixes
> such as *mu which shows up in Burushaski as "she" but in Swahili is used as
> a person word class m(a)- with a plural class prefix wa- (mtu/watu
> "person/people") which is very coincidentally used as "they" in Burushaski.
> "Things that make you go hmmm"... This is why I would include
> NigerKordofanian to the list of "DeneCaucasian" languages and insist that
> the language family is a good 25,000 years old.
>

Gerry: Guess I was wrong about the 4 classes. Then what actually are
the 4 genders? BTW, in an exhibit on Indian miniatures I saw recently
in one of the SF museums, monkeys were dressed up in human clothing
and stood next to humans. Could male and female monkeys contribute to
the other 2 classes?

> NigerKordofanian languages cover the central belt of Africa, whereas
> AfroAsiatic languages (to answer your next question) are part of the younger
> Nostratic group and cover the northern part of Africa. Both groups had
> spread into the continent from the Middle East - first NigerKordofanian and
> then AfroAsiatic on top of it. The oldest language group in Africa seems to
> be Khoisan. BTW, Khoisan DOES have a distinction between masculine and
> feminine as in the Nama masculine noun "|~us" (Can't remember the meaning)
> and "|~ub" ("wheel") in the feminine. (/|~/ is a nasal alveolar ingressive,
> a click sound)
>
> >Do you know whether the early Semitic languges are similar to Altaic >and
> >Uralic or to Mandarin and Cantonese. Seems to me that they would >profile
> >with more similarity to ?Nostratic i.e. Altaic and Uralic.
>
> Semitic is a branch of AfroAsiatic which is in turn a branch of Nostratic.
> In the next 100 years, linguists will realise that Nostratic is a branch of
> the Dene-Caucasian languages but I can only keep praying for that to happen
> soon. :)
>

Gerry: Will it really take linguists that long to reach concensus, even
with the Internet? Are there that many linguistics scholars out there
who can handle this prolonged task? Seems to me that most of the young
folks have interests in other things like economics, computers, and
making money.

> >Back to the Nostratic. You say that the only distinction between
> >animate and inanimate was through syntax. Are you suggesting some >type of
> >gender connection between animate and inanimate? And as I >read below you
> >equate male with animate and female with inanimate.
>
> IE really changed things around. First off, the animate and inanimate
> contrast was originally _only_ a logical categorisation and wasn't marked by
> the grammar except little rational rules like the one that forbade any
> inanimate noun from being the subject of a transitive sentence (Basically:
> An inanimate object doesn't do anything to anyone, that's why it's
> inanimate... That makes sense. Does your car move on its own and hit
> somebody on the street? Only in horror movies perhaps.)
>

Gerry: Most interesting. "Subject" does the acting and "predicate" is
acted upon. So subject is animate and predicate is inanimate. Of
course my car doesn't move on its own, but "she's" a beauty!

> Eventually, IndoEtruscan began to develop the animate nominative -s (from
> the demonstrative *se) which had contrasted with the still unmarked
> inanimate nomino-accusative and thus automatically, animate/inanimate gender
> became officially marked.
>
> Finally, it was only after Anatolian went its seperate way that "masculine",
> "feminine" and "neuter" gender was derived out of the original
> animate/inanimate. That's the only connection to that effect that I'm making
> between "animate gender" and "sex gender" which, aside from my mention of
> IndoEtruscan declension, is a mainstream view about IE gender development.
>

Gerry: When Anatolian split, when did it develop genders or does
Anatolian not have any gender designations? Do you have an appromixate
date for the split of Anatolian (in millenniums is OK). I know my ideas
are sometimes "fantastic" but could the above "animate gender" reference
monkeys and "sex gender" reference humans?

> >And Dene-Caucasian also had no gender references? [...] Is there a
> > >possibility that our early ancestors did not recognize gender?
>
> Erh, no, umm, yes, well... It _had_ gender but not necessarily between
> masculine and feminine. Between things like human/non-human, etc...
> Different classes existed but they can still be called "gender" in a
> linguistic sense. I don't think it had a grammatical _sexual_ gender (but
> then I won't bet my life on it yet).
>

Gerry: Fascinating again. What do you know about difference classes in
the days of our early ancestors?

> >Gerry: Gosh! At the rate you're going you'll have all the world
> >languages linked up!
>
> Well, I've got everything tamed except Khoisan, Asiatic languages
> (Australian, Austronesian, Thai, MonKhmer, Hmongwhatchamacallit), Amerind,
> Tartessian and Iberian. Dene-Caucasian is enough to handle for now. I'll get
> on the others when I'm 50. I do find Hmong interesting though, especially
> its interesting non-Mandarin-like typological constraints on final
> consonants... (more suspense via elipsis)
>

Gerry: Good luck -- you're a very precocious person!

> >Gerry: Perhaps it was the farmer (feminine) who remained at the
> >homestead while the hunter (male) brought back the goodies, or >perhaps
> >didn't bring back the goodies. Actually, why would he need >to bring
> >anything back if the female had the digging stick?
>
> :) Actually as far as I understand, the feminine -a in Latin, like in
> agricola, stems from a case ending used as a derivational suffix. The word
> meant something like "someone of the field-tilling" and didn't refer to
> gender at all. The suffix *-(a)h (traditional notation:
> *-(e)H2) is used as feminine outside of Indo-Anatolian but originally these
> derivational nouns were inanimate, if I'm not mistaken. Hittite does have a
> -s^ar suffix (?) that shows up in the feminine declination of *kwetwer-
> "four" in Celtic languages. So, in summary, Indo-Anatolian must have
> acknowledged gender with the occasional feminine suffix like *-ser but the
> nominal declension originally only made a contrast between "animate" and
> "inanimate". So even with a "feminine" suffix, the word would be classified
> as animate.
>

Gerry: About *agricola* didn't someone on the list say it was Masculine
and not Feminine?

> Actually, while we're on the topic of "agricola", does anyone know if this
> was meant to be a collective or more abstract sense such as "farmers (in
> general)" or "the profession of farmer" or was it strictly a singular
> meaning pertaining to one person?
>
> - gLeN
>
> PS: What I really want to know is what the IndoEuropeans would have
> called "lesbians". You never see that in a linguistic journal.
> You'd think, if the term "fart" survived thousands of years of
> linguistic turmoil that anything is possible.
>
> ______________________________________________________
>