Re: Grammatical Gender

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:
> My understanding is that only IE, AA and Khoi-San have grammatical gender

No. Possibly associated with IE and AA we have Dravidian (allegedly also Nostratic) and NE Caucasian (apparently connected with IE in some fashion, possibly as a neighbour). Ket (Yeniseian) might also belong here.

Further afield, we have Algonquian (animate v. inanimate), Dyirbal (Australian, 4 genders) and, dare I suggest, Bantu.

There are also several cases where unrelated languages seem to have copied gender from neighbouring languages.

Richard.

Thanks for the correction. I'd leave out Bantu and other N-K because the "genders" seem to be derived from  head count markers --but I won't vouch for my opinion since I don't know the origin of those prefixes: m/wa, k-/v- etc. in Swahili.

Algonquian is interesting in that it seems not to be a "typical" Amerind *n-/*m- language but rather an outsider like Na-Dene. Note that I'm not accepting Greenberg's "Amerind" at face value, but I do believe there's something to the N/M group, just that not all Native American languages are (necessarily) N/M.