CORRECTIONS: 4:00 - 这 should be 三. Not sure how that happened... 9:46 - The German nouns should be capitalized 10:01 - ‘Águila’ is in fact feminine, even though it takes the masculine definite article 10:42 - In “anajenga”, the ‘-na-‘ isn’t a class prefix, it’s the present tense marker. 11:03 - Both sentences are actually in the past tense. Also -dogo means small. New is -pya. Again, no idea how that happened. 11:49 - Vidit means "he/she saw". For the translation to be correct, it should be "iit" If anyone spots any other errors, let me know.
I don't know if you count it as an error, but the sample words in Kurdish at 11:29 are in the constructive case (Ezafe). Gender is not marked in the direct case in Kurdish, so dar can be both rod and tree. It would be better their cases are also indicated.
9:46 the german word 'das Mädchen' doesn't mean 'the daughter', it means 'the girl' and comes from 'die Magd' which means 'the maid', which also means it isn't really neuter by association but beacause it's actually a diminutive which are always neuter
Classifiers in proto-lang: People, animals (some specific ones), inanimate objects (including natural objects), toxic, dangerous, edible, good, safe. Classes after evolution: People Animals Inanimate Dangerous(and toxic) Good (and safe and edible) They live in the desert, so dangerous, toxic, edible, and safe were all things that kept their ancestors alive, so those pieces of class stayed. Interesting factoids: Weather is all marked danger class. Some animals are under danger/toxic class. To emphasize or clarify, you add the full marker (not just the suffix) to the word. For instance, a person is understood to just be a person. But if you add dangerous marker to the noun (which are usually not marked) and all articles and modifiers, it emphasizes or adds the information that this particular person is dangerous.
So, in order for a gender system to come together, would it basically be a necessity for the classifiers to be repeated multiple times in one sentence? If I had a classifier for human, "ako", (and inanimate of "pa", and English syntax) and had to write "the man walks through the woods" would I basically be writing "De ako bran ako kalam ako eltro sid pa?" That seems a bit clunky at first. Or am I misunderstanding how this would come to spread from a noun to other words
I don't think it has to be that forced. You can have classifiers that are not used so redundantly at first. Maybe adjectives only use it in predicative sentences, or maybe article + classified (without the noun) is used as a pronoun. Overtime some of those forms would contaminate the articles or adjectives that already accompany the noun, especially if it's already treated more like a suffix.
@@fernandobanda5734 I'm a very blunt man lol. Enjoy Conlanging, but anything naturalistic breaks my logic brain. Like, "Analogy? You mean freAkImG HUMANS desTRoYiNG MY MyAsTERpIECE
@@tompatterson1548 я вижу белый стол (object is inanimate, so it, including the adjective, appears as nominative) я вижу белого снеговика (object is animate, so it appears as accusative)
02:31 ""Grammatical gender is a surprisingly widespread phenomenon, existing in some form in almost half of the world's languages." Mainly because I grew up surrounded by SAE languages that have healthy gender systems, I was actually quite surprised when I first found out that only half of the world's languages had gender!
As a spanish native speaker I want to express some comments on the few examples that were given: "Águila" (eagle) is feminine. We use "el" instead of "la" due to phonaesthetic rules. In spanish is not allowed to place the definite feminine article before a nouns wich begins with an stressed "a / ha". However, we use the feminine article in the plural, "las". For example: El águila --> The eagle Las águilas --> The eagles El hacha --> The axe Las hachas --> The axes El hada --> The fairy Las hadas --> The fairies All these nouns are feminine, but we only use the masculine article in the singular. This phonaesthetic rule does not apply in other situations. For example, "give it to Ana" is translated as "Dáselo a Ana", eventhough "Ana" begins with a stressed "a". This is because "a" is a preposition, thus it does not have gender. Also, as far as I know, latin "ille, illa, illud" (demonstratives) gave us articles such as "el, la, lo, los, las" an pronouns like "él, ella, ello, lo, la, le, los, las, les".
There's a small mistake in the Swahili example. The '-na-' in 'anajenga' isn't the object prefix for class-9 nouns, it's the present tense prefix. The gloss should actually be CLS.1-PRES-build. The object prefix for class-9 is 'i-' and it goes after the tense marking. And if I'm not mistaken it's entirely optional for the direct object. So you could say 'anaijenga'
He also implied Mädchen is neuter for phonological reasons, but it actually has the same (neuter) diminutive suffix -chen as in Blümchen, so it is actually not a phonological coincidence but a result of morphological derivation
The analysis of "Mädchen" is kind of off-target here: it's not a matter of phonology! Rather, *every* diminutive is "neuter" in gender. (I've heard it argued that this is because little kids have yet to really take on meaningful sexed or gendered characteristics. But regardless of the reason, it's a universal rule being applied normally, not a case of something that would otherwise be male- or female-gendered being rendered otherwise for purposes of euphony!)
Diminutives in Indo-European languages are often neuter (in greek the words for "boy" and "girl" are both neuter as they were derived with diminutives). The reason is that the neuter used to be used for inanimate things, and I can see smaller things be thought to be "less animate" than big things.
In Welsh (like all Celtic languages) we have initial-consonant mutations whereby the initial consonant of a word can move along the sonority hierarchy depending on what precedes it. It has major impact on gender in Welsh (which has two: masculine & feminine). The definite article in Welsh is y/yr/'r - which one you use depends on what precedes and follows it. The order of X is: 'r - used after a vowel, regardless of what follows: "Mae'r ci..." (the dog is...) yr - used if there is no preceding vowel but the following word begins with a vowel: "Yr ardal" (the area) y - used if there is no preceding vowel and the following word begins with a consonant: "Y ci" (the dog) If, however, the noun following "y" is feminine and singular, it undergoes 'soft mutation' (lenition). Examples: "Cath" (cat) becomes "y gath" (the cat) "Dynes" (woman) becomes "y ddynes" (the woman) [ = /ð/] "Gardd" (garden) becomes "yr ardd" (the garden) [ /ɡ/ disappears under soft mutation and because it leaves a vowel the form 'yr' is used, not 'y'. However, feminine plurals are unmutated: "y cathod" (the cats); "y dynesau" (the women); "y gerddi" (the gardens). Masculine nouns are all left unmutated: "Dyn" (man) - "y dyn" (the man) "Ci" (dog) - "y ci" (the dog) Adjectives (or any qualifier) which follows a feminine singular noun also undergoes soft mutation (some adjs have masc. and fem. forms): "Gwen" (white [f]): "y gath wen" (the white cat) "Du" (black): "y gath ddu" (the black cat) Again, no mutation with feminine plurals: "Y cathod gwen" (the white cats) With masculine nouns there is no mutation: "Gwyn" (white [m]): "y ci gwyn" (the white dog) "Du": "y ci du" (the black dog) The numeral "un" (one) also causes soft mutation to feminine nouns: "Un gath" (one cat), but "un ci" (one dog).
I got inspired by DJP's High Valyrian and made one of the gender systems for my elven conculture divide into Sylvian, Aquatic, Terrestrial, and Aerial. Sylvian is anything animate plus plants, Aquatic is anything that flows, Terrestrial is materials, and Aerials are abstract concepts.
My conlang Ebenic marks gender very similarly Terrestrial (Any land animal) Plant (Any plant, doesn't include products of plants like vegetables and fruit) Acquatic (Any living being in the waters) Volatile (A creature that mainly flies, like a bird or an insect) Neuter (Abstractions, other genders, non-binary, objects, items and so on)
I believe you might've gotten the Hittite and Ojibwe samples mixed up at 8:03. I was thrown for a minute when I saw that *makízin* was supposedly the word for "shoe" in a non-Algonquian language spoken halfway round the world lol.
@@soton4010 Yeah, but is either Celtic or Finnish consonant mutation "alliterative agreement"? (I was replying to Craig S., the OC, not yer da sells avon.) I should have just looked it up (maybe I did and forgot), and after doing so www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Alliterative_agreement ) I see Bantu prefix agreement is counted (even if not reduced to one consonant, as it typically isn't) and it looks the key factor that makes it interesting is simply that that both (or all) words involved in the agreement have the same affix. Thus, it's very similar to how Spanish gender agreement often is, except that that could more properly be called "rhyming ageeement" due to being vowels at the end rather than consonants at the beginning of words, and that that's not as regular as the near-constant-prefix agreement typical of the agglutinative Bantu languages. Actually, Spanish is quite different when words that don't end in "-a" or "-o" are involved, and other fusional languages, like French and Arabic, are even less similar, since, though there is agreement, it is rarely as simple as putting the same affix on both (or all) the agreeing words. Even if the agreement affixes were as simple as a single affix for each agreement-marked feature (e.g. gender) on the agreeing word (e.g. an adjective), a corresponding affix might not appear on the word triggering the agreement (e.g. the noun), if the triggering feature (e.g. the noun's gender) were treated as inherant to the triggering word and not needing to be marked by an affix on the triggering word (like how the constant "-(e)s" suffix for verbs agreeing with 3.SG subject in English never involves a matching affix on the subject, and in fact precludes the use of the "-(e)s" suffix that could on the subject, which would make the subject plural). These other possibilities are probably why this feature of alliterative agreement is worth being pointed out and described as a feature, though it may seem like the most obvious kind of agreement to some, particularly for gender derived from classifiers.
This helped me finally decide how to add a gender system to one of my conlangs after years of sort of wanting to but being unable to decide how. Thank you!
9:07 In Polish (although this is more prominent in colloquial language) certain masculine inanimate nouns are treated as if they were animate - that is, their accusative form ends in -a instead of being the same as the nominative. For example, "Jem ogórk=a" ("I eat [a] cucumber), "Zawiąż but=a" ("Tie [yout] shoe), but "Jem chleb=0" ("I eat bread"), "Zawiąż węzeł=0" ("Tie [a/the] knot"). Now, are cucumbers and shoes culturally important objects? Not really, as far as I know, this animacy shifting is pretty random, loosely based on semanting categories and phonetic similarity. Animacy shifting in Polish can actually go both ways and be used dor stylistic puproses: 1) The forementioned phenomenon can give an utterance a colloquial/comedic sound; for instance, there's a Polish meme video where a guy shouts "Daj kamienia" instead of grammatically correct "Daj kamień" ("Give [me a] stone") 2) In plural nom./acc./voc. a noun can be either masculine human or anything else : a masc. hum. noun can be "animacy downgraded", giving it a derogatory or humourus meaning: "profesorzy" ("professors" masc. hum.) -> derogatory/humourous "profesory" (like say, "reaktory" "reactors")
Could you also please do a video on subject and topic markers in languages like Japanese or Korean? I would like to include them in a conlang but I have no idea how such system may develop.
You can have it already exist in your proto if you have one (unless you want older versions of your Lang to lack it which is understandable). I'm not sure how good this method is but you could use a definite article for a topic marker, it's a common thing in languages with topic marker to lack definiteness
Whilst I don’t know about their topic markers, Korean’s subject markers came from a earlier ergative case, or demonstrative, depending on who you ask. Japanese on the other hand has its subject particles evolve from an earlier genitive particle, vestigial of it can be found in place names like Seki-ga-hara (gate’s field)
Most Slavic languages have an animate/inanimate distinction, as well as the masculine, feminine, and neuter genders inherited from late PIE. Typically, masculine nouns (at least in the second declension - there are first-declension nouns that don't do this) in the singular have the accusative the same as the genitive if animate, but the nominative if inanimate. What happens in the plural varies from one language to another. Bulgarian and Macedonian, which have lost the accusative and genitive cases, are exceptions. This animacy distinction arose after Slavic was first written down; how did it happen?
I don't think Russian has 2 gender systems, cuz, while sex based genders agrees with another parts of speech, animate and inanimate only distinct in accusative, so I can't say that animacy is gender system in Russian/ But i don't know other Slavic langs, so maybe in them animacy distinction of noun reflects in agreemant
The original early Proto-Slavic masculine Nominative and Accusative forms merged in vowel stem nouns. Now, there was a syntactical innovation in Slavic (that afaik doesn't exist in neighbouring languages) by which the Genitive case replaced the Accusative in clauses with negation (I see milk vs I see not of-milk). What probably happened is that the Genitive spread to positive clauses with high animacy masculine nouns (people, animals) to avoid ambiguity and free up word order. (He saw of-wolf, of-wolf he saw, wolf saw of-him, of-him saw wolf). The old Accusative form (Acc=Nom) can sometimes be found in fixed expressions and proverbs but these are vanishingly rare
How likely is it for a proto-language to have gender that is not at all marked on the noun, but only in agreement, with gender just being an inherent quality of each noun? Your video kind of made it seem like gender needs to be marked on the noun, at least at the start. Modern languages like German of course have many nouns where it's impossible to tell from phonology what gender they are, but it still comes from a proto-lang with gender marked on the noun, so I'm not sure how realistic such a system is. Regardless, I'm gonna use agreement-only gender marking in my conlang. I like the concept and the unnecessary difficulty it adds to learning the language.
To be fair, the amount of irregularity and historical spelling is completely off the charts. Nobody would dare think something like that for a conlang.
@@fernandobanda5734 Although, a lot of conlangers seem to love historical spellings; just look at anything DJP has done which also has a native script. Now, he does try to have very transparent Romanizations, but the native scripts are typically full of complex historical spellings.
Welsh has gender. It 's not marked on the noun so you just have to memorise it. And you 'd better hope you get it right because some adjectives have special feminine forms, and even if they don't their initial consonant is lenited after a feminine noun. Oh and if you're using prepositions make sure you know the gender of the noun if you don't explicitly state it because prepositions decline for gender in the 3.sg Here's some examples Car (m) - car Hat (f) - het Short - Byr / Ber Yr car byr - the short car Y het fer - the short hat (Talking about the car) Es i i'r dre hebddo fo - I went to town without it (Talking about the hat) Es i i'r dre hebddi hi - I went to town without it
fun fact - old swedish used to have three genders just like german. masculine, feminine, and neuter. modern swedish only has two, but not masculine and feminine like spanish. instead feminine and masculine morphed into a single gender called utrum alongside neuter. today the semantic meaning is mostly lost and what gender a word has seems fairly arbitrary. one exception to this though is that almost every word for people, other the word for child, has the utrum gender. which of course makes sense if you know the language history.
And maybe also intonation. You probably are talking about phonemic prosody, but in actual speech, phonemic and metalinguistic factors interact in complex ways, particularly in rhythm, intonation/tone, and phonation.
My favorite conlang I’m working on still has a divine noun gender cause it’s a magical world and these entities are much more important in their community than on Earth where magic doesn’t exist. I went with divine / human / other animate / inanimate, a tidy 4 gender system.
Thanks so much for this great content!!! I was wondering, how would a predominantly Head-Initial language evolve case suffixes? You’ve mentioned in a previous video that even case markers are overwhelmingly suffixes even in Head-Initial languages, but how so? Thanks for the help!
Those head-initial languages could've had pospositions in the far past but at one point switched to prepositions, so you could say in an older stage of the language it had postpositions which got suffixed, and then new prepositions evolved and maybe other word order things happened.
Although we do have some agreement on adjectives: masculine and feminine get the -e suffix, while neuter does not. It is true that Dutch gender barely matters anymore, like how everyone treats 'het meisje (the girl)' as feminine, even though it 'officially' is neuter
Dutch is evolving from three genders to two genders, as the only difference between masculine and feminine left is which pronoun they use, and people don't remember which inanimate thing is a hij and which is a zij. So those two merge into a common gender (like in Scandinavian languages). The neuter gender is still strong.
At 6:03 the "o" in stylo isn't an ending and whilst the "e" in chambre does somewhat clarify gender (because it's derived from feminine "a" in Latin "camera"), it's not always a good indicator because there are nouns ending in "e" that are masculine and in any case word final "e" isn't pronounced in French anymore so you can't go off phonological form, only the written form
I've got a question. Gender is often associated with infixes or variations of a word (while classifiers are often seen as separate words I think)? Is that really a thing? Is gender agreement as separate words completely unheard of?
I mean for a lot of German words you can only tell by the article which gender it has (although there's plenty of other words where you can tell without the article, so maybe a mixed system would be more naturalistic)
Hey there, I was wondering if you would consider doing a feature focus on phatic expressions? There's not much coverage on them at all in regard to writing a conlang.
Great video as always dude! In my conlang, Saremane, I use two genders: animate and inanimate, and I'm pretty happy with it. Continue making these videos, they're incredibly useful for someone like me, who is creating a conlang!
I can tell you that the final -e in French is definitely NOT a reliable way to identify feminine nouns; pretty far from it, in fact. There's quite a big number of masculine nouns that end with an "e", including nouns related to people (père, frère, oncle, etc.) as well as inanimate things (arbre, sable, almost all the nouns ending in -age, etc.). And those aren't even words that come from Greek. Notice it is particularly misleading for "foie" ("liver"), because it ends with "e" while being masculine, while there is also "foi" ("faith"), which doesn't and is feminine.
Il était une fois un homme de foi qui vendait du foie dans la ville de Foix. Il dit: «Ma foi! c'est la dernière fois que je vends du foie dans la ville de Foix!»
Uuuugh! I *hate* the term, "grammatical gender." They're noun-classes. And if we called them "noun-classes" when we taught them in schools, kids wouldn't be so confused by it. The only reason we call them noun "genders" is because of a klunky translation of the word, "genus," from Latin. Because that's what it's called in German: „das Genus“.
Care to share the name of the fonts you're using? I'm particularly interested in the one with the nice IPA symbols at 3:49 for example. Thanks for your videos, I really enjoy them.
fun fact dutch is losing its gender case to, its only slightly in the articles with "de" and "het" but more and more nouns can get both, with "de" being preferred over "het" a lot of the time
I'm a native Spanish speaker and I learned English when I was very young. Then, when I started my tertiary studies, I came across French (which, like Spanish, has gendered nouns) and didn't understand any of it because of that. Japanese, by contrast, is much more simpler in my mind.
@Bibliaridion, how did you make the Nekachti symbols for the conlang page on Campfire Blaze? Cause I'm also making a conlang as well and I just discovered Campfire Blaze about two days ago.
PIE got it from a derivational suffix being reanalysed as a feminine marker from analogy with the words for "woman" and "widow" so that's also an option (The suffix was *-h2, the roots for woman and widow were *gʷneh2- and *widewh2 respectively)
Cognitive linguist here. I found this pretty good, but I have to make a correction that might seem picky. Gender etc. are based on pragmatics and syntactics, not semantics, except in minor part that is difficult for English speakers to understand because English does not have a gender system, only vestigial gender in singular third-person pronouns. Furthermore, a great deal of e.g. gender is not by similarities but differences. It is important pragmatically to distinguish between the sun and the moon, so the words for them tend to be put in different genders. The same is true for men and women. But it isn't much more than accident that in French, the sun is masculine and the moon feminine, while in German it's the other way around. Most of any gender system is because of this, which I call _discerption,_ which effectively is dissimilarity. Something new becomes part of culture--like a new vegetable--so depending on the pragmatic needs, you either put it in the same gender as the words for another vegetable or a different gender from the words for another vegetable. Predicting when is tricky, but the psycholinguists got pretty good at it using Shannon information theory. Oh, and the purpose of these classification systems, or rather their diachronically evolved function, is to make it easier to connect different parts of utterances bigger than simply phrases. This explains the popularity of pronouns. It also makes using adjectives as nouns a lot easier. (It that really an also, or is it related to pragmatics and interpretactics? Too much there for a UA-cam comment.)
While I absolutely love your content I find that it's a tad too quick. Not that you talk too quick per se but rather that you stride from idea to idea maybe too quickly. I find myself having to pause on every one of your videos and rewatch parts. Which, to be honest isn't too bad. But for someone new to this it may be beneficial to give yourself some more negative space between concepts.
Usually they come from the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS): wals.info/ Here is the page for feature 30A: Number of Genders: wals.info/feature/30A#2/26.7/148.9
Start by making your endings have a different form depending on the end of the root it attaches to, or even make it assimilate or merge with it: all of this already happens in English with the pluralizing -s, which is underlyingly /z/ as in bird -> birds, but can also be /s/ in bat -> bats or even /ïz/ in size -> sizes. Now just imagine /ïz/ simplifying to /ï/ sometime in the future, and you have a two competing plural suffixes: -s or -e depending on the noun. Now add changes that obscure the original reasons those suffixes were different, and you end up with two largely arbitrary suffixes that learners have to memorize. That's just one way it can go, but a more striking way which is a major factor behind the diversity of Latin noun and verb paradigms, is when a word ends in a vowel, say a, e, o or i, and those vowels merge with the following suffixes each in their own way: this is so common in Indo European that it gets its own name: "thematic" inflexion, where the vowel is the "theme", as opposed to "athematic" where the suffix is attached on its own, usually after a consonant. Have fun!
oh lexicon Valley covered this in great detail. he also went over why English gender. basically old Norse and old English speakers had to live together and in the process a bunch of adults started learning the other language. this is the perfect environment for Grammer pruning.
I'm trying to create a grammatical gender system with the genders being tool and plant. I still need to decide which nouns of my analytical protolang should go to the "tool" category and which ones should go to the "plant" category, and I'm thinking of seeking out help from Good Samaritans. I don't know why my comment about this gets deleted, and this is my third time so far. Fair reminder, I go by different yet similar logics compared to everyone else.
So, is it that noun class is more general than gender? That noun class doesn't require agreement whereas gender does? Because I heard from Artifexian that they are the same thing. But I've always thought that they are similar but different concepts, where gender requires agreement and noun class doesn't. So am I right or is Artifexian right? I have thought of using noun class in my conlang, because the masculine/feminine/neuter gender split seems completely arbitrary and nonsensical to me. I mean for one thing, how is it that a cat is masculine? If anything, I'd say cats are more feminine than masculine, but that split makes zero sense to me. Something like the animacy spectrum on the other hand, that makes perfect sense to me and I could see myself using it, as long as I don't need to have adjective agreement or verb agreement, which seem to be necessary for a gender system. I mean in every gender system I've seen, it's been adjective-only agreement, verb-only agreement, or adjective and verb agreement. I just want the nouns to be inflected, no agreement. So, would noun class do the trick for that?
Yikes, and here I was just thinking that a class system could be something as basic as having different articles for a given noun, like an "a" and "the" word for one class and a different "a" and "the" for another.
Here's a cool idea. A gramitical class system based on a coinciding political class system. You could have situations like ordering water at a restaurant will give you a different result depending on the noun class you use. Or you could do a significant amount of culture building just in the way different nouns get sorted in to which class. Maybe dancing is seen as a common pastime, so dance gets the commoner class, while conversation gets the noble class. And this could be used to show history, perhaps dancing is now popular with the nobility, but it still gets the commoner class markers.
I would start with agglutinating suffixes for gender, plurality, case/role marking, add sound changes and morphological leveling via analogy. Latin, Greek, Icelandic sometimes look random with its inflections but if you go back to PIE these endings start making perfect sense
you answered the question how gender works okay, but why have gendered linguistic systems at all what utility does it add i haven't yet been able to find someone who can answer that question
Could allow for more flexible syntax when the arguments belong to different categories, which could be reflected in their adjectives and verb agreement allowing them to be moved around without ambiguity as to subject or object, or to which nouns the adjectives belong. Also can disambiguate 3rd person pronouns. More descriptive systems can add context and information about the nouns which never hurts.
Last time I was this early the PIE laryngeals were still pronounced on the steppes of Ukraine. Also, thank you for doing this series. It’s really useful even if you have a lot of background knowledge in the topic you are discussing, and I always learn something new in every episode.
I know this has nothing to do with the video but is English "r" a velar phoneme? when I look at the ipa it says that it's a post-alveolar approximate. the ipa shows a sound for a voiced velar approximate but it's not the same sound. does anyone else pronounce their r's like this
for the latin at 11:48, vidit is the perfect tense of to see not to go, also while latin word order is pretty free, you don't really see adjectives split from the nouns they modify like in the second example. I'm not an expert though.
Not in prose, but my understanding is that Latin poetry can have really wild word order. I knew someone who learned Latin through poetry before they learned any prose, and thought Latin had no standard word order at all haha.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the reason why english lost its gender system is because when the norse (or it might have been the normans) settled in britain for the first time, their languages didn't have the same genders for the same nouns, so most, when trading with the people who spoke old english, didn't bother with it, and this spread to the native speakers.
It's been a long time since I read about it, but I always thought it was the result of case endings being dropped (I think because they weren't quite the same between Norse and Anglo-Saxon?). Gender was expressed through case endings, so dropping them means no more gender expression. This is just what I remember assuming from what I read about the history of English, so I could certainly be wrong.
@@Sovairu I think something more had to be involved since even in languages where gender markers eroded to nothing, or almost nothing and are extremely unreliable today (like in German or French) they are still kept around, so if it had been only due to sound changes then I think they would still be somewhat present (even though morphologically in a completely unreliable way).
@@Whatever94-i4u The fact that some languages do it doesn't mean that every language works the same. Phonological merging is a perfectly good way to lose gender.
CORRECTIONS:
4:00 - 这 should be 三. Not sure how that happened...
9:46 - The German nouns should be capitalized
10:01 - ‘Águila’ is in fact feminine, even though it takes the masculine definite article
10:42 - In “anajenga”, the ‘-na-‘ isn’t a class prefix, it’s the present tense marker.
11:03 - Both sentences are actually in the past tense. Also -dogo means small. New is -pya. Again, no idea how that happened.
11:49 - Vidit means "he/she saw". For the translation to be correct, it should be "iit"
If anyone spots any other errors, let me know.
thanks dad
Another correction in the Swahili example. -dogo means small, -pya means new
11:07 "ocelotl" usually means "jaguar" rather than "ocelot"
11:20 "kutazama" means "to watch, look at" instead of "to see" (AFAIK anyway)
I don't know if you count it as an error, but the sample words in Kurdish at 11:29 are in the constructive case (Ezafe). Gender is not marked in the direct case in Kurdish, so dar can be both rod and tree. It would be better their cases are also indicated.
9:46 the german word 'das Mädchen' doesn't mean 'the daughter', it means 'the girl' and comes from 'die Magd' which means 'the maid', which also means it isn't really neuter by association but beacause it's actually a diminutive which are always neuter
One day we will all become fluent in examplish...
You've given me an idea for a project. I'm going to rewatch all of Biblaridion's feature focus videos and make a vocab list.
@@ukishnzer hows it going on your project
Or exemplish will become the most complex language, having all gramatical features possible
@@qwerty1259 I gave up when I realised it would all contradict itself. I would have to use a lot of suppletion.
@@eduardooliveira2244 That will make it as bad as Thandian... so it's a good idea not to become fluent in it.
Classifiers in proto-lang:
People, animals (some specific ones), inanimate objects (including natural objects), toxic, dangerous, edible, good, safe.
Classes after evolution:
People
Animals
Inanimate
Dangerous(and toxic)
Good (and safe and edible)
They live in the desert, so dangerous, toxic, edible, and safe were all things that kept their ancestors alive, so those pieces of class stayed.
Interesting factoids:
Weather is all marked danger class.
Some animals are under danger/toxic class.
To emphasize or clarify, you add the full marker (not just the suffix) to the word. For instance, a person is understood to just be a person. But if you add dangerous marker to the noun (which are usually not marked) and all articles and modifiers, it emphasizes or adds the information that this particular person is dangerous.
So, in order for a gender system to come together, would it basically be a necessity for the classifiers to be repeated multiple times in one sentence?
If I had a classifier for human, "ako", (and inanimate of "pa", and English syntax) and had to write "the man walks through the woods" would I basically be writing
"De ako bran ako kalam ako eltro sid pa?"
That seems a bit clunky at first. Or am I misunderstanding how this would come to spread from a noun to other words
I don't think it has to be that forced. You can have classifiers that are not used so redundantly at first. Maybe adjectives only use it in predicative sentences, or maybe article + classified (without the noun) is used as a pronoun. Overtime some of those forms would contaminate the articles or adjectives that already accompany the noun, especially if it's already treated more like a suffix.
@@fernandobanda5734 I'm a very blunt man lol. Enjoy Conlanging, but anything naturalistic breaks my logic brain.
Like, "Analogy? You mean freAkImG HUMANS desTRoYiNG MY MyAsTERpIECE
@@DTux5249 Well, analogy is working for me as the perfect excuse to not have too much irregularity. :)
@@fernandobanda5734
>.>
What's that about minimizing irregularity through irregularity
@Bryson Sanger True. The semetic languages, especially Arabic's nouns, are a clear sign of that, I guess XD
About animacy. Fun fact, but in Russian the word «мертвец» (dead man) is animate.
And also снеговик (snowman)
yeah well considering how long it took Rasputin to succumb to his injuries I don't blame them
- Распутин XD
@@ИринаХанжиева-п9д does this have anything to do with the way compounds interact with gender?
@@tompatterson1548 я вижу белый стол (object is inanimate, so it, including the adjective, appears as nominative)
я вижу белого снеговика (object is animate, so it appears as accusative)
in German the article is usually not capitalized while the noun is always capitalized.
10:01 "águila" is actually feminine, but we use the masculine article because "la águila" sounds too ugly. a better example would be "el problema"
"Agua" is the same, right?
@@ec1480 yep, works like that in all feminine words beginning with a stressed _a_ or _ha._
@@ec1480 yess
comúnmente se dice "el águila"
también pasa con "el agua"
Es verdad
02:31 ""Grammatical gender is a surprisingly widespread phenomenon, existing in some form in almost half of the world's languages."
Mainly because I grew up surrounded by SAE languages that have healthy gender systems, I was actually quite surprised when I first found out that only half of the world's languages had gender!
What does a "healthy gender system" mean?
I just mean a language where grammatical gender is a really obvious central, pervasive and unavoidable part of its grammar.
SAE languages??
Standard Average European
Spanish catgirls be like...
*ña*
French catgirls be like: Eauweau
@@EnigmaticLucas That's grossly inaccurate.
It should be "Eauoueau"
Saludos para Gringolandia
And in Portugal, nha.
Italian and French: gna
South Slavic languages: nja
As a spanish native speaker I want to express some comments on the few examples that were given:
"Águila" (eagle) is feminine. We use "el" instead of "la" due to phonaesthetic rules. In spanish is not allowed to place the definite feminine article before a nouns wich begins with an stressed "a / ha". However, we use the feminine article in the plural, "las".
For example:
El águila --> The eagle
Las águilas --> The eagles
El hacha --> The axe
Las hachas --> The axes
El hada --> The fairy
Las hadas --> The fairies
All these nouns are feminine, but we only use the masculine article in the singular.
This phonaesthetic rule does not apply in other situations. For example, "give it to Ana" is translated as "Dáselo a Ana", eventhough "Ana" begins with a stressed "a". This is because "a" is a preposition, thus it does not have gender.
Also, as far as I know, latin "ille, illa, illud" (demonstratives) gave us articles such as "el, la, lo, los, las" an pronouns like "él, ella, ello, lo, la, le, los, las, les".
There's a small mistake in the Swahili example. The '-na-' in 'anajenga' isn't the object prefix for class-9 nouns, it's the present tense prefix. The gloss should actually be CLS.1-PRES-build. The object prefix for class-9 is 'i-' and it goes after the tense marking. And if I'm not mistaken it's entirely optional for the direct object. So you could say 'anaijenga'
10:02 NOTE: 'El águila' is feminine, not masculine; it takes the article 'el' because it starts with a stressed 'a', like 'el agua', 'el aula', etc.
9:50 "Mädchen" means girl. The German word for daughter is "Tochter".
He also implied Mädchen is neuter for phonological reasons, but it actually has the same (neuter) diminutive suffix -chen as in Blümchen, so it is actually not a phonological coincidence but a result of morphological derivation
The analysis of "Mädchen" is kind of off-target here: it's not a matter of phonology! Rather, *every* diminutive is "neuter" in gender. (I've heard it argued that this is because little kids have yet to really take on meaningful sexed or gendered characteristics. But regardless of the reason, it's a universal rule being applied normally, not a case of something that would otherwise be male- or female-gendered being rendered otherwise for purposes of euphony!)
Diminutives in Indo-European languages are often neuter (in greek the words for "boy" and "girl" are both neuter as they were derived with diminutives). The reason is that the neuter used to be used for inanimate things, and I can see smaller things be thought to be "less animate" than big things.
In Welsh (like all Celtic languages) we have initial-consonant mutations whereby the initial consonant of a word can move along the sonority hierarchy depending on what precedes it. It has major impact on gender in Welsh (which has two: masculine & feminine).
The definite article in Welsh is y/yr/'r - which one you use depends on what precedes and follows it. The order of X is:
'r - used after a vowel, regardless of what follows: "Mae'r ci..." (the dog is...)
yr - used if there is no preceding vowel but the following word begins with a vowel: "Yr ardal" (the area)
y - used if there is no preceding vowel and the following word begins with a consonant: "Y ci" (the dog)
If, however, the noun following "y" is feminine and singular, it undergoes 'soft mutation' (lenition). Examples:
"Cath" (cat) becomes "y gath" (the cat)
"Dynes" (woman) becomes "y ddynes" (the woman) [ = /ð/]
"Gardd" (garden) becomes "yr ardd" (the garden) [ /ɡ/ disappears under soft mutation and because it leaves a vowel the form 'yr' is used, not 'y'.
However, feminine plurals are unmutated:
"y cathod" (the cats); "y dynesau" (the women); "y gerddi" (the gardens).
Masculine nouns are all left unmutated:
"Dyn" (man) - "y dyn" (the man)
"Ci" (dog) - "y ci" (the dog)
Adjectives (or any qualifier) which follows a feminine singular noun also undergoes soft mutation (some adjs have masc. and fem. forms):
"Gwen" (white [f]): "y gath wen" (the white cat)
"Du" (black): "y gath ddu" (the black cat)
Again, no mutation with feminine plurals:
"Y cathod gwen" (the white cats)
With masculine nouns there is no mutation:
"Gwyn" (white [m]): "y ci gwyn" (the white dog)
"Du": "y ci du" (the black dog)
The numeral "un" (one) also causes soft mutation to feminine nouns:
"Un gath" (one cat), but "un ci" (one dog).
I got inspired by DJP's High Valyrian and made one of the gender systems for my elven conculture divide into Sylvian, Aquatic, Terrestrial, and Aerial.
Sylvian is anything animate plus plants, Aquatic is anything that flows, Terrestrial is materials, and Aerials are abstract concepts.
My conlang Ebenic marks gender very similarly
Terrestrial (Any land animal)
Plant (Any plant, doesn't include products of plants like vegetables and fruit)
Acquatic (Any living being in the waters)
Volatile (A creature that mainly flies, like a bird or an insect)
Neuter (Abstractions, other genders, non-binary, objects, items and so on)
YES, I have been waiting for this video for sooo long
Thank you. This series is incredibly useful.
I believe you might've gotten the Hittite and Ojibwe samples mixed up at 8:03. I was thrown for a minute when I saw that *makízin* was supposedly the word for "shoe" in a non-Algonquian language spoken halfway round the world lol.
One thing I'd love you to cover is Alliterative Agreement. Seems like a fun language feature to explore.
There's also consonants mutation
Is that different from just agreement prefixes reduced to one consonant?
@@Mr.Nichan not exactly its historic sandhi thats triggered grammatically. Celtic mutation is word initial but finnish has mutation word intinally
@@soton4010 ?"...Finnish ... word-*internally."
@@soton4010 Yeah, but is either Celtic or Finnish consonant mutation "alliterative agreement"? (I was replying to Craig S., the OC, not yer da sells avon.)
I should have just looked it up (maybe I did and forgot), and after doing so www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Alliterative_agreement ) I see Bantu prefix agreement is counted (even if not reduced to one consonant, as it typically isn't) and it looks the key factor that makes it interesting is simply that that both (or all) words involved in the agreement have the same affix. Thus, it's very similar to how Spanish gender agreement often is, except that that could more properly be called "rhyming ageeement" due to being vowels at the end rather than consonants at the beginning of words, and that that's not as regular as the near-constant-prefix agreement typical of the agglutinative Bantu languages.
Actually, Spanish is quite different when words that don't end in "-a" or "-o" are involved, and other fusional languages, like French and Arabic, are even less similar, since, though there is agreement, it is rarely as simple as putting the same affix on both (or all) the agreeing words. Even if the agreement affixes were as simple as a single affix for each agreement-marked feature (e.g. gender) on the agreeing word (e.g. an adjective), a corresponding affix might not appear on the word triggering the agreement (e.g. the noun), if the triggering feature (e.g. the noun's gender) were treated as inherant to the triggering word and not needing to be marked by an affix on the triggering word (like how the constant "-(e)s" suffix for verbs agreeing with 3.SG subject in English never involves a matching affix on the subject, and in fact precludes the use of the "-(e)s" suffix that could on the subject, which would make the subject plural). These other possibilities are probably why this feature of alliterative agreement is worth being pointed out and described as a feature, though it may seem like the most obvious kind of agreement to some, particularly for gender derived from classifiers.
At 11:48, vidit means "saw"
This helped me finally decide how to add a gender system to one of my conlangs after years of sort of wanting to but being unable to decide how. Thank you!
man your mandarin translations are pretty out of whack occasionally, at 4:00 you have the word for "this" translated as "three"
9:07 In Polish (although this is more prominent in colloquial language) certain masculine inanimate nouns are treated as if they were animate - that is, their accusative form ends in -a instead of being the same as the nominative. For example, "Jem ogórk=a" ("I eat [a] cucumber), "Zawiąż but=a" ("Tie [yout] shoe), but "Jem chleb=0" ("I eat bread"), "Zawiąż węzeł=0" ("Tie [a/the] knot"). Now, are cucumbers and shoes culturally important objects? Not really, as far as I know, this animacy shifting is pretty random, loosely based on semanting categories and phonetic similarity.
Animacy shifting in Polish can actually go both ways and be used dor stylistic puproses:
1) The forementioned phenomenon can give an utterance a colloquial/comedic sound; for instance, there's a Polish meme video where a guy shouts "Daj kamienia" instead of grammatically correct "Daj kamień" ("Give [me a] stone")
2) In plural nom./acc./voc. a noun can be either masculine human or anything else : a masc. hum. noun can be "animacy downgraded", giving it a derogatory or humourus meaning: "profesorzy" ("professors" masc. hum.) -> derogatory/humourous "profesory" (like say, "reaktory" "reactors")
Polaki
Could you also please do a video on subject and topic markers in languages like Japanese or Korean? I would like to include them in a conlang but I have no idea how such system may develop.
You can have it already exist in your proto if you have one (unless you want older versions of your Lang to lack it which is understandable).
I'm not sure how good this method is but you could use a definite article for a topic marker, it's a common thing in languages with topic marker to lack definiteness
Whilst I don’t know about their topic markers,
Korean’s subject markers came from a earlier ergative case, or demonstrative, depending on who you ask.
Japanese on the other hand has its subject particles evolve from an earlier genitive particle, vestigial of it can be found in place names like Seki-ga-hara (gate’s field)
Most Slavic languages have an animate/inanimate distinction, as well as the masculine, feminine, and neuter genders inherited from late PIE. Typically, masculine nouns (at least in the second declension - there are first-declension nouns that don't do this) in the singular have the accusative the same as the genitive if animate, but the nominative if inanimate. What happens in the plural varies from one language to another. Bulgarian and Macedonian, which have lost the accusative and genitive cases, are exceptions. This animacy distinction arose after Slavic was first written down; how did it happen?
I don't think Russian has 2 gender systems, cuz, while sex based genders agrees with another parts of speech, animate and inanimate only distinct in accusative, so I can't say that animacy is gender system in Russian/ But i don't know other Slavic langs, so maybe in them animacy distinction of noun reflects in agreemant
The original early Proto-Slavic masculine Nominative and Accusative forms merged in vowel stem nouns. Now, there was a syntactical innovation in Slavic (that afaik doesn't exist in neighbouring languages) by which the Genitive case replaced the Accusative in clauses with negation (I see milk vs I see not of-milk). What probably happened is that the Genitive spread to positive clauses with high animacy masculine nouns (people, animals) to avoid ambiguity and free up word order. (He saw of-wolf, of-wolf he saw, wolf saw of-him, of-him saw wolf). The old Accusative form (Acc=Nom) can sometimes be found in fixed expressions and proverbs but these are vanishingly rare
I think? this is an error but at 5:58 "tlalli" is marked as meaning "boat."
First but better
An independent video on classifiers and all of the things they can do would be great, as well. People sleep on the possibilities of classifiers.
How likely is it for a proto-language to have gender that is not at all marked on the noun, but only in agreement, with gender just being an inherent quality of each noun? Your video kind of made it seem like gender needs to be marked on the noun, at least at the start.
Modern languages like German of course have many nouns where it's impossible to tell from phonology what gender they are, but it still comes from a proto-lang with gender marked on the noun, so I'm not sure how realistic such a system is. Regardless, I'm gonna use agreement-only gender marking in my conlang. I like the concept and the unnecessary difficulty it adds to learning the language.
English is the most non naturalistic natural language lol 😂
It seems more like a conlang
English is Thandian 2.0.
Change my mind.
To be fair, the amount of irregularity and historical spelling is completely off the charts. Nobody would dare think something like that for a conlang.
@@fernandobanda5734 Although, a lot of conlangers seem to love historical spellings; just look at anything DJP has done which also has a native script. Now, he does try to have very transparent Romanizations, but the native scripts are typically full of complex historical spellings.
English isn't special, you just happen to know more about it, myriads of languages have harder spellings or more arbitrary rules
@@ryuko4478 Tibetian spelling...yikes
Welsh has gender. It 's not marked on the noun so you just have to memorise it.
And you 'd better hope you get it right because some adjectives have special feminine forms, and even if they don't their initial consonant is lenited after a feminine noun. Oh and if you're using prepositions make sure you know the gender of the noun if you don't explicitly state it because prepositions decline for gender in the 3.sg
Here's some examples
Car (m) - car
Hat (f) - het
Short - Byr / Ber
Yr car byr - the short car
Y het fer - the short hat
(Talking about the car) Es i i'r dre hebddo fo - I went to town without it
(Talking about the hat) Es i i'r dre hebddi hi - I went to town without it
Would you say "es i i'r dre hebddo'r car/hebddi'r het", or "heb y car/y het"?
@@pierreabbat6157 just heb y car / heb yr het because you're explicitly stating the noun
fun fact - old swedish used to have three genders just like german. masculine, feminine, and neuter. modern swedish only has two, but not masculine and feminine like spanish. instead feminine and masculine morphed into a single gender called utrum alongside neuter. today the semantic meaning is mostly lost and what gender a word has seems fairly arbitrary. one exception to this though is that almost every word for people, other the word for child, has the utrum gender. which of course makes sense if you know the language history.
Could you make feature focus videos on prosody topics? In most conlang resources it's barely covered.
And maybe also intonation. You probably are talking about phonemic prosody, but in actual speech, phonemic and metalinguistic factors interact in complex ways, particularly in rhythm, intonation/tone, and phonation.
8:53 i'm not sure a lion is human
Furries?
My favorite conlang I’m working on still has a divine noun gender cause it’s a magical world and these entities are much more important in their community than on Earth where magic doesn’t exist. I went with divine / human / other animate / inanimate, a tidy 4 gender system.
Thanks so much for this great content!!!
I was wondering, how would a predominantly Head-Initial language evolve case suffixes?
You’ve mentioned in a previous video that even case markers are overwhelmingly suffixes even in Head-Initial languages, but how so?
Thanks for the help!
Those head-initial languages could've had pospositions in the far past but at one point switched to prepositions, so you could say in an older stage of the language it had postpositions which got suffixed, and then new prepositions evolved and maybe other word order things happened.
In Dutch, gender is eroded so much that it's just every noun has to use one of two articles with usually no way to guess.
Although we do have some agreement on adjectives: masculine and feminine get the -e suffix, while neuter does not. It is true that Dutch gender barely matters anymore, like how everyone treats 'het meisje (the girl)' as feminine, even though it 'officially' is neuter
Dutch is evolving from three genders to two genders, as the only difference between masculine and feminine left is which pronoun they use, and people don't remember which inanimate thing is a hij and which is a zij. So those two merge into a common gender (like in Scandinavian languages). The neuter gender is still strong.
At 6:03 the "o" in stylo isn't an ending and whilst the "e" in chambre does somewhat clarify gender (because it's derived from feminine "a" in Latin "camera"), it's not always a good indicator because there are nouns ending in "e" that are masculine and in any case word final "e" isn't pronounced in French anymore so you can't go off phonological form, only the written form
I've got a question. Gender is often associated with infixes or variations of a word (while classifiers are often seen as separate words I think)? Is that really a thing? Is gender agreement as separate words completely unheard of?
I mean for a lot of German words you can only tell by the article which gender it has (although there's plenty of other words where you can tell without the article, so maybe a mixed system would be more naturalistic)
@@Coolducky2 I guess that counts in a way. but the gender displayed in determiners and adjectives is clearly just suffixes.
Hey there, I was wondering if you would consider doing a feature focus on phatic expressions? There's not much coverage on them at all in regard to writing a conlang.
Does anyone else feel that other people’s root words are perfect but your own never really fit with the definition?
Great video as always dude! In my conlang, Saremane, I use two genders: animate and inanimate, and I'm pretty happy with it. Continue making these videos, they're incredibly useful for someone like me, who is creating a conlang!
I can tell you that the final -e in French is definitely NOT a reliable way to identify feminine nouns; pretty far from it, in fact. There's quite a big number of masculine nouns that end with an "e", including nouns related to people (père, frère, oncle, etc.) as well as inanimate things (arbre, sable, almost all the nouns ending in -age, etc.). And those aren't even words that come from Greek.
Notice it is particularly misleading for "foie" ("liver"), because it ends with "e" while being masculine, while there is also "foi" ("faith"), which doesn't and is feminine.
Il était une fois un homme de foi qui vendait du foie dans la ville de Foix.
Il dit: «Ma foi! c'est la dernière fois que je vends du foie dans la ville de Foix!»
Uuuugh! I *hate* the term, "grammatical gender." They're noun-classes.
And if we called them "noun-classes" when we taught them in schools, kids wouldn't be so confused by it.
The only reason we call them noun "genders" is because of a klunky translation of the word, "genus," from Latin. Because that's what it's called in German: „das Genus“.
Care to share the name of the fonts you're using? I'm particularly interested in the one with the nice IPA symbols at 3:49 for example.
Thanks for your videos, I really enjoy them.
Guess it's minion 3
Since I'm currently working on the case system for my conlang that has 8 classes, this is perfect timing
Do you have a write up for examplish to keep the phonology and words straight?
fun fact dutch is losing its gender case to, its only slightly in the articles with "de" and "het" but more and more nouns can get both, with "de" being preferred over "het" a lot of the time
I'm a native Spanish speaker and I learned English when I was very young. Then, when I started my tertiary studies, I came across French (which, like Spanish, has gendered nouns) and didn't understand any of it because of that. Japanese, by contrast, is much more simpler in my mind.
@Bibliaridion, how did you make the Nekachti symbols for the conlang page on Campfire Blaze? Cause I'm also making a conlang as well and I just discovered Campfire Blaze about two days ago.
I wonder if gender systems ever evolve from something other than classifiers.
PIE got it from a derivational suffix being reanalysed as a feminine marker from analogy with the words for "woman" and "widow" so that's also an option
(The suffix was *-h2, the roots for woman and widow were *gʷneh2- and *widewh2 respectively)
Consonant mutation feature focus?
Cognitive linguist here. I found this pretty good, but I have to make a correction that might seem picky. Gender etc. are based on pragmatics and syntactics, not semantics, except in minor part that is difficult for English speakers to understand because English does not have a gender system, only vestigial gender in singular third-person pronouns. Furthermore, a great deal of e.g. gender is not by similarities but differences. It is important pragmatically to distinguish between the sun and the moon, so the words for them tend to be put in different genders. The same is true for men and women. But it isn't much more than accident that in French, the sun is masculine and the moon feminine, while in German it's the other way around. Most of any gender system is because of this, which I call _discerption,_ which effectively is dissimilarity. Something new becomes part of culture--like a new vegetable--so depending on the pragmatic needs, you either put it in the same gender as the words for another vegetable or a different gender from the words for another vegetable. Predicting when is tricky, but the psycholinguists got pretty good at it using Shannon information theory.
Oh, and the purpose of these classification systems, or rather their diachronically evolved function, is to make it easier to connect different parts of utterances bigger than simply phrases. This explains the popularity of pronouns. It also makes using adjectives as nouns a lot easier. (It that really an also, or is it related to pragmatics and interpretactics? Too much there for a UA-cam comment.)
Three genders is my preference in languages. Sweet spot.
or you could just do a Finnish and forget about gender anything
Asian languages, yeah we seem to get on just fine without them.
While I absolutely love your content I find that it's a tad too quick. Not that you talk too quick per se but rather that you stride from idea to idea maybe too quickly. I find myself having to pause on every one of your videos and rewatch parts. Which, to be honest isn't too bad. But for someone new to this it may be beneficial to give yourself some more negative space between concepts.
yay!
All the Russian examples are in the past tense. Gender is not distinguished in the present.
Vivo pra ver uma referência ao português
Lmaoo when i heard about cherokee i felt as if i won a milion dollars, thats like my favorite language
Just what I needed. 100% pausing as I go along to take in all the excellent examples. Thanks for the video Bib!
11:03 the correct translation is "Anna saw the man" and "The man saw Anna"
Brazilll
1:13 even though these icelandic word are correct we just say banani and pizza
What font do you use?
It looks like Palatino
I guess minion 3
9:35
Arabic: God in arabic is Allah
Hinuq:God in hinuq is also Allah
Me: What the-
The Hinukh are Muslims and just borrowed the word from Arabic
@@keras_saryan i thought that they were a native american group
@@oitubeman1019 They live in Dagestan in Russia
loanwords innit
I wonder, where do the maps like at 2:32 come from?
Usually they come from the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS): wals.info/ Here is the page for feature 30A: Number of Genders: wals.info/feature/30A#2/26.7/148.9
@@Sovairu Thanks. :)
@@MisterHunterWolf You're welcome!
I don't like how that comment dissapeared...
I wonder, how would I develop multiple declensions like those present in Latin?
Start by making your endings have a different form depending on the end of the root it attaches to, or even make it assimilate or merge with it: all of this already happens in English with the pluralizing -s, which is underlyingly /z/ as in bird -> birds, but can also be /s/ in bat -> bats or even /ïz/ in size -> sizes. Now just imagine /ïz/ simplifying to /ï/ sometime in the future, and you have a two competing plural suffixes: -s or -e depending on the noun. Now add changes that obscure the original reasons those suffixes were different, and you end up with two largely arbitrary suffixes that learners have to memorize. That's just one way it can go, but a more striking way which is a major factor behind the diversity of Latin noun and verb paradigms, is when a word ends in a vowel, say a, e, o or i, and those vowels merge with the following suffixes each in their own way: this is so common in Indo European that it gets its own name: "thematic" inflexion, where the vowel is the "theme", as opposed to "athematic" where the suffix is attached on its own, usually after a consonant. Have fun!
Everyone! Place your bets on what next feature focus episode will be about!
Will you cover deep-sea life in a future episode of the Alien Biospheres series?
No, not all other PIE cases are the same as accusative
oh lexicon Valley covered this in great detail. he also went over why English gender.
basically old Norse and old English speakers had to live together and in the process a bunch of adults started learning the other language. this is the perfect environment for Grammer pruning.
No, not all other PIE cases are the same as accusative
I'm trying to create a grammatical gender system with the genders being tool and plant. I still need to decide which nouns of my analytical protolang should go to the "tool" category and which ones should go to the "plant" category, and I'm thinking of seeking out help from Good Samaritans. I don't know why my comment about this gets deleted, and this is my third time so far. Fair reminder, I go by different yet similar logics compared to everyone else.
*smug look* I take it the choice for Hard Boiled being the track was inspired by Edgar using it for his videos? *giggles*
So, is it that noun class is more general than gender? That noun class doesn't require agreement whereas gender does? Because I heard from Artifexian that they are the same thing. But I've always thought that they are similar but different concepts, where gender requires agreement and noun class doesn't. So am I right or is Artifexian right? I have thought of using noun class in my conlang, because the masculine/feminine/neuter gender split seems completely arbitrary and nonsensical to me. I mean for one thing, how is it that a cat is masculine? If anything, I'd say cats are more feminine than masculine, but that split makes zero sense to me.
Something like the animacy spectrum on the other hand, that makes perfect sense to me and I could see myself using it, as long as I don't need to have adjective agreement or verb agreement, which seem to be necessary for a gender system. I mean in every gender system I've seen, it's been adjective-only agreement, verb-only agreement, or adjective and verb agreement. I just want the nouns to be inflected, no agreement. So, would noun class do the trick for that?
Yikes, and here I was just thinking that a class system could be something as basic as having different articles for a given noun, like an "a" and "the" word for one class and a different "a" and "the" for another.
In 03:28, "Do tan mozdūr" means "two bullies," not "two workers."
Language feature that intrigues me ellipsis. I hear, ancient Greek embraced, complicated translate the New Testament.
Here's a cool idea. A gramitical class system based on a coinciding political class system.
You could have situations like ordering water at a restaurant will give you a different result depending on the noun class you use. Or you could do a significant amount of culture building just in the way different nouns get sorted in to which class. Maybe dancing is seen as a common pastime, so dance gets the commoner class, while conversation gets the noble class. And this could be used to show history, perhaps dancing is now popular with the nobility, but it still gets the commoner class markers.
wait_a_minute.mp4 i know that background music... :V
Sory, I'm so confused on one part, how do you make the genders to agree on plurality or case marking?
I would start with agglutinating suffixes for gender, plurality, case/role marking, add sound changes and morphological leveling via analogy. Latin, Greek, Icelandic sometimes look random with its inflections but if you go back to PIE these endings start making perfect sense
I love when you combine word example and suffix ish
I’ve started making a conlang with animacy classes, this video is just what I needed!
Thx for another informative video Biblaridion
are there any languages that both grammatical gender/noun class and classifyers
what font do you use for this video? i wanna use it!
you answered the question how gender works
okay, but why have gendered linguistic systems at all
what utility does it add
i haven't yet been able to find someone who can answer that question
Could allow for more flexible syntax when the arguments belong to different categories, which could be reflected in their adjectives and verb agreement allowing them to be moved around without ambiguity as to subject or object, or to which nouns the adjectives belong. Also can disambiguate 3rd person pronouns.
More descriptive systems can add context and information about the nouns which never hurts.
It could also make words easier to hear correctly if you can narrow down the possibilities of what a word could be from hearing the gender
It's like a hash table for nouns. It allows for easier identification of actors in a sentence as well as which modifiers and verb apply to which.
Last time I was this early the PIE laryngeals were still pronounced on the steppes of Ukraine.
Also, thank you for doing this series. It’s really useful even if you have a lot of background knowledge in the topic you are discussing, and I always learn something new in every episode.
I know this has nothing to do with the video but
is English "r" a velar phoneme?
when I look at the ipa it says that it's a post-alveolar approximate.
the ipa shows a sound for a voiced velar approximate but it's not the same sound.
does anyone else pronounce their r's like this
The English "r" is a post-alveolar approximant (retroflex in some dialects), but is almost always labialized, and sometimes velarized.
Artifexian music?!
for the latin at 11:48, vidit is the perfect tense of to see not to go, also while latin word order is pretty free, you don't really see adjectives split from the nouns they modify like in the second example. I'm not an expert though.
Not in prose, but my understanding is that Latin poetry can have really wild word order. I knew someone who learned Latin through poetry before they learned any prose, and thought Latin had no standard word order at all haha.
Clicked the video so fast that I'm actually first
Is that artifexian music
Well yes and no it’s probably copyright free music
That music is common in UA-cam videos because it’s royalty-free
Ok. Just leave everything you are doing and watch Biblaridion's new video
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the reason why english lost its gender system is because when the norse (or it might have been the normans) settled in britain for the first time, their languages didn't have the same genders for the same nouns, so most, when trading with the people who spoke old english, didn't bother with it, and this spread to the native speakers.
It's been a long time since I read about it, but I always thought it was the result of case endings being dropped (I think because they weren't quite the same between Norse and Anglo-Saxon?). Gender was expressed through case endings, so dropping them means no more gender expression.
This is just what I remember assuming from what I read about the history of English, so I could certainly be wrong.
Blart, it was mostly due to sound changes and other reductions on agreement and case endings which then eroded them down to nothing.
@@Sovairu I think something more had to be involved since even in languages where gender markers eroded to nothing, or almost nothing and are extremely unreliable today (like in German or French) they are still kept around, so if it had been only due to sound changes then I think they would still be somewhat present (even though morphologically in a completely unreliable way).
@@Whatever94-i4u That is not necessarily true.
@@Whatever94-i4u The fact that some languages do it doesn't mean that every language works the same. Phonological merging is a perfectly good way to lose gender.
Nice to see finally see a cohesive explanation of classifiers.
Alien biospheres 10 hype???
I think an episode on consonant mutations like those of the Celtic and Russian languages would be interesting
Russian?
@@Alice-gr1kb Russian has palatalisation in certain morphological forms, but I don't know it that should count as consonant mutation.
@@vytah yeah consoant mutation in Celtic langs (and Nivkh) is different from that.
wake up babe, new biblaridion video dropped
is that chanwoo in your profile picture? 💀💀
@@inari.28 ...yes