Fun fact: Bosmeri has a animacy gender classification (grammatical gender is what we refer to these classifications, nothing to do with real gender I promise) between animate and inanimate things. Well this classification seems to be semantically motivated (animate things are living things, like human beings, inanimate things like tools are inanimate). However in real animacy systems (Anishinaabemowin, Mi’kmaw, other Algonquian languages), we see it is not purely semantic but arbitrary (rocks ‘asin’ in Anishinaabemowin are animate!). There are different approaches to animacy, primarily feature-based accounts (I myself am in the camp of animacy is not an inherent property but rather is assigned in the mental lexicon)
But all this to say I found it interesting that a tes language has the same linguistic phenomenon that I got my Master’s in!
Although I have deliberately avoided looking too closely at fan created Bosmeri stuff because I’m scared to come off as I’m bragging or using my education to tell others what to do 😅
If anyone has Bosmeri headcanons and wants to know how animacy systems work to improve them, I’m your gal! Also any tes linguistics ideas pls pls pls talk yo me ❤️
