#noun class

Agreement systems are retained in language because the redundancy strengthens the signal. It's better to think about linguistics systems in terms of "why didn't speakers get rid of this" as opposed to "why did this come about in the first place". Sometimes things happen randomly. They're retained because they're useful.

But like, consider gender in English. We used to have it. Gender was mostly defined by the endings of words. We lost all the endings. We lost some major forms of agreement (consider that French still has different articles). At a certain point, it was impossible to tell if a noun was m/f/n, so of course English lost its gender system. It was no longer useful. In fact, going even further, it was the opposite of useful, because it was totally unpredictable and didn't buy you anything.

As an example of the latter, there's this sign system called Signed Exact English (SEE). It's often (not always, but often) pedaled as a replacement for ASL, because it will "help" Deaf signers learn English. One of the features it retains is the distinction between "a" and "an". English speakers know how to do this instinctively: You use "a" before a noun phrase (not a noun, but a noun phrase) that begins with a consonant sound, and you use "an" before a noun phrase that begins with a vowel sound (so "umbrella" gets "an", but "union" gets "a"). In SEE, there's a separate sign for "a" and "an", and then ASL signs are used for English words like "man" and "old". So then you have to sign:

A MAN

AN OLD MAN

But, of course, the difference is based on the sound of the English pronunciation of the word the sign stands for, so it is quite literally impossible to predict for a Deaf signer. It has to be memorized. Which is an extraordinary task. Basically, all nouns, adjectives, and adverbs (consider "a really old man") have to be dumped in either the A class or the AN class with absolutely no way to predict which will be in which.

This is a great example of a feature that would quickly die in a natural language.

So looking at gender, the question is how useful is it? If it's (a) predictable, and (b) spread across multiple areas of the language, then it's more useful, and more likely to be retained. If you look at Spanish, agreement is present in pronouns, adjectives, demonstratives, and articles. The gender of a noun highly predictable (not 100%, but highly predictable). That's a stable gender system. French is similar, but the gender is less predictable for nouns. If one was going to lose gender first, you'd predict French. Even so, it's still predictable enough that more will probably have to happen for French to actually lose it.

As for where it comes from, if you want to read a detailed account of the development of Indo-European gender, this is an intro. Most of the time it's the incorporation of pronouns or small, generic nouns that become commonly associated with particular classes and are used as modifiers. We've got a pretty good example of the development of noun class in Sarkezhe, season 4 of LangTime Studio. If you want to see it done from beginning to end, check that out.

When I studied Latin and Ancient Greek, I was taught that they each had three genders. So I was fascinated to read this article about how the Romans and the Greeks didn’t necessarily think of their own languages that way, featuring many quotes from original texts. Excerpt:  

As a Latin teacher, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I present grammatical gender to my students. Latin obsessively genders its speakers. From pronouns to choice of name and use of adjectives, it’s one thing if you identify as masculine or feminine, but Latin presents real questions for non-binary speakers. In addition, there is a chauvinism inherent in Latin grammar, like in the way that mixed-gender groups are referred to as masculine. There is a similar chauvinism in the Latin pedagogical tradition: the very ordering of adjectival forms as masculine/feminine/neuter (-us/-a/-um) presents a hierarchy of being masquerading as a lexicographical convenience.

On top of that, I worry that our modern pedagogical practices implicitly present students a highly essentialized vision of gender: every noun has one gender exclusively, rigid and unchanging.

Yet grammatical gender is actually complex and shifting, a fact that Greek and Roman grammarians were highly conscious of. They debated whether grammatical gender was inherent in the things themselves or a product of human convention. They devised a technical vocabulary to articulate the difference between grammatical gender identity and grammatical gender expression. They argued about whether their language had three genders — as we teach — or perhaps only two, or maybe five, or even as many as seven, if you count “fluid” and “uncertain” and as distinct categories (and they did!).

Grammatical gender, at its most basic, is a system of noun classes whose forms agree with other inflected words, like adjectives. French nouns have two genders, German three, Chechen six, and Ganda ten. Wikipedia has a handy list of languages by type of grammatical gender.

The fact that we think of these classes as “genders” at all is a product of historical circumstance rather than linguistic necessity. There is nothing inherently feminine about aqua (“water”) or masculine about rivus (“stream”). From a purely morphological perspective, we could dump the very concept of grammatical gender and call these groups “noun classes,” which is apparently the usual term for them in Bantu languages.

Agglutinative gender systems are the easiest ones to evolve. It goes like this:

Noun + Generic Noun

Generic Noun > Modifier

Modifier > Suffix

That’s assuming a head-initial language. You reverse it for a head-final language (or just for a language where modifiers come before or after, regardless of headedness). This is where most gender markers come from. The oddball ones are languages where the gender affix isn’t clearly separable.

Maybe I should reserve this title for posts that are inconsequential conlanging doodles. You guessed it, it’s Proto-Suner again! I added the diphthong oi /ɔ‿ɪ/ to the vowel set.

More noun classes!

Here are the noun class I came up with so far. I remind you that the pair presented are sg/pl:

-i/-il: humans, dead things (kiʰpil ‘human’)

-a/-oit: flying creatures (upʉra ‘Ubyr’)

-ul/-es: mass nouns (edul ‘stone’)

-aʰt/-eʰt: small objects/animals (niʰsaʰt ‘mouse’)

-am/-ʉr: tools, weapons (akam ‘knife’)

-(s)uʰk: infinitives (iʰsasuʰk ‘to see’)

The infinitive class is the only one to have an optional linking element between the stem and the suffix.

Verb tenses so far

So, in previous posts, we saw the three verbal classes in u-, e-, i- that make their past with respectively ne-, nʉ-, nu-. The future tense is a bit different, using a suffix -i as well as the prefix. Moreover, e- and i- verbs are undifferentiated under the same prefix a-

Present, Past, Future

u-, ne-, ma-/-i

e-, nʉ-, a-/-i

i-, nu-, a-/-i

Thus madami-mei ‘I will sleep’ from the verb udam ‘to sleep’. But how do the verbal stems ending in a vowel deal with the addition of -i? These are not a small quantity, after all. What happens is that the vowel is modified along the following lines:

a > ei

e > ei

u > oi

au > oi

i ʉ ei oi > no modifications

Giving us aʰsei as the future tense of the verb iʰsa ‘to see’.

Adjectives

Adjectives are their own class of words in Proto-Suner. They agree in gender and number with their head noun in attributive constructions.

tsana upʉra ‘the strong Ubyrs’

tsanil kiʰpil ‘the strong humans’

The adjective tsan ‘strong’ takes the same suffixes as its governing nous. We see also that adjectives come before the noun.

In predicative constructions however, adjectives agree with the noun only with respect to number, with zero-marking in the singular and an -an suffix in the plural. There is also no copula in the present tense.

kipsa tsan ‘the owl is strong’