Well that's interesting. I've seen languages with lots of cases but not one with more than 'male' and 'female' grammatical genders.

  • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    There are some African languages with way more noun classes. I think Swahili has a ton of them.

  • naom3 [she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    (There’s lots of different languages like that.)[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class#language_famalies] For example, Bantu languages like Swahili tend to have a lot of them (18 in the case of Swahili I think) and instead of conjugating verbs for person and number, like most European languages, they conjugate for the genders of the subject and object. Lots of Native American languages also have a difference between “animate” and “inanimate” nouns instead of masculine and feminine, although those languages typically have exceptions, such as “lightning” being animate but “berry” being inanimate.

    • MarxGuns [comrade/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      3 years ago

      Doh, yes, you're right. I often think of neuter as just ungendered like the tone in Mandarin that isn't one of the other four.