• rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    Having some feminitives in lexicon is not the same as having grammatical gender. I mean, is having a word for werewolf the same as having a “wolf” gender?

    • Aqarius@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      “Some feminitives” is disingenuous. It’s an Indo-European language, it shares the structure of other IE languages, in some cases pared down and/or in disuse, but they’re still there, same as vestigial base-12 counting.

      I don’t get why people are so upset about the concept of grammatical gender, though. It’s gramatical, it’s not actual gender - original division in PIE was “animate” and “inanimate”. Hell, I vaguely remember a conlang that had separate genders for terrestrial and aquatic animals, so you could absolutely make one that has a gender for “wolf”.

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        I’m not talking about that, frankly. Just that grammatical gender means usually its own inflections for cases, for adjectives, for verbs. At least some of those.