IE without genders

Veracruzano   Mon Jul 14, 2008 2:41 am GMT
Hi!

Are there other Indo-European languages that lack grammatical genders beside Persian and English?

Thanks!
Skippy   Mon Jul 14, 2008 4:10 am GMT
Animate nouns in English, if nothing else, have a reflective gender (my chinchilla is cute, HE is three years old) or pronomial gender (he/she/it).

As far as the centum languages go, I believe English is the only one lacking at least two true grammatical genders.
Guest   Mon Jul 14, 2008 10:00 am GMT
Afrikaans
Shrey   Mon Jul 14, 2008 11:46 am GMT
What exactly do you mean by grammatical genders? as in the "el, la, le, la, il, la, le, i"? or the grammatical gender of the word itself (like dog is masc. or cat is fem.)

Persian does have a grammatical gender in the latter sense as the gender of the noun is conveyed by the agglutinative endings of the verbs much like turkish and many Indian languages.

For eg. in Hindi, Machchi - fish (no gender).
But in a sentence, yey macchi bahut achcha hai - this fish is very good (inanimate masc. gender).

In kiristave, Peska - fish (no gender)
in a sentence - ta peska nichi bona avara - the fish wasn't very good (inanimate fem. gender)
Shrey   Mon Jul 14, 2008 12:00 pm GMT
Also in Kiristave, there's something called multiple gender endings. This is one of the very rare dialects to use it.

So in the previous example that I gave you (peska nichi bona avara), peska (fish) was inanimate feminine.

Check out the following sentences to see how the gender changes based on the sentence:

The fish has spoiled because of high temperatures.
Peski kharabezh perqi altia tempestin (peski here is inanimate masculine due to the noun temperatures which is also inanimate masc. in the sentence; so the noun temperatures modified the gender of every other noun, preposition and adjective in the sentence).

The fish is too expensive as this is not the right season.
Peskui esa ti cari iz istesh nichi direti estisao (peskui here is what we can translate to as a neuter gender; but again it's more like inanimate neuter)

The fishes are going crazy, fluttering here and there.
Peskezesh loqiz akhitazan aqiya az alliya (here peska or fish is combined with a verb so it technically has no gender at all but since this is the case, the gender of prepositions "here" and "there" modify the gender of the fish so it changed to peske which is feminine).
guest2   Mon Jul 14, 2008 12:07 pm GMT
<<Persian does have a grammatical gender in the latter sense as the gender of the noun is conveyed by the agglutinative endings of the verbs much like turkish and many Indian languages. >>

Turkish has agglutinative endings but lacks gender!
Shrey   Mon Jul 14, 2008 8:49 pm GMT
I see...I didn't know that...sorry
Skippy   Mon Jul 14, 2008 9:54 pm GMT
Turkish isn't IE though...

Grammatical gender (as opposed to biological gender) is better called a "noun group." It's called gender because these groups (at least in IE languages) at one point (probably) fit into noun groups similar to those based on biological gender (and animacy).
moutabor   Fri Jul 18, 2008 10:49 pm GMT
Armenian!
Veracruzano   Fri Jul 18, 2008 10:52 pm GMT
Oh yes! Armenian!

Thanks moutabor!
Mark   Fri Jul 18, 2008 11:07 pm GMT
What particular group of IE languages does Kiristave belong to? The excerpts above are full of words that appear to be of Romance origin.
PARISIEN   Sat Jul 19, 2008 12:07 am GMT
Kiristave is a Portuguese creole spoken in Goa, India!
A language very few people are aware of...
Our friend Shrey informed us of its existence a couple of days ago.

Thanks to people like him there are still valuable discoveries to be made on Antimoon.
K. T.   Sat Jul 19, 2008 12:10 am GMT
I have found no information about it on the internet except here. I used Google and Dogpile and nothing!
zatsu   Sat Jul 19, 2008 1:06 am GMT
I know about Kristi, which is a Portuguese creole language spoken by very few people in India, but not Kiristave.
There's no Portuguese creole spoken in Goa, at least not a recognized or official one.
PARISIEN   Sat Jul 19, 2008 2:06 am GMT
<< I have found no information about it on the internet except here. I used Google and Dogpile and nothing! >>

-- Indeed this is right... The only occurences Google gave me are Shrey's postings on Antimoon... This one for instance:
http://www.antimoon.com/forum/t10848.htm

"I speak a dialect known as Kiristave (similar to Varli) and they come under the Konkani language group. However it's very different from konkani, in that the word-structure follows that of other romance languages (but there are also sentences which also don't do that)."

Should that be taken at face value???
Or is that 'Kiristave' only spoken in a very small neighbourhood?
Or is it Shrey's personal concoction?

Shrey, please, enlighten us!