1001: Noun Classes (g.w.2) Sep 5, 2017

About a quarter of the world's languages have grammatical gender, but while some of the ones with which people familiar, including mostly Indo-European languages, may only break up nouns into the categories of masculine feminine, and sometimes neuter, this is not how grammatical gender appears in all languages. Some languages have more than 3 genders, but when this happens the terminology switches from 'genders' to 'noun classes' and so there is no longer an association with ideas of maleness and femaleness that there might have been before, even though there is always some arbitrariness. In kiSwahili for example, there are 18 noun classes. In the same way that Latin nouns are divided into genders by the way that the suffixes sound, and change to indicate syntax or pluralization, the noun classes of kiSwahili are divided by prefixes, but these are numbered rather than named. Still, some noun classes can be called "semantic groups", because they tend to contain certain types of words, such as class 14 which tends to have concepts, like 'upendo' ('love'), or noun class 1 which concerns words for people, like 'mtu' ('person'), 'mtoto' ('child'), and 'mwanafunzi' ('student'). Unlike what typically happens with Indo-European gendered words which often follow biological associations when possible, such as the French "l'homme" ('man') in the masculine and 'la femme' ('woman') in the feminine, the words for ''man' and 'woman' in kiSwahili—'mwanaume' and 'mwanamke' respectively—are both in the same noun class, because divisions in grammatical gender are almost entirely due to how a word sounds rather than what a word means.