1002: Inanimate Genders (g.w.3) Sep 6, 2017

As mentioned yesterday, grammatical gender does not have to relate to men and woman, or at least if it does, people do not have to be the sole focus or foundation for gender. For instance, like kiSwalhili, Ganda has many noun classes—ten classes in this case—that are simply numbered as such. The noun classes are based upon sound—not meaning—but some people still assign names to the semantic groups, including 'long objects', 'large objects and liquids', 'small objects' and 'pejoratives', as well as 'people', 'animals', though all of these groupings are pretty general and full of exceptions. Many languages divide words by 'animate' and 'inanimate' either instead of or along with 'masculine' and 'feminine', or in other cases such as with Chechen there will be a 'masculine' and 'feminine' that appears alongside classes that are simply considered miscellaneous. Moreover, Czech, Polish, and some other languages also have multiple varieties of a gender, such as in this case 'masculine animate' and 'masculine inanimate'. While a few languages spoken by many like Spanish or German have gender-systems that relate only or mostly to 'masculine' and 'feminine', there is a lot of variety in systems that do not follow that same pattern.