[Fictionary] Language question

[Beth Bruch]

so it's been over 20 years since i took my conversational Yucatec Mayan
class (loads of fun), but i think they class some nouns based on their
shapes (shapes of the nouns, not the speakers) - the main one i'm recalling
was flat things like paper.  but on the other hand my mind is a weird place
and it might just be making this up.  -Beth


On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 9:02 PM, Ranjit Bhatnagar <ranjit at moonmilk.com>wrote:

> I can't sleep, and I figure someone here can answer this question: are
> there any languages which have something like grammatical gender for nouns,
> but with absolutely no association with biological gender?  Like instead of
> masc fem and neut they have rock paper and scissors nouns?
>
> (A group of rock object and paper objects is referred to with the p.pl.
> determiner. If you have a bunch of paper and scissor things in a pile, you
> use s.pl. terms to refer to the pile. And rocks and scissors together are
> rocks. But what if you get all three kinds together in a single set? It
> turns out that just never seems to happen.)
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.swarpa.net/pipermail/fictionary/attachments/20130324/4d4d8553/attachment.html