<div dir="ltr">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</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 9:02 PM, Ranjit Bhatnagar <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ranjit@moonmilk.com" target="_blank">ranjit@moonmilk.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">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? <div>
<br></div><div>(A<span></span> group of rock object and paper objects is referred to with the <a href="http://p.pl" target="_blank">p.pl</a>. determiner. If you have a bunch of paper and scissor things in a pile, you use <a href="http://s.pl" target="_blank">s.pl</a>. 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.)</div>
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