Laceyiami dairetȳvai
▲
1▲ 1 ▼ 0
Gender in Laceyiam
This public article was written by [Deactivated User], and last updated on 4 Aug 2016, 10:11.
[comments] laclaceyiamgenderhonorificcourtesy formhistory
Laceyiam has a natural gender system, which is not influenced by the word’s "shape" (except for a few derivational suffixes) but is almost completely governed by semantic criteria.First of all, in the Laceyiam language gender does not really have many connections with the biological concept of gender per se (starting from terminology: gender as a grammatical category is called dairetȳva, “word quality” - not to be confused with the similar-sounding tairëtȳva, meaning “verbal mood” -; gender as for ‘male, female, transgender, agender, and so on’ is ṭāṭyama); instead it is almost completely based on the structure of Chlegdarim (matriarchal) society and is strongly influenced by the Chlegdarim worldview - the one of the Yūnialtia religion.
Laceyiam’s gender system can be most properly understood and described as a system of honorifics; the gender a particular noun takes only determines the pronouns that will be used to refer to that concept - of the three inflecting parts of speech in Laceyiam (nouns, verbs and pronouns), none of them inflects for gender: gendered pronouns are thought of as separate words.
Laceyiam divides nouns in four possible gender categories, traditionally defined as such:
- Higher animate or caṃlileviyā;
- Lower animate or chūlileviyā;
- Plant animate or jńęklileviyā;
- Inanimate or katlilnė.
The higher animate gender includes, first of all, all nouns referring to female humans (except for a few culturally-influenced ones), thus the alternative but now archaic name hulyṃlileviyā or ‘female animate’. It also includes all animals, all concepts related in some way to the Yūnialtia, as well as concepts related to arts and sciences. Things inherently feminine (like hulunāmie or tėtiąkta, two synonyms for ‘pregnancy’) are higher animate too.
Abstract feelings are either higher or lower, without many hints as far as word roots are concerned. Anyway, abstract feelings derived with the -ma or -ya suffixes (which appears as -ya, -ia, or simply -a but with umlaut of a preceding vowel) are for the most part higher animate, as are also nouns in -ltia (which often corresponds to English -ism or -logy); those with -amie/-āmie or -ta are usually lower animate. Inherited intensive nouns formed with ablaut (most notably kaira ‘love’ and kayla ‘purity’) are also higher animate.
There are also some higher animate nouns whose inclusion in this gender is somewhat arbitrary and odd, most notably nanūk ‘salt’, but also others like latirė ‘wave’ (and derivatives like teyūlatirė ‘solar ray’); mayla ‘water’; gindāmi ‘book’; þātia ‘star’; leliėmita ‘family’ and its archaic synonym døjńa; dūṃda ‘fog’ (though often plant animate for some speakers, especially in Western and Northwestern Laltīmāhia); lunai ‘tea’; or lelīm ‘swamp’. Hėnna ‘language’ is higher animate, but its hyperonym mayva, referring to more broadly any system of communication, is lower animate.
The third person pronouns for the higher animate gender are tami (singular, also used as a generic one regardless of gender) and gauta (plural).
Plant animate nouns are probably the easiest category to define. As their name obviously suggests, all plants and plant-related things are of this gender; note that plants and fruits used as food are however treated as inanimate when the “food” meaning is intended. Somewhat more oddly, all colours are plant animate and even more surprisingly all human and animal body parts, with only four exceptions (all higher animate: maissbetta ‘brain’, maula ‘breast’, and the two synonyms keńja and läka for ‘heart’ — additionally, yāṇḍama ‘vagina’ and juitan ‘vulva’ can be both higher and plant animate). Moreover, not only are body parts treated as plants - many of those terms either have a basic meaning that applies both to animals (including humans) and plants (like ṇīṭa, ‘skin’ and ‘bark’, meanings that can however be specified through hyponimic compounds) or are animal parts which are described through compounds made from root words referring to plants, like the most common term for ‘ear’, tėnemīta, which is a compound of tėn ‘to hear’ and emīta ‘leaf’, also literally ‘hearing leaf’.
The plant animate third person pronouns are kalū (singular) and klūk (plural).
The lower animate gender is an extremely vast category with few clear boundaries. Obviously, as the last remaining animate concepts, human males and male-related words are here, clearly still reflecting the gender roles - females vs. males as “thinking class” (nayuivė) vs. “working class” (pūnuivė) - that dominated Chlegdarim society until the 50s of the Fourth Era (that’s about 80 years ago).
We’ve also already seen that many abstract feelings have lower animate gender; in fact, about 70% of abstract concepts are lower animate. Other lower animate meaning categories are activities (thus basically all nouns derived with the “activity” derivational suffix -ram), time-related words, most locations (the main exceptions are maita ‘river’ (higher animate), as well as most habitat nouns, that take plant animate gender when referring to ecosystems instead of the places themselves), illnesses and qualities. Many things that can be perceived as “moving” or “moved” are lower animate too, like kalai ‘fire’, daśa ‘rain’ or muyla ‘thunder, lightning’. Marta ‘city’ and other similar places are also in this category, and as a result of this most toponyms, including all cities and country names, are lower animate - the exception being names of bodies of water, wetlands, forests, planets, and Laltīmāhia itself, all higher animate.
This gender has its oddities too - “arbitrary” lower animate nouns include daira ‘word’ and most derivatives (like dairalīnë ‘vocabulary’), daṃdin ‘gong’, ādama ‘abode’ (literary), pāṇi ‘side’ or pańynia ‘scandal’.
The lower animate third person pronouns are þėm (singular) and hjugði (plural).
Finally, defining the inanimate gender is mostly straightforward too, as - obviously - all remaining nouns are included. Due to cultural perceptions, inherent “negativity” can cause a noun to be treated as inanimate regardless of its “natural” classification. This is most notable with døntairṇė ‘heresy’ and all related nouns, like døntairøtum ‘heretic’.
The third person singular inanimate pronoun is lika, the plural one is lahen.
Some words can have more than one gender; while in many cases it’s a sociolectal or regional variation, with different people giving different levels of importance to the same phenomenon or thing, in some cases the word itself takes different genders depending on the meaning.
Probably the easiest word in which this can be noted is kita, which translates two English meanings: ‘house’ and ‘home’.
The meaning ‘house’ - thus representing the concept of a building used as or suitable for dwelling, takes inanimate gender; the meaning ‘home’ - the concept of a place with a particular significance to a person or a group of people - takes higher animate gender.
This concept isn’t much different from the lower/plant animate distinction mentioned above depending on a place being identified as a place one can be in or as a particular ecosystem; other nouns with similar distinctions are:
- avyābhima ‘party, celebration’, usually lower animate but always higher animate for celebrations of religious (yūnialtei) nature;
- caṃkaitmādama ‘university’ - inanimate as a building (or collection of buildings), higher animate as institution;
- ėjilden ‘spire’ - always inanimate except for spires that are parts of a nälikhiąa, a Yūnialtei temple;
- gālla - when inanimate it means ‘funnel’, when plant animate means ‘estuary’ (mostly in Classical Laceyiam - standard Laceyiam nowadays uses gāllememai (lit ‘funnel-delta’) for ‘estuary’);
- hīmba - ‘colour’ when lower animate, ‘harmony’ or ‘melody’ when higher;
- jāgam - usually ‘jug’ and only inanimate; it is however a slang and vulgar word for ‘tit(s)’, meaning that gives it the higher animate gender of its “proper” counterpart maula;
- kaindalbė ‘body painting’, usually lower animate but higher animate when done for a religious celebration;
- lā ‘passage, pass, border crossing’, inanimate if man-made, otherwise plant animate;
In addition to this, most unisex person nouns are lower animate when referring to a male, higher animate otherwise, the main exceptions are nouns inherently higher animate (e.g. høgyṃhjøðam ‘Inquisitor’) or døntairøtum, ‘heretic’, inherently inanimate.
There’s also a small class of nouns that can be of any gender, and take the one of their genitive argument - that’s the case of nouns referring to positions like bhakṣa ‘centre’, jlėmita ‘right [part]’, or deila ‘piece, part’. For example lelīmi bhakṣa ‘centre of the swamp’ is higher animate, while þelai bhakṣa ‘centre of the table’ is inanimate, due to the genders of arguments lelīm and þelak.
Word derivation through bound morphemes gives genders related to the new meanings; dvandva, tatpuruṣa and karmadhāraya compounds usually keep their head’s gender, while bahuvrīhi ones have to be learnt as if they were different roots.
As mentioned while introducing the concept of gender in Laceyiam, this gender system works as a honorific one.
Laceyiam lacks specific courtesy pronouns; instead, the higher animate second-person pronouns are used as courtesy forms.
This means that for females there is no courtesy form at all - the same pronouns teham (singular) and yuvah (plural) are always used. At the other end of the spectrum, males are referred to with the rougher-perceived pronouns esāt (singular) and nagy (plural). Traditionally, these were always used for most males, with only artists and scientists deserving to be called with the more refined higher animate ones; nowadays females can still address unknown males as esāt or nagy, but the more formal a context gets, the less this is accepted. Still, using the lower animate pronouns to address an unknown female is really bad manners, and some dioceses in Laltīmāhia have laws punishing this behaviour (this is obviously never true if the addressed person is a heretic or has been excommunicated - Laltīmāhia being a theocratic country without religious freedom, these people practically lose all of their basic rights and addressing them as teham or yuvah would be considered offensive by third parties; they should be addressed with the lower animate pronouns, but are more commonly called using insulting nicknames).
For people with a non-binary gender identity, the most common practice is to use the higher animate pronouns, though it’s possible that people with masculine appearance prefer to be addressed with the lower animate ones; since non-binary gender identity began to be legally recognized as a third gender (in 4E 59, 74 years ago, parallel to the laws granting men the same rights women had) the practice of using lower animate pronouns for people assigned male at birth rapidly fell out of use - previously non-binary AMAB people were possibly the most discriminated ones, due to the strict gender roles (the nayuivė—pūnuivė roles mentioned previously) that dominated Chlegdarim society. On the contrary, non-binary AFAB kept the same rights as all other women and led completely normal lives (there had been, up to 4E 59, eight confirmed non-binary AFAB Great Inquisitors and sixteen Baptists - only mentioning the two highest roles of Chlegdarim society and Yūnialtei religion).
Unlike languages with complex honorific systems, Laceyiam only has one word which has a “mandatory” more honorific counterpart, the one for ‘father’ - common lower animate klut is always substituted by higher animate tamayaru when talking about fathers of second persons - more rarely of third parties.
Most words can take higher animate gender if they have a genitive second-person higher animate argument - most commonly done with words about meals - for all other words the general rule is to use the indeclinable attributive yamei. Lāma is the common vocative honorific particle (coming after the noun), often being combined with the previous in forms like yamei høgyṃhjøðam lāma ‘honourable Mrs./Mr. Inquisitor’.
✎ Edit Article ✖ Delete Article
Comments
