Subject: genderless lgs

content - length : 2009 hi you gender people , it may be that i have missed something that has been going on on the list . if i understand right there has been some claim about that a language totally lacking a gender system would be something of science fiction . as the responses have shown , this is not definitely the case but an indo - european line of thinking of what are natural conceptual ( grammatical ? ) categories . albert ortmann , among others , made the point that e . g . uralic languages generally lack gender . this is a point in case in finnish . the language does not have any grammatical gender markers ( in principle , no articles ) , no division into male / female in the pronoun system and , in particular , spoken finnish does not make distinction between animate / inanimate . persons , animals , objects , ideas may be referred to with the pronoun " se " . yet a slight comment to ortmann 's theory about case / gender . the point about case being realized only once in an np does not seem conceivable , at least from finnish point of view : attribute ( s ) and head must concord in case . hope this is of interest . and i could point out that i am no uralic or fennic scholar but a native speaking linguist . best regards - jan lindstrom dept . of scandinavian lgs university of helsinki
