The Kivunjo construction fits entirely inside the verb, which has seven prefixes and suffixes, two moods, and fourteen tenses; the verb agrees with its subject, its object, and its benefactive nouns, each of which comes in sixteen genders. (In case you are wondering, these "genders" do not pertain to things like cross-dressers, transsexuals, hermaphrodites, androgynous people, and son on, as one reader of this chapter surmised. To a linguist, the term gender ratains its original meaning of "kind", as in the related words, generic, genus, and genre. The Bantu "genders" refer to kinds like humans, animals, extended objects, clusters of objects, and body ports. (...)

PINKER, Steven. The Language Instinct

Marcadores: lingüística, pinker, the language instinct

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