Gold nouns

The Gold language, also known as Diʕìləs, has grammatical gender for animate objects and some inanimates. The gender system was retained by some of its descendants, being most prominent in Moonshine, but even in Moonshine the system was less full than in Gold.

Basic structure

The Gold gender system is based on consonants only, with each consonant corresponding to a different gender. The gender setup divides people not just into males and females, but into different age groups as well. There are more feminine genders than masculine ones, and in some descendant language, the masculine gender is even swallowed up by one of the neuter or epicene genders, leaving the feminine genders intact.

Reflections in daughter languages

All languages descended from Gold lost much of the gender system when they lost their noun classifier prefixes, but the Khulls branch of the family retained it most. And in one of Khulls' daughter languages, Moonshine, the gender system actually grew back up again, based on suffixes rather than prefixes, and for the first time included some vocalic reflexes of the consonants.

Note that the genders in this table are ordered in such a way that overlapping categories are contiguous; there was no individual language that placed them in this traditional order.

GENDER SYSTEM

Gender	Gold	Khulls	Moonshine	Babakiam	Thaoa	Notes
Epicene	p	p	p	p	p, ph	Used for humans in groups of mixed or unknown genders, including a pregnant woman.
Greater Feminine	m	m	m	m	m, ph	Used for adult women and females in general.
Lesser Feminine	s	s	s, t	s	š	Used for adult women and females in general, but contains few words.
Masculine	t	t		t	t	Used for men and boys.
Young Masculine		r	l, ř			Used for young boys.
Unisex	d	l, r	l, ř		č	Used for babies and children who are young enough to be perceived as genderless.
Baby		ʕʷ	r	b	—	Used for babies only. Descended from Gold /b/, which at the time patterned the same as /p/.
Neuter	—	ʕ	—		h	Used for animates of indistinct gender and for some inanimates.
Greater Young Feminine	n	n	n	n	n	Used for young girls, and in many words for unmarried women.
Lesser Young Feminine	y

Similarity to Andanese

The Gold gender system was descended from the noun classifier system of Gold's own parent language, Tapilula. A sister language, Andanese, preserved this noun classifier system with little change, and this setup closely resembles the Gold gender system. However, in Andanese, there is no distinction between the various animate genders and the other noun classes; they all are seen as equal parts of a whole.