Gold nouns
The Gold language, also known as Diʕìləs,[1] 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.
Case system
The Gold language has a robust noun case system featuring the ability to compound noun cases with other noun cases. However, sequences of more than two case markers on a single noun are not generally found. Thus, the noun cases can be presented as a grid.
Most of the noun cases are marked by shifting the stress to the final syllable and attaching one of the consonants k ḳ n s l ʕ to the end of the resulting word; other noun cases, however, are marked by vowel shifts. Both types of inflection originate from the infixes of the Tapilula language. Some nouns undergo obligatory stem mutations when the stress is shifted; this is called the oblique form of the noun.
Gender
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.
Romanization of gender symbols
In Romanization, additional astronomical symbols can be repurposed to mark the non-binary genders of the Gold language and its descendants. The pattern used here is:
♀ FEMININE ♂ MASCULINE ☿ YOUNG FEMININE ♃ YOUNG MASCULINE ♁ EPICENE ☼ UNISEX ⚲ NEUTER
Animacy hierarchy
In a compound noun whose elements are of different genders, the gender highest in the animacy hierarchy dominates. If two morphemes are at the same level on the animacy hierarchy, the rightmost morpheme dominates. There are five tiers in the animacy hierarchy.
Animacy level 4
The highest animacy level is used primarily for adult humans of both sexes and for epicenes. There are only a small number of "misfit" nouns in this category. Nouns belonging to the highest animacy level do not need to take any modifiers on their verbs; that is to say, they are compatible with all types of transitive verbs.
The genders belonging to this category are the greater feminine, the epicene, and the masculine, symbolized in Romanized text respectively by ♀ ♁ ♂.
Animacy level 3
The second-highest animacy level is used primarily for human females, but contains a large number of nouns for other animate beings, and a sizable number of words that are syntactically inanimate but behave as animates in the Gold language and in many of its descendants.
The genders belonging to this category are the lesser feminine and the greater young feminine, symbolized in Romanized text respectively by ⚳ ☿.
Animacy level 2
The middle animacy level is used mostly for human children of both genders, although there are historically more words for boys than for girls in this category, as most words for young girls are found in animacy level 3. Thus, it could be said that girls are given superior status to boys in the Gold language. This is true from a grammatical standpoint; on the other hand, it is considered grammatical to describe young boys with words from the proper masculine gender, which is in animacy level 4. Therefore boys are alternately above or below girls depending on the word being chosen to describe them, and can occasionally also be equal to certain feminine words.
This gender disappears early on in the histories of most of Gold's daughter languages, as it contained very few words and came to be phonetically indistinct from genders with simialr meanings.
The genders belonging to this category are the young masculine and the lesser young feminine, symbolized in Romanized text respectively by ♃ ⚵.
Animacy level 1
The second-lowest animacy level is used mostly for babies and animate beings with no easily observable gender or whose gender is unimportant to human relationships. Most words for wild animals belong to this gender, even if the word specifically describes an animal of a particular sex. The unisex gender also contains words for grass, flowers, and other objects that are perceived as living things, and therefore animate, but whose gender, if present, is unimportant to humans. Additionally, the diminutive suffix -ĭ places objects it attaches to into the unisex gender unless overridden by a gender of higher animacy hierarchy earlier in the word.[2]
The genders belonging to this category are the unisex and the baby gender, symbolized in Romanized text respectively by ☼ ⚙.
Animacy level 0
The lowest animacy category corresponds to the neuter gender, which has no associated consonant and can be considered a lack of gender rather than a gender of its own. It is distinct from both the unisex, which implies animacy, and the epicene, which implies the presence of both masculine and feminine genders. A small number of words for syntactically animate objects are found in this category.
It is symbolized in Romaniezed text by ⚲.
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. See also Proto-Moonshine language.
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. The numbers next to each gender indicate their rank on the five-tier animacy hierarchy, with 0 being the lowest rank and 4 being the highest.
| Gender | Gold | Khulls | Moonshine | Babakiam | Thaoa | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Epicene ♁ 4 | p | p | p | p | p, ph | Used for humans in groups of mixed or unknown genders, including a pregnant woman. |
| Greater Feminine ♀ 4 | m | m | m | m | m, ph | Used for adult women and females in general. |
| Lesser Feminine ⚳ 3 | s | s | s, t | s | š | Used for adult women and females in general, but contains few words. |
| Masculine ♂ 4 | t | t | t | t | Used for men and boys. | |
| Young Masculine ♃ 2 | r | l, ř | Used for young boys. | |||
| Unisex ☼ 1 | d | l, r | l, ř | č | Used for babies and children who are young enough to be perceived as genderless. Thus, implies animacy. | |
| Baby ⚙ 1 | ʕʷ | r | b | — | Used for babies only. Descended from Gold /b/, which at the time patterned the same as /p/. | |
| Neuter ⚲ 0 | — | ʕ | — | h | Used for animates of indistinct gender and for some inanimates. | |
| Greater Young Feminine ☿ 3 | n | n | n | n | n | Used for young girls, and in many words for unmarried women. |
| Lesser Young Feminine ⚵ 2 | 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.
