Comment by packet_nerd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by packet_nerd | Hacker News Reader

The Sgaw Karen language from Thailand and Burma has a system of what I've always called classifiers, but reading this, it sounds like they might be properly called genders too?

Everything is classified into one of a bunch of classifiers, where a bunch might be a few dozen? Maybe hundreds, I'm not sure.

Some really common ones:

Rational beings like people, God, angles, etc. = "gha" (but not spirits, demons, ghosts, etc.; they are animals)

Flat things like the earth, plates, leaves, fields, the sky, etc. = "bae" (but modern Karens sometimes use "round" for the earth and moon instead)

Round things like balls, houses, rocks, a person or animals head, eyes, etc. = "pler"

Long skinny things like a stick, snake, road, etc = "bo"

Most kinds of animals = "doo" (but fish and birds are flat, and insects are round)

These words show up all over the place in basic grammar. Like "5 cows" would be "cows 5 doo". Sometimes they stand in for the actual name of what you're talking about, for example you might say "this cow" as "ta doo ee" and drop the word for cow entirely.

> classifiers, but reading this, it sounds like they might be properly called genders too?

No, not quite, classifiers do not introduce a notion of the noun class/gender, and the East/South East Asian languages that make an extensive use them (notably, Sino-Burmese and Tai-Kradai languages) remain being fully analytical languages.

A more apt comparison for classifiers would be collective nouns, of which English (and other Indo-European languages) has plenty, e.g.

– a pandemonium of enterprise architects;

– a tuxedo of Linux kernel developers;

– a dazzle of birds of paradise;

– a shiver of IT consultants;

– etc.

where the implicitly associated noun class/gender of the noun that is the focal point of the expression is «debased» into a collective one and can be applied across the noun class/gender boundaries. Pandemonium, dazzle, tuxedo and shiver are, effectively, classifiers.

Is it used only for counting? Mandarin and other East Asian language have a classifier for counting. English uses counting classifier sometimes. For example, "paper" without a classifier in English refers to an official document or essay. For example "I have to write a paper" or "Do you have your papers?" otherwise you have to use "a sheet of paper", "some paper", "a pack of paper" etc. It's not exactly the same as the counting words in Mandarin but play a similar role in grammer.

Yes, sort of, but a lot more than counting. I think Thai has counting words too, but I think they are not as central to the grammar or as flexible as Karen classifiers.

Sort of like you can say "a sheet of paper" or "5 sheets of paper" in English to count papers, but imagine you could also say "typing on a sheet", or "your sheet is full of typos", or "could you hand me a sheet", where "sheet" is a broad category and that you mean a sheet of paper comes from the context in which the sentence is spoken.

Edit: Another interesting use for them is disambiguation. Super useful if, like me, you're just learning and don't always nail the tones or pronunciation. For example, I might throw in the animal classifier in "ga cha ta doo" just to make sure no-one misunderstands my poor pronunciation of "elephant" as "mountain". That's a crude example, but native speakers benefit from the disambiguation too in colloquial speech.

Words with this range of meaning are simply called ‘noun classifiers’ in linguistics [0]. They’re pretty common both in the region and outside it: they’re also in Lao, Hmong and Minangkabau, as well as various Australian, Mayan and South American languages.

[0] Aikhenvald 2003, chapeter 3: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/classifiers-97801992...

> (but modern Karens sometimes use "round" for the earth and moon instead)

1. Isn't the full moon visibly a circle? What made it flat?

2. There are many concepts for "earth". Are you referring to soil, the ground, the landscape, or the entire world?

Thanks for the list of classes, it was interesting to read

The moon doesn't visibly have bulk or mass like a ball, house, or mountain does. And I was referring to earth as the entire world. Edit: But the landscape, fields, meadows, districts, states, countries, and continents are all still flat.

Edit 2: Now that I think about it, I should have used "spherical" to describe that category rather than "round."

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