Wistrish noun genders
Wistrish, similarly to some Germanic and other Indo-European languages feature three main genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Masculines and neuters frequently distinguish between animates and inanimates, so techincally Wistrish has five real genders: masculine animate, masculine inanimate, feminine, neuter animate and neuter inanimate.
These three genders generally follow their designations in humans, but they often do not have any underlying logic in animals and things: therefore, gender should be memorized for each noun.
Animate and inanimate distinction on the other hand is usually pretty straigtforward: nouns marking humans and animals are animate, nouns marking everything else are inanimate.
Wistrish preserves gender distinction in non-singular (dual, paucal and plural) forms.
Gender paradigms
Human nouns are frequently contained within gender paradigms: multiple nouns of the same root that have different genders, therefore belonging to different noun classes, and marking people of different gender. Gender determination is as follows:
Singular
- Singular humans of a gender use that gender of the gender paradigm.
- Singular humans of an unspecified gender usually use neuter forms.
Neuter in singular is also frequently used as a means of formal address even if the gender is specified and is non-neuter.
Duals
Duals have the most complex system of gender determination of numbers:
- Pairs of the same gender use the form of that gender.
- Pairs of mixed gender (any pair of feminine, masculine and neuter) use masculine forms.
- Pairs that include one masculine always use masculine forms, even when the other gender is unknown.
- Pairs that include one feminine/neuter and one unknown use neuter duals.
- Pairs of unknown gender use neuter duals.
Paucals and plurals
These are pretty straigtforward and identical to each other:
- Groups of one specific gender use paucals / plurals of that gender.
- Groups of mixed or unknown gender use masculine forms of that gender.