Detail #386: A Gender-Based Quirk

Imagine a language with a gender system along the lines of German. Now, however, imagine that the society has gone through a quick but fairly successful modernization, where a formerly very strict division into 'female occupations' and 'male occupations' has over a generation or two become rather 'ideally equal' for some combination of those words. 

Ok, look, I am trying very hard not to take any stance in that debate. This is all set-up for a convoluted grammatical situation.

However, the titles associated with occupations persisted in the gender they previously had been associated with. So ... 

Sergeant is still masculine when it is a woman sergeant.

Secretary is still feminine when it is a male secretary.

Some limited examples of this can be found in Europe to this day, with some titles in French, for instance, only having masculine forms, and in some varieties of Swedish, sjuksköterska, "nurse", only having a grammatically feminine form.

However, the twist I am going for is one where pronominal binding still is lexically gender-based even when the gender of the particular person is known. When referring to Tim the secretary or Jenny the sergeant, the gender of the pronoun would follow the gender associated with the occupation.

However, when speaking of Tim or Jenny as persons having private lives and so on, they would get their expected pronouns.

This creates a situation where persons working in occupations associated with the other gender can get their professional person and their private person separated by pronouns, but people working in gender-typical occupations do not have this quirk available to them.

Detail #385: A Type of Letter Shape

I seldom have ideas about writing in this group, and I generally am not a very graphically oriented person. But I figured a language could have a few different types of letters:

positionwise absolute letters

The form of an positionwise absolute letter is predictable from its position in a word. Available positions might be script-specific: some language might distinguish initial from other, some may have initial, medial and final, some may have sentence-initial vs. others, etc. Some may have word-initial, second, and other, etc.

left- and right-outline adhering letters

Left-adhering letters shape their right side so at to adhere to the outline of the letter to their right. Thus, the curve or line simply doubles the neighbouring letter's left or right side. Say the J in "John" had a slight bulge to leave some space for the "o". (Of course, this idea can be turned 90 degrees for scripts that are vertical instead of horizontal.)

Edge cases might entirely be missing for these letters, or they behave in special ways at word boundaries - or there may be some placeholder letters for that situation.

dual-outline adhering letters

These only have some small medial detail and otherwise match the shapes of the left and right of the surrounding letters.

other?

Letters that cross into other letters could of course be feasible, and their shape could be controlled by the properties of the other letter.

Detail #384: Making Adjectives more Dynamic

One word class that sometimes does not get all the love it deserves is adjectives. Sometimes, they are just made a special type of verbs (or barely even special, at that), and sometimes they are conflated with nouns.

I have previously suggested a language that splits them in two new classes but I imagine there may be other things to do with them.

Let's make something like cases but exclusively for adjectives, that operate separately from the cases of nouns.

Here's a few such cases:

1. Qualitative

The basic use of an adjective: tells us something about the noun. Can appear both as subject and complement:

I am hungry
the red house

2. Translative

Much like how this case is used in Finnish on both adjectives and nouns, it expresses a quality the noun acquires. Unlike in Finnish, however, this can mark an NP that is undergoing a transition due to the verb:

hungry-TRNSL wolf ran
the wolf ran (and therefore got hungry)
"the wolf ran itself hungry"

3. Terminative-translative

Like the translative, but restricts the verb's time span or aspect:

tired-TT man worked
the man worked until he got tired

4. Essive

Qualitative, but restricts timespans:

you can come to the new open-ess store
you can come to the new store when it's open

old-ess you can sleep
you can sleep when you're old

It can also inform about cause:

I hated the new loud-ess guitarist

 5.  Post-essive:

Marks 'after being', or direct cause:

small-PE you will have to pay taxes
I saw the shiny-PE clothing