Talk: Xhosa language

From open-encyclopedia.com - the free encyclopedia.

Are you sure there's ever an exclamation point there? I think you're confusing Xhosa with the Khoisan languages.

You are absolutely right; Ethnologue mentions many names for Xhosa, none with an exclamation mark. arj 19:55, 19 Feb 2004 (UTC)

"Gender system"

To call this a gender system, to me, is really strange as there is absolutely no correlation with gender. There is also something like 15 classes, none of them with any relation to gender. Many of the classes pair to form singular-plural pairs. My knowledge is about Zulu, but I'm quite sure its the same for Xhosa.

The original meaning of "gender" is "kind, type", and not "sex". I agree it can be confusing, and in languages with more than two or three genders, these are often termed "noun classes" - which the article uses as the primary term. "Genders" in scare quotes should stay, in my opinion, since many non-linguists are not aware of the proper term, nor of the existence of languages with many noun classes. arj 18:43, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)