72 



ON THE CLASSIFICATION 



All classifications, however well they are conceived and how- 

 ever logically they are applied, encounter obstacles, when they 

 are consistently practised. This is a natural defect of all 

 systems. In the first division, which constitutes life and reason- 

 ing power as the salient points, these two (life and reasoning 

 power) are not always easily discovered, and the unbiassed 

 recognition of gender in creatures, objects, and thought 

 is in the second division also occasionally impeded by 

 flights of imagination, or by want of knowledge. But the 

 most important distinction between the two systems must 

 be considered to be the fact, that the first mentioned is 

 adopted by concrete, the second by abstract languages. 

 This choice is retrospectively a sufficient indication of the 

 prevalent tendency in each classification. 



The concrete languages do not only submit to the first 

 classification, but they are also in consequence free from 

 the influence of gender. A language marks the varieties 

 of gender when the words, more especially the nouns, 

 contain in themselves the distinction of sex, without 

 expressing it by peculiar terminations, additions or modi- 

 fications of sound ; e.g., in English " man " and " bull " 

 are masculine, and " woman " and " cow " are feminine ; 

 but the external form does not betray their respective gender. 

 Of course every language can express the difference of sex, 

 as sex is a natural fact, and a language is nothing if not 

 descriptive ; but if a dialect must have recourse to the expedi- 

 ent of adding such terms as " male" and " female," or others 

 which convey the same meaning, in order to specify the sex of 

 the particular subject in question, it is clear that such a 

 language has not, what has been defined as gender. Though 

 man is a male and woman a female by sex, grammatically they 

 may be neither masculine nor feminine. We need not go far 

 to convince ourselves of this fact, for according to Telugu 

 grammar neither magadu " man" and eddu " ox " are mascu- 

 line, nor dlu " wife " and mm " cow " feminine. 



