Naturalism question: compound/hierarchical gender systems

[mbrsart]

So I recently revisited the elvish/draconic conlang I'm creating for my WIP high fantasy novel series, and I'm questioning the naturalism of the gender system I came up with. I don't know whether to call it nested, hierarchical, compound, or all of the above, but it's basically animate/inanimate with some subcategories:

• High Animate (adults)
  • Masculine
  • Feminine
• Low Animate
  • Children
  • Animals
  • Non-living animate (wind, water, fire, electricity, etc.)
• Inanimate

Are there any natural languages that do something similar? Does this sound weird to anybody? The only languages I've ever studied in depth have the standard sex-based gender system, so I'm throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.

ETA: Yes, these all have agreement mechanics to a degree, but they're most relevant with numeral classifiers and definite articles, at least at this stage in the language. I haven't done very much beyond nouns, numbers, and a few vocab words.

[Ahzoh]

Nah, this looks realistic even if there is no precedent.

[Nachtuil]

Actually, this break down of categories reminds me quite a bit of the animacy hierarchy in some North American languages. Ojibwe and Navajo use similar categories, though not necessarily as noun classes but in other ways such as indicating grammatical relations. I believe both have a direct-inverse marking system. Those languages don't have a masculine feminine distinction so often use obviation, but with your gender and number distinctions you likely wouldn't need to. So in that sense it seems naturalistic. If I ran into a language with these as noun categories I wouldn't question it. I would stick plants in the inanimate category myself. I think those languages (Bantu?) in south west Africa with 12 to 22 noun classes may have similar divisions, with masculine, feminine and children in different categories.

[mbrsart]

Nah, this looks realistic even if there is no precedent.

Actually, this break down of categories reminds me quite a bit of the animacy hierarchy in some North American languages. Ojibwe and Navajo use similar categories, though not necessarily as noun classes but in other ways such as indicating grammatical relations. I believe both have a direct-inverse marking system. Those languages don't have a masculine feminine distinction so often use obviation, but with your gender and number distinctions you likely wouldn't need to. So in that sense it seems naturalistic. If I ran into a language with these as noun categories I wouldn't question it. I would stick plants in the inanimate category myself. I think those languages (Bantu?) in south west Africa with 12 to 22 noun classes may have similar divisions, with masculine, feminine and children in different categories.

Cool. One of my original design goals was to make an elvish language that was less European (namely Celtic) and more North American, but I was going off of stuff that I'd heard rather than stuff I'd actually studied. And I just went back to my original notes, and I did put plants under inanimate after all. Makes sense. I've also pulled in some influence from Ancient Greek and Hebrew, and I'm giving polypersonal agreement a try.

[Porphyrogenitos]

The masculine animate-masculine inanimate distinction in some Slavic languages is like this, in that they're "half-genders" of a sort.

[mbrsart]

The masculine animate-masculine inanimate distinction in some Slavic languages is like this, in that they're "half-genders" of a sort.

Interesting. I'll have to do more Slavic research, especially since I'm trying to pull Slavic influences into another conlang (at this point, it's a mostly a triconsonantal language with a Slavic sound system, just for the sake of weirdness).