Crang does not have any seperate morphological process for gender. In this post we will be dealing with how it encodes the major genders ‘male’ and ‘female’.
For any word, we get the ‘male’ version of the word by infixing the crang word for human male, ‘ti’. Similarly, we get the ‘female’ version by infixing ‘tin’, the word for adult human female.
A few examples,
| Sno | Word | Meaning | Male form | Female Form |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | dAgu | bird | dA-ti-gu | dA-tin-gu |
| 2 | EA | fish | E-ti-A | E-tin-A |
| 3 | kai | tranquil fish | k(a)-ti-ai | k(a)-tin-ai |
| 4 | lAgO | a dolphin like animal | la-ti-gO | la-tin-gO |
| 5 | bIr | tree | bi-ti-r | bi-tin-r |
| 6 | gAz | wave | gA-ti-z | gA-tin-z |
| 7 | fU | air | f(a)-ti-U | f(a)-tin-U |
For the people of crang, there are male and female trees.
The cases 6,7 are different. Although they donot encode the gender directly, they rather attribute the ‘maleness’ or ‘femaleness’ to the modified noun. In this case gA-ti-z is a fierce wave opposed to gA-tin-z which is a rather pleasant wave.
Crang not only has the ‘male’ and ‘female’ genders but has an elaborate nominal classification much like kiswahili bantu.
What we will see later is that these constructions are very confusing. E-ti-A can either mean ‘male fish’ or it can also take the genitive and mean ‘his fish’ because as you will see later in a more detailed fashion, crang lacks pronouns too. So, this confusion is because ti can either mean ‘a man’ or a third person eg. ‘him’.