There are also other options as David J. Peterson suggested on Wired and his most recent Google Talk.
In the Wired video, DJP explained how other options include big vs large, living vs non-living(dead), natural vs non-natural, tool vs plant, etc. Could be anything, including physical vs non-physical, or even human vs non-human(which could also be known as sentient vs insentient).
Presumably, the culture itself could impact their language's grammatical gender system, maybe in terms of taxonomy as well.
I'm going for tool vs plant for this one. Though I will need help with the methods for an analytical language with tool vs plant as its grammatical gender system to express it. I asked for help with it, and someone asked these two questions to set an example:
"What do you do with tools that you rarely do with plants, and vice versa?
And what are some ways you classify tools that you don't care about with plants, and vice versa?"
On Reddit, I got this response:
"It's hard to get grammatical gender in an analytic language. Grammatical gender is about agreement, and you can't really get agreement if you don't have morphology. It's possible it might show up in different sets of demonstratives or articles. However, I'd be surprised if plant vs tool is either the only or the most salient category. Like, what gender would mother or brother be? Sparrow? River? Apple? Sand?"
This reply followed it:
"I mean who knows how long before it gets reanalyzed as masculine/feminine, but I could easily see an extrapolation like "women nurture and stay at home, plant; men go out and use tools, tool." Inanimate natural things are plant gender, animate natural things are tool gender could also make sense. It also might be that they are seen as primarily plant/tool categories rather than some other dichotomy because of some formal realization, not semantic assignment."
Another response is this:
"If it's completely analytical, it would probably show up as different articles, pronouns, demonstratives, or pluralization or case-marking strategies. Some languages also have suppletive verbs for different noun classes for some verbs. If it's not completely isolating, it might show up as adjective or verb agreement instead or as well."
For "Demoese", we could go for the chosen genders applying to nouns based on the object's usefulness, though plants might also become useful in the long run, as the culture would evolve. Perhaps that could alter the grammatical gender as well. So let's just try this out and see what happens.
Noun cases are also a thing. Common examples include the nominative case for indicating finite verb subjects, the accusative to showcase a transitive verb's direct opposite, the dative for a verb's indirect object, the ablative for movement away from something, the genitive which indicates another noun's possessor, the vocative for indicating whoever is being addressed, the locative for either physical or temporal locations(or both), and the instrumental for indicating a means or tool used or companion present in/while doing something. Other cases include the oblique/objective, the absolutive, and others that have their articles on Wikipedia. And you're free to look them up. I'm thinking of phasing them out since most of the world's languages go without cases, and I could add them when I evolve the grammar.
Building The Grammar
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