Some languages classify nouns into categories, including gender and animation. Animation determines how “alive” a noun is and can affect grammar, word order, and verb forms. Different languages have different animation systems, with some having more complex hierarchies.
Some world languages classify nouns into classes. One of the most common noun classifications is that of gender. Other than gender distinctions of pronouns, English has no meaningful categorization of nouns. Other languages, however, may have a variety of noun classes that determine how a given noun is to be used correctly. Animation, in many languages, is the classification of the nouns and things these words refer to, according to the degree to which they are “alive” or animated.
Some languages simply separate a noun into whether it is animate or inanimate, like a person against a tree. Within a language, there is never noun class overlap or ambiguity; but across languages, the classification may differ, such as a culture might regard a tree as animate. Other languages therefore may have more complex animation for their names. It could be a class, not only of division, but also of hierarchy.
As with the example of a tree, it cannot be generalized across languages, but an animation system with more than two categories will typically employ a subset of the following order: the first person “I”, followed by other human males, females, children , animals, plants, natural forces such as water, concrete objects and, finally, abstractions. Name animation is also a taxonomic scheme, or hierarchical classification system, of a culture’s perception of the degree of sentience. Linguistically, nouns don’t fall into an animation class unless they also have grammatical consequences.
The class of a noun can have various effects on the grammar of a language. The German article for “the” is either der, die or das to designate the following noun as masculine, feminine or neuter. These represent the most common noun classification rules. Animation can affect a language in other ways, such as correct word order, different verb forms, or classifiers such as prefixes and suffixes that change the noun in the plural case.
In Japanese, the verb for “to be, exist, or possess” is iru for animate things like people and animals, but aru for inanimate objects. Slavic languages such as Russian must add the suffix -a to most animate nouns if it is not the main subject of a sentence. When an animate noun is a direct object of the sentence, Spanish adds the preposition a for “at, or to,” but not so for inanimate places and things. The Navajo Native American language has been extensively studied for its complex animated hierarchy and how it affects the word order of their language and changes their verbs with prefixes to explain the relationship between this noun order.
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