Gender

Pre-Kaddesol nouns have four morphological genders: masculine, feminine, bestial, and inanimate.

Prehistory

In the earliest stages of its development, Pre-Kaddesol had two genders based on animacy. This made for easy classification. People and animals, things that could move on their own were considered animate while plants and things were inanimate.

There was an initial effort to separate humans from animals, but this results in human words that emphasized masculinity. A subsequent effort refined the animal gender to the modern bestial and feminine genders.

The relic of this prehistory is that while pronouns require agreement in gender, number, and case, articles and verbs only require agreement in number and animacy.

Notes

Gender in Collective Nouns

Nouns that reference collectives have more limited genders than others. For instance, nouns that refer to groups of people tend to be masculine more often than feminine. Nouns that refer to groups of animals tend to be Class III bestials.

Gender by Association

Recent centuries have seen a period of reanalysis in Pre-Kaddesol where inanimate nouns have begun to take on the gender of a person or animal associated with that object. Tribes of a patriarchal bend tend to prefer the masculine gender for things used by men while other tribes lean more towards feminine or inanimate nouns.

This preference does not currently block understanding, but it will affect word choice in daughter languages.