Universal 1429: (agglutinative morphology ⇒)¬ gender ⇒ categorial markers with hydronyms
- Original
- If a language lacks the category of gender, then hydronyms always contain categorial markers.
- Standardized
- IF there is no gender, THEN hydronyms always contain formatives classifying them as such.
- Keywords
- gender, hydronym, agglutination
- Domain
- inflection, lexicon
- Type
- implication
- Status
- achronic
- Quality
- absolute
- Basis
- unspecified
- Source
- Serebrennikov 1974: 296
- Counterexamples
In agglutinative languages, hydronyms most commonly contain words that function as categorial markers, e.g. in Komi, river names usually have words “ju” or “va”, meaning ‘river’. Finnish river names contanin the word “joki”: Kalajoki, Pühajoki, Kemijoki. Conversely, Russian hydronyms are characterized by a considerable number of elliptic names, e.g. Belaja (reka) – ‘white (river)’, Velikaja (reka) – ‘great (river)’. (Serebrennikov 1974: 296)