Dwarves and Gender

[tehhumi]

Headcanon: Dwarves have no social genders (roles that you are expected to live according to, rarely if ever change, and clearly signal to others in the community) and 7 grammatical genders (sets of pronouns, common adjectives, and ways to conjugate verbs).

1. child dwarf
2. adult dwarf
3. member of other tool-making species (elves, men, orcs, crows, etc.)
4. growing thing (grass, trees, cows, potato plants, fish, cats, etc.)
5. raw material (marble, wood, iron, wool, harvested apples, gems straight out of the earth, most emotions, etc.)
6. crafted thing (clothes, tools, swords, casseroles, jewelry, pots, stained glass windows, philosophies, etc.)
7. place (the mountains, towns, a specific city, the ocean, etc.)

Another reason dwarves don’t often teach Khuzdul is that new speakers tend to use only a few grammatical genders, and put things in the wrong one even between those.

Comments

[hhimring]

I think those are interesting ideas!

[keiliss]

Oh man, this is such an interesting concept.