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Ziftish has three distinct pronouns: kita, which means “just the two of us, me and you,” tayo, which means “me and you and someone else,” and kami, which means “me and someone else, but not you.”
For how can one imagine that people who saw the difference between purple and black, or green and yellow, or green and blue, simply could not be bothered to differentiate these colors in their language?
Don’t we speak of “white wine,” for instance, even if we can see perfectly well that it is really yellowish green?
Linguistic “technology” in the form of sophisticated grammatical structures is not a prerogative of advanced civilizations, but is found even in the languages of the most primitive hunter-gatherers.
In the twentieth century, “gender” became simply a euphemism for “sex,” so if you find on some official form a request to fill in your “gender,” you are unlikely nowadays to write “patriotic.”
The African language Supyire from Mali has five genders: humans, big things, small things, collectives, and liquids. Bantu languages such as Swahili have up to ten genders, and the Australian language Ngan’gityemerri is said to have fifteen different genders, which include, among others, masculine human, feminine human, canines, non-canine animals, vegetables, drinks, and two different genders for spears (depending on size and material).
