Gender in Lotha
is based on the natural distinction of sex and therefore
it is applied only to the animate nouns, hence it is non-linguistic.
Gender of animate nouns is marked morphologically except
some kinship terms which are absolute forms.
Nouns in Lotha
can broadly be divided into two groups i.e. Animate and
Inanimate. Animate group can further be divided into Human
and Non-human. These human and non-human groups have three-way
opposition for gender i.e., Masculine, Feminine and Common.
Gender denotes the group of nouns which are neither to sex.
This grolup is mostly restricted to the non-human nouns.
Lotha
gender system can be represented graphically as follows
:
rà
à
