Noun classes in Arapesh

For some Latin nouns, gender is correlated with conceptual categories; for example, nouns denoting plants are routinely feminine. For others, gender is correlated with the phonology of the stem; thus, third declension nouns whose stems end in -c, -e, -l, -n, -t, -ar, -ur, -us and -uus are characteristically neuter, a fact that schoolchildren were long forced to memorize. This curious observation might seem to be just that, an accident, were it not for the existence of languages whose entire gender and declension systems are organized along phonological lines. This article is devoted to one of these languages, Arapesh, a language of the Torricelli family, spoken near the north coast of Papua New Guinea. My discussion of Arapesh is based entirely on Reo Fortune’s (1942) grammar.