Grammatical features / gender power & prefix derivation

[Richard Wordingham]

On Mon, 1 Mar 2021 06:50:35 +0800
Kip Cole via CLDR-Users <cldr-users at unicode.org> wrote:

> My understanding of TR35 section 16.1 is that when deriving the
> grammatical gender of a “power” (like “square meter”) or
> “prefix” (like “milligram”) the basic operation is to strip the power
> and/or prefix and derive the gender of the base unit (“meter” in this
> case).
> 
> If my understanding is correct, then looking at the Section 16.1:
> <deriveCompound feature="gender" structure="power" value="0"/> <!--
> gender(square-meter) ←  gender(meter) --> <deriveCompound
> feature="gender" structure="prefix" value="0"/> <!--
> gender(kilometer) ←  gender(meter)--> Is there any circumstance
> whereby “value” could be anything other than “0” ? Is there any
> circumstance where the power or prefix themselves would form part of
> the gender determination? (Based on the above I assume not, but
> confirmation would be helpful).  Looking at the locales for “root”,
> “de” and “fr”, all of them have “value=0” for “power” and “prefix”.

I think you need something like a Tigrinya or Sanskrit locale to give
you any confidence.  In Latin, the plural thousands are neuter nouns
(with the counted object in the genitive plural) and Pali can form
compounds with 'thousand' as a neuter head noun in a fuctionally similar
construction.  In Pali the higher numerals are feminine, so there's
certainly scope for the prefixes to take genders.

Richard.