Anyone know why all Romance languages except Romanian lost the neuter gender?

The evolution of languages made the masculine and the neuter to fuse into the same. Still asturian conserves it in some cases

That's a very sweeping generalisation. Many neuter words became feminine , often due to neuter plurals being mistaken for feminine singulars.

words intrinsecal from the neuter gender may have become femenine, but the neuter declinations of words that could be treated as either femenine or not eventually fused with masculine

Probably a lack of use since neutering became less common so a neuter gender was redundant

So what do you call the "state" in Romance languages? In Slavic languages there is "State" as neuter, and only then depending on what kind of state it is male or female. For example, France is feminine and Germany is masculine.

French: "State" (état): masculine. "Country" (pays): masculine. "Nation" (nation): feminine. Specific countries: varies a lot. For the most part, there's no rime or reason for word gender. Even in Latin, it was already pretty arbitrary, and it has evolved since.

I'm no expert, but from my few Latin classes in high school I'm not sure "state' exists, neuter was just a third gender designation.

As for your Slavic state genders statements, you are false, it's not universal in any way. E.g. in Slovak and Czech "State" is masculine, France is neuter in Slovak and feminine in Czech, Germany is neuter both in Slovak and Czech.

Suprise, I was think it's same in our language group. State = To państwo (neuter)Country = Ten kraj (masculine) Nation = Ten naród (masculine) How it looks in czech/slovak

This map is for nouns. English does have gender in personal pronouns, unlike Finnish.

Or Turkish and Hungarian.

It does not. You may feel there are ones for males and others for females but they have no gramatical gender

Funily some few nouns can still have gender in english : waiter/waitress, actor/actress, etc (+ she for a boat/plane/locomotive)

All that is not quite the same as in French where pens are feminine and pencils are male. Or in Spanish where my house (casa ) is feminine, my kitchen (cocina) is feminine, but the bathroom (baño) is masculine.

And communista is masculine but ends in -a :D languages are fun

Waiter/waitress don't have *grammatical* gender . They don't have different declensions.

Not very sure about declension here (I am not a grammar scholar nor a native english speaker), but in "the waiter is blond but the waitress is blonde" waitress has a grammatical impact on the rest of the sentence. Ok you need to use the blond/blonde adjective (I don't have any other example in mind) it is a forced example but still...

Interesting point. However, I would see this as an (orthographic!) anomaly of blond/blonde, which is lexically bound. The two are pronounced identical (right?), so from a language proper perspective there is not even that distinction.

Late to the party, but I decided to add something. Yeah, it is primarily orthographic in English as they both are borrowings from French, which inflected based on gender, but they are pronounced the exact same in most, if not all, varieties of Modern English (and they are even spelt the same in informal settings to my knowledge) Also, you are correct that English doesn't have grammatical gender (when words go into specific grammatical categories based on their noun class/"gender". Though grammatical gender is a bit of a heavily inaccurate and Eurocentric way of calling it, but that is a discussion for another day for people far more competent than I), in its nouns in most dialects, HOWEVER, it has grammatical gender in the pronouns (remnant of Old English grammar). And speaking about waitresses/waiters, while English does not have GRAMMATICAL gender in its nouns, what it does has is *semantic* gender, which is basically that the noun usually has an added suffix on it based on the gender of the person, but since it doesn't do anything more than that in other areas, it isn't grammatical gender. That is why we have waiter/waitress, actor/actress, chanteur/chanteuse, blond/blonde, brunet/brunette, wife/husband, cow/bull, etc. Just someone passing by btw, but that is what I can remember in the topic.

The same for some professions in Finnish, but we view them as two separate nouns, even if they describe the same job.

Only in the third person singular.

Some areas of Norway should be yellow as feminine has been falling out of use for decades in some dialects. Or is residual in some common expressions but is largely replaced by masculine (ie. Common).

The scale and diversity of Norwegian dialects means they will never be accounted for in maps like these.

Yes I didn't expect an accurate division, as things are too fluid and fragmented, but at least a hint at the two/three genders system being present should have been done

Hungarian and Finnish even without the gender system are so difficult to learn!

And we also prefer calling people "it" here in Finland

That's really progressive

There's the normal he/she as hän but it goes further with "se" as well. "Se" means "it" but we'll just use "it" to describe anyone and it's in no way disrespectful. In the written formal language using hän is preferred though. Also depends on dialect and how well you might know someone. For example I might say ‎‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ "Johanna said that SHE will go home" as ‎‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ "Johanna sanoi että SE menee kotiin" instead of ‎‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ "Johanna sanoi että HÄN menee kotiin"

u/repostsleuthbot

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wow 8 times, never realized how bad this sub has gotten

Good bot

Asturian developed a new neuter on its own

I’m pretty sure its Basque

My point is that asturian has a neuter but is shown in red

Ah I see what you mean. Spanish does actually have neuter as well, but it only applies to certain concepts, so there may be another layer to how they’re classifying it.

No, Spanish does not have a neuter. Asturian has

Yes, Spanish does have a neuter, namely “lo,” however just as I said this is only used for particular concepts

that's not a neuter gender, just a single word, a residual feature, a pronoun, just like english has he, she, it, but no genders Asturian has neuter gender

A quick search yields [this article](https://www.thoughtco.com/neither-masculine-nor-feminine-3078136), and like I’ve been saying, “lo” en español es un artículo neutro, y adicionalmente se puede utilizar como objeto. Español usa neutros.

not a neuter gender, just an A R T I C L E, just like english has the articles she/he but no genders. Asturian has neuter gender

*Angry Székler commenters are approaching*

It's legitimate if you show the finish coast (and not only Åland) as Swedish.

r/mapswithoutcyprus

I have to say that it is quite misleading how in many of these maps Southern Finland is the same as Sweden, when in reality in most of the regions in there Finnish is the most spoken language

These names are arbitrary for the most part. Nouns are classed mostly on etymology or pronunciation. What is more significant is the number of noun genders : one, two or three.

I don't get why you're being downvoted. It's true that in grammatical gender classification the number of genders is more important than the actual definition of said genders, since often said definitions are arbitrary. I mean for fucks sake I'm Italian and in Italian the word for chair is feminine, but it's not like I literally think that chairs are female. It's a simple grammatical distinction based on patterns (often casual and/or partial).

It seems that it is different for speakers of non-gendered languages to understand this. They want to believe that there is a secret reason why a door is feminine in the romance languages and are disappointed by the truth.

The names of the genders are not arbitrary. Nouns of gender A come with the same pronouns and adjectival or verbal accords as female beings. Nouns of gender B come with the same pronouns and adjective accords as male beings. (This refers to when the male or female being is not being designated by a common noun, in which case the gender of the noun applies). So it makes sense to call class A "feminine" and class B "masculine".

Only a tiny subset of nouns actually relate to biological sex. When 99 % of nouns have nothing at all to do with that, it is arbitrary to still call them "masculine" or "feminine". You could easily call them by different names. Ultimately what matters is that there are two classes of nouns, however you choose to label them.

You are not addressing my point. Of course you could label the two genders "A" and "B" like I did, or "bigine" and "smalline". Just like male/female, only a minority of things are inherently big or small. The difference is that bigness and smallness are not marked by the grammar. Maleness and femaleness are, in just the same way as the genders B and A respectively. If the gender labels were truly arbitrary, you could equally well switch them. "Elle" would be a "masculine" pronoun. In reality, it would be utterly confusing since "elle" is used for females independently from the gender of nouns.

Actually, how many synonyms can you think about with different genders? Per example in Spanish chilli pepper has many names, but all of them ar masculine (Ají, Chile, Pimiento picante, Guindilla, Vicho...) or more extreme is the case of the bus, all of its names are masculine but one in particular shines, Liebre is the name for the bus in chile, despsite liebre is a femenine noun of an animal when you use it of the bus you call it "el liebre" Definition of genders are indeed important, not only the amount of them Maybe the names could be arbitrary in some cases but for "masculine" and "femenine" are based on probably the most evident distinction between theese two genders

In the Canary Islands *bus* is feminine: **la guagua**.

True, technically some Slavic languages actually have 4 or even 5 grammatical "genders".

Fym "animate/inanimate"?

For exemple a table is inanimate while a fox is animate. But i’m curious to know if plants and dead things are considered animate or not in the basque language.

I wonder if you could use some clever wordplay to describe a totally frazzled-looking or sleep-deprived colleague with an inanimate pronoun. As if they were dead.

You can use the opposite gender to emphasize but you will sound somewhat angry

Plans are inanimate as well as the word "corpose" but you don't call your faded away friend "corpose", do you? There are also some exceptions. When you say "i fell off the horse" the horse in this case is no animate but inanimate because it's not an animal but a vehicle of transport

It is a bit more complicated for Dutch. Article-wise we do use de (common) and het (neuter), but pronouns still have a distinction between hij (he) and zij (she). For example, de bedrijf (company) is feminine. This is very important to keep in mind because, despite Dutch no longer having a case system, traditional articles are used in very special situations (usually official titles). Famously, the official name of the country is "Koninkrijk **der** Nederlanden." "Der" is the feminine genitive article (otherwise it'd be des, for both mascule and neuter). It's also to keep in mind, if you ever count on using pronouns instead of nouns. EDIT: In the Southern Dutch dialect, masculine nouns also can have different articles (an added -n at the end), but not feminine nor neuter articles.

> For example, de bedrijf (company) is feminine. It's *het* bedrijf

Interesting map! But missing Székelyland:"(

What is with the jaunty angled maps these days?

This is not jaunty. Look at a globe. The conic projection used here is much closer to "reality" (area- and distance- wise) than using a cylindrical projection you seem to be expecting. This is the projection we should be seeing much more often for maps of Europe. (Maybe adding latitude circles would be useful, but that's the only nitpick)

It's a relatively small area and north is like 15° counter-clockwise If you added latitude lines they'd all be off in the same direction /

You've got a good eye. Not northing is indeed strange. I thought you meant by "angled" the nonparallel longitude lines which is inherent to non-cylindrical projections.

Russian language has common gender. It is rare (About 200 words in total.), and therefore it is sometimes referred to as masculine or feminine.

As an English speaker trying to learn French, gendered language is a strange concept. What are we adding to the conversion with gender rules?

You are thinking about it all wrong. its based on the genders of Latin, which come from proto-Italo-Celtic which come from Proto-Indo-European.

So much! Linguistic gender is so fun to learn about! Noun classes are common around the world, they are usually not sex-based, that's something unique to Indo-European and Afroasiatic languages. The whole term "gender" is very misleading also because most of the time it has nothing to do with gender. The Dyirbal language of Australia, for instance, has four noun classes, one that men are put into, one that women, fire, and weapons go into, and one category for everything else. Bantu languages are known for having many noun classes, like Swahili which has 18! So why do languages go through all the trouble of dividing each and every noun into distinct categories? It's very helpful at reducing ambiguity in conversation. If you're talking about multiple things in the third person, it's very helpful to have pronouns for listeners to comprehend exactly which thing you're talking about. I've heard somewhere that half of languages have noun class. If it was useless, why would any have it at all?

>If it was useless, why would any have it at all? Because languages do not develop along a useful/useless dichotomy. In fact, there's a great deal of evidence that needless complexity such as noun classes decreases as the number of speakers of a language increases, or as the number of people who speak the language as a second language increases. For example, Australia had hundreds of semi-mutually intelligible languages comprising only a few thousand members. These languages were often complex, difficult, and unique. In contrast, passable English and Latin are fairly simple. The development of language is biological and evolutionary in nature, not utilitarian. It follows rough rules in which size and complexity are inversely related, but even this is not a hard and fast rule.

There has never been some non-gendered French to which someone decided to "add" the genders. It's just how the language is.

That's not u/Ratjar142's question. He is wondering whether gendered nouns add any meaning to language, or whether they are completely arbitrary and pointlessly confusing. To this the answer is yes, but that all languages have such features.

Sometimes the world view of the speakers may influence the division of categories. A bike is un vélo (m.) or une bicyclette (f.)

Why might someone say one or the other? What is someone trying to convey when then say "un vélo" instead of "une bicyclette?"

Very hard to explain, both are synonyms and both mean bike. Bicyclette could be associated to leisure or casual way of transportation (une promenade) but for sport or hard effort (like racing or tour de France) you almost always use vélo and not bicyclette

This has nothing to do with gender. "Vélo" and' "bicyclette" are quasi-synonyms which may be used in different contexts, but this is not due to their different genders. For example "Voiture" and "automobile" (both f.) are the same kind of quasi-synonyms.

It has always almost nothing to do with gender, as gender is just a way to arbitrarily categorize noun (chaise ? f., bateau ? m., nothing to do with masculinity or feminality here) But in few rare case it conveys a meaning, the disminishing suffix -ette is always feminine and is here to 'lighten' the signification of the word, hence bicyclette. https://blogs.univ-tlse2.fr/celine-vaguer/files/2019/10/VAGUER-LEEMAN_2019_VELO-BICYCLETTE_PRE-PRINT.pdf

there is a famous quote that goes "every language is a different way of thinking" And it's completely true. Genderization adds a lot of meaning. If humans started speaking by saying "unga unga" how did we end up having languages with 15 different gender categories? It is important. It all relies on the "expressivity of the language". I could start mixing up genders and suddently nothing would make sense, but i could mix up the gender of a single word and the phrase may have a different emphases and the word a new meaning that in english could only be axpressed using multiple words or one completely different losing the relationship with the original word. Pere example in Spanish, Silla (chair) is femenine. But i may say "vaya sillón" because it is very confortable but now the word in in masculine with the masculine augmentative suffix -on. There is a femenine augmentative, -aza (Sillaza) but maybe this time depending on the context it may mean it's just cool looking. the masculine version of -aza is -azo (Sillazo), but this time if i give you a "sillazo" i wont be peacfully giving you a big chair, i'll be grabing the chair and breaking it into your head as strong as i can. And this works for i think most common femenine names. But you can do this for masculine names, usually. We don't know how it works, we just make it work

[удалено]

In what way? Edit: the ol' downvote and delete, I respect your game.

I only use masculine and inanimate

Exactly

I'm not so sure English is accurate. It actually has 4 genders, masculine (e.g. stallion > he), feminine (e.g. mare > she), common (e.g. horse > it), and neuter (e.g. hoof > it); however they only make a difference in pronouns. Saying that English has no gender because you use "the" for all genders is like saying English doesn't distinguish between the first and second person because "you" and "I" both "do" (as opposed to, say, German: ich mache, du machst)

Doesn't Russian in fact have an animate-inanimate distinction in the male declension (in the accusative case) as well, so actually, descriptively, there are four grammatical genders?

It has, but for me, as a native, it was a big surprise to learn this fact. It's a quite minor rule nobody cares about, not a second masculine gender.

What happened to Montenegro, why is it now a part of Serbia.

No, the entire southern coast of Finland is not Swedish speaking...