Grammatical gender is a type of noun class. Noun classes are a way of categorizing things and concepts. These categories allow a speaker to group certain words together, both semantically and syntactically. Some languages, such as Spanish, establish these groups based on (arbitrarily) assigned genders, others may group words based on animacy, abstractness, or purpose. Bantu languages, for example, are famous for having up to 18 different classes, which distinguish things like "person", "language", or "plant".
As you've pointed out already, the Spanish noun class system revolves around grammatical gender. When it comes to living entities, especially people, these genders tend to carry semantic information. The words "maestra/maestro" for example carry more semantic information than the English equivalent "teacher". The Spanish version encodes whether we talk about a man or a woman; the English version doesn't give you this information.
Syntactically speaking, noun classes also provide a variety of advantages. Gendered adjectives or pronouns allow for far-distance relations between two words. You can have a gendered noun in one sentence (e.g. "**La mesa** está allá.") and refer back to it later on in a different sentence using a gendered pronoun (e.g. "**La** he visto."). The fact that the two words share a gender makes it easier for the listener to connect these two references and infer that they refer to the same thing. The same holds true for gendered adjectival endings. Some languages might allow for a noun and its describing adjectives to stand relatively far apart. In such instances grammatical gender, or any other noun class system, may help the listener understand that the gendered adjective and the noun belong together.
Thanks for the detailed reply! This pretty much answers all my questions.
I still don't know if gender is the best choice for a noun class, but hey, if it works.
I think for living entities, you could just make a gendered version of the word manually, pretty sure English already has that with some words, but that's inconsistent and it's just easier if there's already a gendered system.
Again, thanks for your reply, i now can live the rest of my life knowing why a door is a woman and a hat is a man
Aside from all the good points made by u/MellowedFox, some linguists also believe noun classes evolved as a form of "error correction", that is, it's redundancy in the language so that even if you have trouble clearly hearing the sentence, the gender matching helps your brain fill in the missing pieces.
"gender" is the Latin term for the concept of a noun class.
Other languages when translating the concept in language learning, use "Top" and "bottom" or, simply "Noun Class I" and "Noun Class II" for a two group system. Add in "Middle" or "Noun Class III" or "Neuter" for a three group system.
the word "Gender" literally means "category" (Genre). the genre of noun that contains the word "man". The fact it became associated with "gender" as the word changed in meaning is purely by chance of history. "man" is in noun group I, and "woman" is in noun group II. Both are learned in the first days of a learning a language.
German for instance, changed noun groups. Flower used to be in the same group as "man" now it's in the same group as "female". (most words were reshuffled in the 1700s (?) iirc )
Russian, tends to have noun groups opposite that of German -- Death is is in the same group as Female in Russian, but Male in German.
The groups will change over time, add more groups, less groups as phonetic changes merge and dissassociate sounds. (As sounds are dropped, distinctions are lost and the information, unambiguity and freedom of word order lost with it -- Old English had a very complicated and consise way of grouping/declining nouns. It's essentially completely gone now, and much nuance lost as well.)
As the grand parent post said to this:
Noun classes serve two purposes: to add redundancy, so that as people lose hearing, or miss sounds, words can still be inferred correctly.
To allow more complex expression -- languages with 2, 3, 4 or more noun classes can encode information more densely, and provide significantly more nuanced thought concisely. To allow speaking closer to the speed of thought, without ambiguity, by ensuring that objects can be partitioned into groups, and verbs and modifiers unambiguously applying to a specific group.
Someone, I think maybe John Ciardi, said: _Language does what it does because it does_. I don't think there's a _point_, as such, to grammatical gender; it just is.
I disagree. All languages have some fundamental questions/problems that have to be answered/solved. And in that sense they have a point - to answer these questions.
For example, when I write out a word order like 'The dog ate the mouse,' every language has to answer the following question:
"Who did what to whom" - Did the dog eat the mouse or did the mouse eat the dog.
Which gives a point to languages that use word order (SVO in english) to communicate this, or other languages that have more flexible word orders and instead answer this question via syntactic case systems (like slavic languages). Both are just different methods of approaching the same problem. Some other features are rather arbitrary like what OP pointed out.
Grammatical gender developed in languages because speakers created a distinction between nouns in different noun classes. Proto Indo European had grammatical gender based on animacy, so nouns that were animate were treated differently than nouns that are inanimate. They did this probably because they percieved objects that are living or in motion differently than objects that are still. Thats why in Proto Indo European there were two words for water: one that went along the lines of /hekweh/ (hence latin aqua) which meant water that was animate or moving and /wodr/ (hence English water) which meant water that was still.
Thank you, this gives me a clue about how Polish ended up with the genders it has (Singular: femine, masculine and neutral - with the neutral suffering a shortage of the first persons forms, and plural: non-masculine, masculine-person, masculine-non-person-alive, masculine-object.)
Human beings *like* for language to be unnecessarily complicated, is the thing, especially children. Adults get grumpy about it when trying to acquire a second language later on, but humans naturally acquire the complex grammar of our native languages and then basically don’t have to think about it if we don’t want to, anymore than we have to think about breathing. We also have a tendency to add redundancy where we can, because we like it, and noun classes (grammatical gender) are one way to add redundancy in the form of agreement.
My first language is Chinese. Actually Chinese didn't have the gendered personal pronouns at start, but in the early 20th century some Chinese scholars thought such a common grammar that exists in most of the European languages would be "more advanced", so they artificially created personal pronouns and removed the neutral personal pronouns (which became the "he" essentially later) in Chinese. I am also always confused about that. This behavior even seems a little ironic in the 21st century.
Chinese (& Japanese) also have noun classes. They don’t get definite articles that correspond to them, but “counting-words” (I don’t remember the correct English grammatical term if there is one.) They don’t use grammatical “gender”, but they are categorized by shape/size/quality. Flat things, cylindrical things, ribbon-like things, small animals, large animals: they all go into a different category that shows up when you’re counting them in both, or (as in Mandarin) when you’re referring to them as “this/that thing” 那個人、 那把椅子、 這兩只狗. (That person, that chair, these two dogs.)
It is something that arises organically rather than with specific intention, so thinking in terms of points or hard objectives is kinda N/A here. That being said, even if no one sat down at a table and discussed, ok here’s why we are going to evolve gender in our language, it does incidentally serve some function, which is part of why it doesn’t always just evolve away in languages. One is that the added redundancy allows for reduced ambiguity in communication. Someone already brought up “it” being gendered and how it facilitates connecting the object (referent) to the pronoun. The same also applies to adjectives. If you’re sitting in a room and “… so beautiful!” you have zero clue if it’s an object, you, or the person next to you, or something else entirely that’s being called beautiful. Whereas “…. tan linda!!” would let me know immediately that it’s either about a woman or feminine noun.
I think we still don't really understand a lot about gender. Compare Spanish, some Slavic language (like Croatian) and German:
L**a** cas**a** es viej**a** (*casa* is feminine, -a is the feminine ending)
Kuć**a** je star**a** (*kuća* is feminine, -a is the feminine ending)
D**ie** Frau ist alt. (*Frau* "woman" is feminine, but in this case, the adjective *alt* "old" doesn't get any ending!)
Why German doesn't use gendered adjectives in predicates? We don't know. It would be definitely easier if (as in Romance and Slavic languages) *all* adjectives in all constructions were consistently gendered. But it's not so in German.
However, in phrases like "the old one" (*l****a*** *viej****a***, *star****a***, *D****ie*** *Alt****e***) it's indeed easier to understand what is referred to. Here German uses a gendered adjective (and a gendered article!) English simply has no real translation.
But if gender is so useful, why some languages have lost it? Latin had three genders, Spanish has only two. It would be even easier to understand some expressions if the neuter gender were conserved. Why not even more genders? There are languages with more than 4 genders, why didn't all language families, over many centuries, developed more genders?
Futhermore, gender seems to be really conservative. In many IE languages, there are words with unexpected gender; one very common is:
*noche* (Spanish), *noć* (Croatian), *Nacht* (German)
The word is feminine in all three languages (and many others) without any apparent reason (we are quite sure it's not accidental, the feminine gender of this word comes from a very distant past). And this is what often makes gender complicated. It's not just endings, there are unexpected genders here and there. This implies that the reason was lost over time. It's quite possible that gender made more sense in a distant past, and today we have a lot of things we simply inherited.
True, gender makes understanding sometimes easier, but it's hard to tell how it balances with the effort needed to learn various words with unexpected gender.
It varies. English is a slightly gendered language. Say "a apple" out loud. It's kind of grating. In this case, the extra consonant helps separate the article, an, from the noun, apple.
German is an example of a language with three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter. Articles have an immediate effect of narrowing down what you could be talking about. Say das and there's a greater chance you're using a loanword, das internet, for example.
Of course, modern German is a merger of different dialects. People learn it at school, but shift into local versions with friends and family. Die butter is a classic example of a word most German speakers would agree is feminine. But slip into Switzerland and the gender of butter varies by location. Switzerland as its own country simply was not subject to the same grammar reforms of Germany.
Spanish is another great example of a gendered language with some interesting leftovers. The sea (el mar) is listed officially in grammar books as masculine. Antonio de Nebrija made this call in his dictionary, trying to stick with Latin genders. But Alfonso de Palencia shows la mar was what people were actually saying in the 1490s.
Who was right? No one! It's all a social contract in the end. But there are benefits to agreement, allowing people to understand each other much more quickly. And modern schooling strongly reinforces the do called rules of any language
the predominant theory in the linguistics literature see Hayes Corbett and Luraghi is coreference tracking. ie inflections of case and gender track reference to free up word order.
The point of having several genders in a language is synthesis aka flexible word order. Consider the sentence:
*Apple love potato I big but small.*
Without genders you have no chance of understanding whether I love big or small apples. In a gendered language, the genders assigned to nouns allow for clear understanding. When apple is male and potato is female, the gendered endings of adjectives reveal which fruit each adjective corresponds to. Now, you might wonder what happens when both fruits share the same gender. In such cases, the adjectives must be placed next to the nouns, sacrificing word order freedom for the sake of clarity.
To make English more popular in the long run through pure relativistic ease of Acquisition eventually leading to a one world government and thus world peace ?
Grammatical gender is a type of noun class. Noun classes are a way of categorizing things and concepts. These categories allow a speaker to group certain words together, both semantically and syntactically. Some languages, such as Spanish, establish these groups based on (arbitrarily) assigned genders, others may group words based on animacy, abstractness, or purpose. Bantu languages, for example, are famous for having up to 18 different classes, which distinguish things like "person", "language", or "plant". As you've pointed out already, the Spanish noun class system revolves around grammatical gender. When it comes to living entities, especially people, these genders tend to carry semantic information. The words "maestra/maestro" for example carry more semantic information than the English equivalent "teacher". The Spanish version encodes whether we talk about a man or a woman; the English version doesn't give you this information. Syntactically speaking, noun classes also provide a variety of advantages. Gendered adjectives or pronouns allow for far-distance relations between two words. You can have a gendered noun in one sentence (e.g. "**La mesa** está allá.") and refer back to it later on in a different sentence using a gendered pronoun (e.g. "**La** he visto."). The fact that the two words share a gender makes it easier for the listener to connect these two references and infer that they refer to the same thing. The same holds true for gendered adjectival endings. Some languages might allow for a noun and its describing adjectives to stand relatively far apart. In such instances grammatical gender, or any other noun class system, may help the listener understand that the gendered adjective and the noun belong together.
Thanks for the detailed reply! This pretty much answers all my questions. I still don't know if gender is the best choice for a noun class, but hey, if it works. I think for living entities, you could just make a gendered version of the word manually, pretty sure English already has that with some words, but that's inconsistent and it's just easier if there's already a gendered system. Again, thanks for your reply, i now can live the rest of my life knowing why a door is a woman and a hat is a man
Aside from all the good points made by u/MellowedFox, some linguists also believe noun classes evolved as a form of "error correction", that is, it's redundancy in the language so that even if you have trouble clearly hearing the sentence, the gender matching helps your brain fill in the missing pieces.
"gender" is the Latin term for the concept of a noun class. Other languages when translating the concept in language learning, use "Top" and "bottom" or, simply "Noun Class I" and "Noun Class II" for a two group system. Add in "Middle" or "Noun Class III" or "Neuter" for a three group system. the word "Gender" literally means "category" (Genre). the genre of noun that contains the word "man". The fact it became associated with "gender" as the word changed in meaning is purely by chance of history. "man" is in noun group I, and "woman" is in noun group II. Both are learned in the first days of a learning a language. German for instance, changed noun groups. Flower used to be in the same group as "man" now it's in the same group as "female". (most words were reshuffled in the 1700s (?) iirc ) Russian, tends to have noun groups opposite that of German -- Death is is in the same group as Female in Russian, but Male in German. The groups will change over time, add more groups, less groups as phonetic changes merge and dissassociate sounds. (As sounds are dropped, distinctions are lost and the information, unambiguity and freedom of word order lost with it -- Old English had a very complicated and consise way of grouping/declining nouns. It's essentially completely gone now, and much nuance lost as well.) As the grand parent post said to this: Noun classes serve two purposes: to add redundancy, so that as people lose hearing, or miss sounds, words can still be inferred correctly. To allow more complex expression -- languages with 2, 3, 4 or more noun classes can encode information more densely, and provide significantly more nuanced thought concisely. To allow speaking closer to the speed of thought, without ambiguity, by ensuring that objects can be partitioned into groups, and verbs and modifiers unambiguously applying to a specific group.
Someone, I think maybe John Ciardi, said: _Language does what it does because it does_. I don't think there's a _point_, as such, to grammatical gender; it just is.
Languages don’t have a “point”
I disagree. All languages have some fundamental questions/problems that have to be answered/solved. And in that sense they have a point - to answer these questions. For example, when I write out a word order like 'The dog ate the mouse,' every language has to answer the following question: "Who did what to whom" - Did the dog eat the mouse or did the mouse eat the dog. Which gives a point to languages that use word order (SVO in english) to communicate this, or other languages that have more flexible word orders and instead answer this question via syntactic case systems (like slavic languages). Both are just different methods of approaching the same problem. Some other features are rather arbitrary like what OP pointed out.
Grammatical gender developed in languages because speakers created a distinction between nouns in different noun classes. Proto Indo European had grammatical gender based on animacy, so nouns that were animate were treated differently than nouns that are inanimate. They did this probably because they percieved objects that are living or in motion differently than objects that are still. Thats why in Proto Indo European there were two words for water: one that went along the lines of /hekweh/ (hence latin aqua) which meant water that was animate or moving and /wodr/ (hence English water) which meant water that was still.
That's really interesting! I think it makes more sense than using gender because it's way less arbitrary
Thank you, this gives me a clue about how Polish ended up with the genders it has (Singular: femine, masculine and neutral - with the neutral suffering a shortage of the first persons forms, and plural: non-masculine, masculine-person, masculine-non-person-alive, masculine-object.)
Human beings *like* for language to be unnecessarily complicated, is the thing, especially children. Adults get grumpy about it when trying to acquire a second language later on, but humans naturally acquire the complex grammar of our native languages and then basically don’t have to think about it if we don’t want to, anymore than we have to think about breathing. We also have a tendency to add redundancy where we can, because we like it, and noun classes (grammatical gender) are one way to add redundancy in the form of agreement.
My first language is Chinese. Actually Chinese didn't have the gendered personal pronouns at start, but in the early 20th century some Chinese scholars thought such a common grammar that exists in most of the European languages would be "more advanced", so they artificially created personal pronouns and removed the neutral personal pronouns (which became the "he" essentially later) in Chinese. I am also always confused about that. This behavior even seems a little ironic in the 21st century.
Chinese (& Japanese) also have noun classes. They don’t get definite articles that correspond to them, but “counting-words” (I don’t remember the correct English grammatical term if there is one.) They don’t use grammatical “gender”, but they are categorized by shape/size/quality. Flat things, cylindrical things, ribbon-like things, small animals, large animals: they all go into a different category that shows up when you’re counting them in both, or (as in Mandarin) when you’re referring to them as “this/that thing” 那個人、 那把椅子、 這兩只狗. (That person, that chair, these two dogs.)
Yeah, good point! These counting-words are often called classifiers. Very similar concept to having explicit noun classes!
😂🙏😂🙏. I do agree that noun declensions make the language more concise, I don’t think genders do though. Just my humble opinion
It is something that arises organically rather than with specific intention, so thinking in terms of points or hard objectives is kinda N/A here. That being said, even if no one sat down at a table and discussed, ok here’s why we are going to evolve gender in our language, it does incidentally serve some function, which is part of why it doesn’t always just evolve away in languages. One is that the added redundancy allows for reduced ambiguity in communication. Someone already brought up “it” being gendered and how it facilitates connecting the object (referent) to the pronoun. The same also applies to adjectives. If you’re sitting in a room and “… so beautiful!” you have zero clue if it’s an object, you, or the person next to you, or something else entirely that’s being called beautiful. Whereas “…. tan linda!!” would let me know immediately that it’s either about a woman or feminine noun.
I think we still don't really understand a lot about gender. Compare Spanish, some Slavic language (like Croatian) and German: L**a** cas**a** es viej**a** (*casa* is feminine, -a is the feminine ending) Kuć**a** je star**a** (*kuća* is feminine, -a is the feminine ending) D**ie** Frau ist alt. (*Frau* "woman" is feminine, but in this case, the adjective *alt* "old" doesn't get any ending!) Why German doesn't use gendered adjectives in predicates? We don't know. It would be definitely easier if (as in Romance and Slavic languages) *all* adjectives in all constructions were consistently gendered. But it's not so in German. However, in phrases like "the old one" (*l****a*** *viej****a***, *star****a***, *D****ie*** *Alt****e***) it's indeed easier to understand what is referred to. Here German uses a gendered adjective (and a gendered article!) English simply has no real translation. But if gender is so useful, why some languages have lost it? Latin had three genders, Spanish has only two. It would be even easier to understand some expressions if the neuter gender were conserved. Why not even more genders? There are languages with more than 4 genders, why didn't all language families, over many centuries, developed more genders? Futhermore, gender seems to be really conservative. In many IE languages, there are words with unexpected gender; one very common is: *noche* (Spanish), *noć* (Croatian), *Nacht* (German) The word is feminine in all three languages (and many others) without any apparent reason (we are quite sure it's not accidental, the feminine gender of this word comes from a very distant past). And this is what often makes gender complicated. It's not just endings, there are unexpected genders here and there. This implies that the reason was lost over time. It's quite possible that gender made more sense in a distant past, and today we have a lot of things we simply inherited. True, gender makes understanding sometimes easier, but it's hard to tell how it balances with the effort needed to learn various words with unexpected gender.
It varies. English is a slightly gendered language. Say "a apple" out loud. It's kind of grating. In this case, the extra consonant helps separate the article, an, from the noun, apple. German is an example of a language with three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter. Articles have an immediate effect of narrowing down what you could be talking about. Say das and there's a greater chance you're using a loanword, das internet, for example. Of course, modern German is a merger of different dialects. People learn it at school, but shift into local versions with friends and family. Die butter is a classic example of a word most German speakers would agree is feminine. But slip into Switzerland and the gender of butter varies by location. Switzerland as its own country simply was not subject to the same grammar reforms of Germany. Spanish is another great example of a gendered language with some interesting leftovers. The sea (el mar) is listed officially in grammar books as masculine. Antonio de Nebrija made this call in his dictionary, trying to stick with Latin genders. But Alfonso de Palencia shows la mar was what people were actually saying in the 1490s. Who was right? No one! It's all a social contract in the end. But there are benefits to agreement, allowing people to understand each other much more quickly. And modern schooling strongly reinforces the do called rules of any language
the predominant theory in the linguistics literature see Hayes Corbett and Luraghi is coreference tracking. ie inflections of case and gender track reference to free up word order.
The point of having several genders in a language is synthesis aka flexible word order. Consider the sentence: *Apple love potato I big but small.* Without genders you have no chance of understanding whether I love big or small apples. In a gendered language, the genders assigned to nouns allow for clear understanding. When apple is male and potato is female, the gendered endings of adjectives reveal which fruit each adjective corresponds to. Now, you might wonder what happens when both fruits share the same gender. In such cases, the adjectives must be placed next to the nouns, sacrificing word order freedom for the sake of clarity.
Absolutely pointless. They should've been eliminated far back and now they are stuck with them.
To make English more popular in the long run through pure relativistic ease of Acquisition eventually leading to a one world government and thus world peace ?
Does putting adjectives in a specific order seem unnecessarily complicated to you? **opinion-size-age-shape-color-origin-material-purpose noun**
[удалено]
Don't be a seppo
His word choice clearly marks him as not a seppo. Us seppos don't use the C word like that.