# Evolution of word gender in languages



## gordon e-d

*Moderator note: See also this related thread about the gendering of abstract nouns.*

One of the biggest problems for me in learning a language is the gender of nouns .
Could someone  please tell my how it came to exist and why it persists in so many languages when English has managed to get rid of it (or perhaps never had it ) ?
  I have searched the internet for information without result; could I be pointed in the direction of sites which may enlighten me?


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## Alxmrphi

gordon e-d said:


> One of the biggest problems for me in learning a language is the gender of nouns .
> Could someone  please tell my how it came to exist and why it persists in so many languages when English has managed to get rid of it (or perhaps never had it ) ?
> I have searched the internet for information without result; could I be pointed in the direction of sites which may enlighten me?



English had gender until developments in Middle English slowly eroded them away, English had three genders and a very complex case system that eventually merged with other case forms so it virtually became extinct, however you can still see it in the plural of nouns and the genitive.

This has been talked about before so many a search in the forum for this topic will bring up some lengthy interesting discussions for you.
Actually, I had assumed it had been talked about here before, but I've just searched myself and couldn't find any information to pass on to you.

However, you may find this interesting:

Evolution of Gender in Indo-European languages.

I'm certainly going to go and read it right now.
The story of how English lost its genders is a long one, basically, the short and very generalised story is that, when the various European languages came to be spoken in England (not English) and as they all merged and gradually evolved of its own accord, as a mix of Norse from the Viking settlers, French (from the brief period when French was spoken in all formal situations), the mix with the traditional languages already spoken in England and the influence of Latin from when the Romans were here, it went through a lot of changes and battles..

A battle that is still ongoing is mixing the Romance language idea of putting a stress close to the end of a polysyballic word, and the Germanic idea of having the stress at the beginning of the word (Germanic Stress Rule, GSR), this is why we have a lot of differences in how we speak English, the only sort of consensus that has been found is that when two words have the same form, but are used as a verb / noun, the stress changes. The main part of this battle for what stress patterns to use was between 1600 and 1780 when "_speakers in general were struggling with the relics of a complex history_" (A History of the English Language, 2006).

i.e. it is at the front (Germanic) for nouns and at not at the front (Romance) for verbs.
Think about* súbject* (noun) and *subjéct* (verb).... *réject* (noun) and *rejéct* (verb) etc..

So different battles of ideas meant that things gradually eroded away, like the case system, like seemingly random gender, with so much disagreement because it was a giant mix of a load of different languages I think it had to, though it lasted a considerable time without it, but that was mainly before the Norman Conquest when things really started to change in English.

There was a period when English started to override its grammatical gender with semantic gender, this following example from my book is from the late tenth century (970 AD):

Wæs sōna gearo *wīf *[neuter] ... swā *hire* [feminine] weoruda helm beboden haefde...
'The _*woman*_ [neuter] was immediately ready, as the protector of troops [=God] had commanded *her*.

Basically what we are seeing here, is that they are paying attention to the gender of the word when the actual noun is used, but when referring back to this person using a pronoun, a more semantic (logical) pattern has started to emerge, referring to the person not by the grammatical gender, but by the semantic gender, as feminine. Basically pronouns started to adopt the gender of the person being referred to if they were human.

So this is part of one of the many stepping stones that English went through as we started to see things from a different light, this was just over 1,000 years ago it started to happen.

It's also a bit like when we lost our second person singular, though this happened a lot later, when thee / thy / thine was used with loved ones, but the formal 'you', was used, addressing the same person in the letters, in a different way as something _distant_ had also been mentioned in the sentence (i.e. a mother in law) this is visible in the 1600's, while the latest sightings of gender in English were in Kent in the 1340s, and this was known as a region that was "_behind the times_" and was the last to conform to new developments in English..

I hope that helps give an insight into how English changed a bit, a fascinating topic!


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## brtkrbzhnv

Well, I don't know why it was invented or why it caught on, but the primary reason so many Eurasian languages have gender is an evolutionary–historical one: that Proto-Indo–European did. The Wikipedia article on grammatical gender is long and informative.


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## gordon e-d

Thank you Alxmrphi for so much   information. Your link to "Evolution of Gender in IE languages" is fascinating, worthy of serious reading. 



> Well, I don't know why it was invented or why it caught on, but the primary reason so many Eurasian languages have gender is an evolutionary–historical one: that Proto-Indo–European did. The Wikipedia article on grammatical gender is long and informative.


I previously looked at the Wikipedia article which has much information but did not answer my questions. However, I revisiting the article and found links in the associated notes which help.

It seems that,  as I suspected , the answers to my questions are going to be complex and like so much history,  the  origins  irretrievably lost in the distant mists of time !


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## brian

Well, no one really "invented" genders, especially not for English, German, Spanish, etc.

Gender (as well as cases, morphology, etc.) was handed down from Proto-Indo-European (which is unattested and only partially reconstructed), and perhaps handed down from something even before that, and on down the line - but we'll never know for sure.

Basically, as far as I know, gender is something that has existed as far back as we know and can imagine.

So asking "where does gender come from" is sort of like asking "where do toes come from" - I don't know; they're just there!

(Actually, we probably have a better idea of where toes come from than where gender comes from, but that's another story. )


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## Sepia

We still have the big question "why". Probably noone can tell for sure, so I suppose that my qualified guess can be as good as anyone's.

Suppose it simply evolved out of a purely phonetic thing. Like when they began using words like articles they gradually had them fit the nouns in some way like rhyming. Even today we lots of words in the romance languages that end with an "a" and have the article (f) "la". As languages developed and became more complex this turned into an important part of a system.

People still deterine gender more by a subjective feeling of the phonetics than by pure logic. In German practically everybody is comfortable with "die CD" (F) even though it is an abrevation of "Comact Disk" - and by this logic it ought to be "der" and not "die". 

Frequently new words need a lot of time before you can tell what the proper gender is. A word like "Rally" used in German ist a good example. some 40-50 years ago there was really no rule for it. It could be der/die/das Rally. Gradually it was cut down to two possible genders - then, I think, the Swiss did not quite aggree with the Germans or something, and today I don't think you'd hear but "die Rally".

The weirdest thing, though, is Danish where some new words seem to change genders over the years.


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## effeundici

An interesting word with respect to word gender is the word *sun / sonne / sole / soleil *which is male in the southern and hot countries and feminine in the cold and northern countries, as far as I know.

It would be interesting to know the relevant gender in Icelandic and Arabic (if genders exist in those languages,though).


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## MarX

Sepia said:


> We still have the big question "why". Probably noone can tell for sure, so I suppose that my qualified guess can be as good as anyone's.
> 
> Suppose it simply evolved out of a purely phonetic thing. Like when they began using words like articles they gradually had them fit the nouns in some way like rhyming. Even today we lots of words in the romance languages that end with an "a" and have the article (f) "la". As languages developed and became more complex this turned into an important part of a system.
> 
> People still deterine gender more by a subjective feeling of the phonetics than by pure logic. In German practically everybody is comfortable with "die CD" (F) even though it is an abrevation of "Comact Disk" - and by this logic it ought to be "der" and not "die".
> 
> Frequently new words need a lot of time before you can tell what the proper gender is. A word like "Rally" used in German ist a good example. some 40-50 years ago there was really no rule for it. It could be der/die/das Rally. Gradually it was cut down to two possible genders - then, I think, the Swiss did not quite aggree with the Germans or something, and today I don't think you'd hear but "die Rally".


I was just thinking about *die Mail* today. I've no idea why Germans end up saying that insted of _das _or_ der Mail_. There doesn't seem to be any explanation for that.

Perhaps just like Brian said: Genders were just there.


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## Foygl

In general it is said that there are two kinds of gender systems (or class systems): one based on semantics, and the second based on morpho- and phonology. Few languages have a system completely based on semantics; most of them are a combination of semantics and morpho-/phonology, or only the latter. Tamil (and many of the other Dravidian languages) are some of the languages having a strict semantic system. In Tamil all nouns are classified by whether they are male/god or female/goddess, and most of the remaining nouns fall into their own group. The two first class of nouns are called rational nouns, while the last class is called irrational, and the rest of the morphology is base done these classes.
Such semantic system could easily have evolved in a language, because the speakers have wanted to categorize their surroundings. The morpho-/phonological approach may be a bit trickier, but like Sepia suggested, the phonology could have played an important role in many of the Romance languages, and the words in some languages may have been categorized on this background. 

It's hard to talk about gender/class systems in general, because there are so many different ones: almost every language with a gender/class system has a way of categorizing, so one must talk about a specific language. If you, gordon e d, want to know a lot more about it, I think you should definitely read the book "Genders," by G. G. Corbett. Through the book he uses examples from more than 200 languages to show how genders work, how genders are categorized, etc.



effeundici said:


> It would be interesting to know the relevant gender in Icelandic and Arabic (if genders exist in those languages,though).


In Arabic it is شمس and in Icelandic it is sól, and they are both feminine.


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## BP.

Interstingly, in Urdu we've borrowed the Arabic word *shams* (شمس) even when we had two other words for sun - _aaftaab_ and _suuraj_, but for us the same word *shams* isn't feminine since the sun is thought of as a masculine object.


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## berndf

The standard hypothesis has been that primitive cultures are (almost) all characterized by animistic world views.  Therefore, applying homomorphic concepts like gender to *all* things seems obvious.

The discrepancy of biological and syntactic gender which we observe in many modern languages (i.e. _das Mädchen, the girl,_ is neuter rather than feminine in German) would then be the (incidental) outcome of a long development and may also be due to changes in the views of gender in different societies (e.g. children being perceived as genderless or belonging to a third gender).


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## Alxmrphi

> (e.g. children being perceived as genderless or belonging to a third gender).


This is the case in Icelandic : *Barnið *(neuter [child]). Do you know why children would be seen differently, irrespective of their older counterparts that have a logical gender?


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## brian

Alex, even in English we often refer to infants as "it," even when we know the sex of the infant. The difference is that eventually "it" becomes "he" or "she," perhaps once it starts actually acting noticeably masculine or feminine, while in another language perhaps the "it" simply stuck or is used for a longer period of time than "it" in English.


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## Welshie

berndf said:


> The discrepancy of biological and syntactic gender which we observe in many modern languages (i.e. _das Mädchen, the girl,_ is neuter rather than feminine in German) would then be the (incidental) outcome of a long development and may also be due to changes in the views of gender in different societies (e.g. children being perceived as genderless or belonging to a third gender).



I thought Mädchen being neuter was simply due to the fact that the -chen suffix in German (diminuative) is necessarily neuter, the original word for "maid/girl" was Magd, according to wiktionary:

Herkunft:
Diminutiv (= Verniedlichungsform) von Magd → die Magd → das Mägdchen → das Mädchen

So "maid" -> "little maid", but the suffix -chen meant the the gender had to change to neuter. I am not sure this has anything to do with children being sexless.

"Alex, even in English we often refer to infants as "it," even when we know the sex of the infant."

I have never heard of this. I think any parent would be offended if one referred to their child as "it". The first question people ask about new babies is "Is it (the baby) a boy or a girl?" And then they will use the appropriate pronoun. I would never refer to a child as "it" and I would advise against doing so.


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## brian

Welshie said:
			
		

> "Alex, even in English we often refer to infants as "it," even when we know the sex of the infant."
> 
> I have never heard of this. I think any parent would be offended if one referred to their child as "it".



It could be a regional thing, but in any case, it's normal here. And this is what the Wikipedia article on It (pronoun) says:



> In English, words such as _it_ and its genitive form _its_ have been used to refer to babies and pets, although with the passage of time this usage has come to be considered too impersonal in the case of babies, with many usage critics arguing that it demeans a conscious being to the status of a mere thing.


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## BP.

> Originally Posted by *Welshie*
> I have never heard of this. I think any parent would be offended if one referred to their child as "it".



Chidren, especially infant babies are often referred to by 'it', though I feel the practice is getting archaic.


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## berndf

Alxmrphi said:


> This is the case in Icelandic : *Barnið* (neuter [child]). Do you know why children would be seen differently, irrespective of their older counterparts that have a logical gender?


You are imposing the concept of gender of your own culture onto the corresponding concept of a very different hypothetical culture out of which PIE has emerged and where people knew nothing about genetics and X and Y chromosomes. Why do there have to be only two genders? What would be more natural than the _trinity_ of _father, mother _and _child_? Interestingly, when elementary school children in Germany learn the concept of grammatical gender and to give them a name, most of them intuitively suggest the name _Kindlich_ (_=childly_) for neuter.



Welshie said:


> I thought Mädchen being neuter was simply due to the fact that the -chen suffix in German (diminuative) is necessarily neuter.


That is correct. My point was simply that grammatic gender may, for whatever reason, differ from biological gender.


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## MarX

Welshie said:


> I thought Mädchen being neuter was simply due to the fact that the -chen suffix in German (diminuative) is necessarily neuter, the original word for "maid/girl" was Magd, according to wiktionary:
> 
> Herkunft:
> Diminutiv (= Verniedlichungsform) von Magd → die Magd → das Mägdchen → das Mädchen
> 
> So "maid" -> "little maid", but the suffix -chen meant the the gender had to change to neuter. I am not sure this has anything to do with children being sexless.


You're right. There's a thread just about *Mädchen*.

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1252457


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## Hulalessar

Welshie said:


> I have never heard of this. I think any parent would be offended if one referred to their child as "it". The first question people ask about new babies is "Is it (the baby) a boy or a girl?" And then they will use the appropriate pronoun. I would never refer to a child as "it" and I would advise against doing so.


 
But when you ask "Is it a boy or girl?" you are still referring to the baby as "it"!


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## Athaulf

Hulalessar said:


> But when you ask "Is it a boy or girl?" you are still referring to the baby as "it"!



I don't think this is a good analogy. "It" is a part of the idiomatic phrase "is it X or Y?" here, which can refer to persons of known gender in other situations, as well as any other entities. In this phrase, "it" refers to the outcome of a process abstracted away from the concrete entities that are involved in it. For example, imagine you were curious about the outcome of last year's Wimbledon men's finals, but unable to watch it. You could then ask someone who had just watched the game: "Is it Nadal or Federer?" By analogy with your above example, we could then conclude that "it" can refer to men too. (Notice that "Is he...?" would not be appropriate this context.)

(That's at least my analysis. Someone more knowledgeable about English syntax and semantics might disagree.)


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## Athaulf

Alxmrphi said:


> The story of how English lost its genders is a long one, basically, the short and very generalised story is that, when the various European languages came to be spoken in England (not English) and as they all merged and gradually evolved of its own accord, as a mix of Norse from the Viking settlers, French (from the brief period when French was spoken in all formal situations), the mix with the traditional languages already spoken in England and the influence of Latin from when the Romans were here, it went through a lot of changes and battles..



This is questionable. English grammar has undergone dramatic changes since the Old English period, but it's unclear to what extent this was a consequence of language contact and mixing. This issue has been discussed at length in earlier threads. To state the main objection to your theory very briefly, there are many examples of languages that underwent similar changes without the same factors involved, as well as languages that didn't change in an analogous manner despite very similar historical circumstances. 



> There was a period when English started to override its grammatical gender with semantic gender, this following example from my book is from the late tenth century (970 AD):
> 
> Wæs sōna gearo *wīf *[neuter] ... swā *hire* [feminine] weoruda helm beboden haefde...
> 'The _*woman*_ [neuter] was immediately ready, as the protector of troops [=God] had commanded *her*.
> 
> Basically what we are seeing here, is that they are paying attention to the gender of the word when the actual noun is used, but when referring back to this person using a pronoun, a more semantic (logical) pattern has started to emerge, referring to the person not by the grammatical gender, but by the semantic gender, as feminine. Basically pronouns started to adopt the gender of the person being referred to if they were human.


There's nothing peculiar about Old English here. The Indo-European three-gender system is still fully alive in Slavic languages, and yet, they use the exact same pattern. If, say, a noun referring to a man is grammatically feminine, the adjectives, possessive pronouns, etc. preceding it in a noun phrase will take feminine endings, but the subsequent pronouns that are coreferential with it may be masculine. This is certainly not indicative of an erosion of the gender system.


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## Alxmrphi

> There's nothing peculiar about Old English here. The Indo-European three-gender system is still fully alive in Slavic languages, and yet, they use the exact same pattern.


I can only report what I read in my book (where I based my first opinion)



> "There was also a steadily increasing tendency for semantic gender to override grammatical, particularly in human nouns. From a late tenth-century text: (quote above)"


Which certainly gives the impression it never used to be like that, incidentally, Icelandic doesn't conform to this rule that was apparently present in Indo-European.



> but it's unclear to what extent this was a consequence of language contact and mixing. This issue has been discussed at length in earlier threads. To state the main objection to your theory very briefly, there are many examples of languages that underwent similar changes without the same factors involved, as well as languages that didn't change in an analogous manner despite very similar historical circumstances.


I think trying to compare the developments of two languages based on only one idea (language mixing) is absolutely and 100% fundamentally flawed. Given how many things are given to chance and the political, geographical and social aspects of what was going on at that time.

You simply cannot say (not a direct quote) "*in a different country with a different language with the same historical circumstances, this didn't happen*"

To even comprehend a comparison of two places, let alone languages, is an absolutely flawed idea. It would have to be a virtual parallel universe with slightly different things going on in order for a fair comparison to be made.

Many historians agree, even from language historians in the year 200 all the way up to today can easily see the mixing of languages in English certainly had a deep and profound effect on the language. I don't imagine it's the sole answer, by a long shot... but you cannot just discount it based on a similar language going through 'similar historical circumstances'. I mean, there is just so much that happens in history, there aren't any two places on Earth with close enough historical circumstances to make a fair comparison, there's just too much chance and possible other, unforseen and unconsidered outside influences to brush it off because of considering another language.

Just out of curiosity, what language(s) were you referring to and in respect of what grammatical changes?
That seems like something I'd be interested in looking at, how two languages developed in similar ways and how they were similar / different in a historical context.


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## ahshav

effeundici said:


> An interesting word with respect to word gender is the word *sun / sonne / sole / soleil *which is male in the southern and hot countries and feminine in the cold and northern countries, as far as I know.
> 
> It would be interesting to know the relevant gender in Icelandic and Arabic (if genders exist in those languages,though).



In Hebrew the word is שמש shemesh - a cognate of the Arabic shams. However, in Hebrew it is one of the rare words that has no gender assigned - both feminine and masculine can be used.


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## Athaulf

Alxmrphi said:


> I think trying to compare the developments of two languages based on only one idea (language mixing) is absolutely and 100% fundamentally flawed. Given how many things are given to chance and the political, geographical and social aspects of what was going on at that time.



What I had in mind are the theories that explain the historical changes of English in the analytical direction, including among other things the disappearance of its grammatical gender system, by postulating the influence of the language contact with Old Norse, Norman French, or both. The issue has been discussed extensively in the past here; see for example this or this thread for my thoughts on the matter. (I'm not implying that you share the opinions of the people I debated in those threads, of course.)



> You simply cannot say (not a direct quote) "*in a different country with a different language with the same historical circumstances, this didn't happen*"
> 
> To even comprehend a comparison of two places, let alone languages, is an absolutely flawed idea. It would have to be a virtual parallel universe with slightly different things going on in order for a fair comparison to be made.


Exactly so. This is why extreme caution should be exercised before making any judgments on such matters, even if they sound eminently plausible on first sight. We simply have no idea how (if at all) the disappearance of grammatical genders in English was influenced by the contact of English with foreign languages. It may or may not be among the causes, and my opinion is that the only way to test the causal link is to look at the set of IE languages whose speakers passed through similar historical circumstances, and the set of those that underwent analogous changes. As far as I know, the correlation between these sets happens to be weak to nonexistent. This doesn't strictly disprove the causal relationship in the case of English, of course, but it does make it seem less plausible. 

(I should also point out that I have no formal expertise on this topic, so my impressions could be mistaken.)



> Just out of curiosity, what language(s) were you referring to and in respect of what grammatical changes?
> That seems like something I'd be interested in looking at, how two languages developed in similar ways and how they were similar / different in a historical context.


People often argue that in the Old and Middle English periods, the political, social, and economic forces operating in England made the outside linguistic influences on English particularly strong, thus explaining its dramatic shift towards a more analytic language. Yet, there is no such historical argument I've ever seen that wouldn't be applicable -- with the actors changed, of course -- to, say, various Slavic or Baltic languages, which however didn't undergo any similar changes. Furthermore, if you ask why the continental Scandinavian languages have changed in ways strikingly similar to English -- including, in some dialects, the disappearance of grammatical genders -- you can't find any historical forces analogous to those commonly invoked to explain the changes in English. At the end, such theories can be maintained only by special pleading. 

(It's possible that someone has come up with a better theory along these lines than anything I've seen before, which I would be curious to see. But I'm not holding my breath.)


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## gordon e-d

Athaulf said:


> I don't think this is a good analogy. "It" is a part of the idiomatic phrase "is it X or Y?" here, which can refer to persons of known gender in other situations, as well as any other entities. In this phrase, "it" refers to the outcome of a process abstracted away from the concrete entities that are involved in it. For example, imagine you were curious about the outcome of last year's Wimbledon men's finals, but unable to watch it. You could then ask someone who had just watched the game: "Is it Nadal or Federer?" By analogy with your above example, we could then conclude that "it" can refer to men too. (Notice that "Is he...?" would not be appropriate this context.)
> 
> (That's at least my analysis. Someone more knowledgeable about English syntax and semantics might disagree.)


I think in this case "it" is not referring directly to the men but to the winner.
"Is the winner Nadal or Federer"


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## gordon e-d

Living languages must be in  a constant state of change. That may include degeneration of the use of gender.   Instead of looking at the dim distant history of language, it seems to me  that clues to past changes may be better gained by looking at present influences on language modification.
Is there any research going on now, investigating  changes of gender use within living memory  which could reliably attributed to particular causes ?


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## berndf

Athaulf said:


> People often argue that in the Old and Middle English periods, the political, social, and economic forces operating in England made the outside linguistic influences on English particularly strong, thus explaining its dramatic shift towards a more analytic language. Yet, there is no such historical argument I've ever seen that wouldn't be applicable -- with the actors changed, of course -- to, say, various Slavic or Baltic languages, which however didn't undergo any similar changes. Furthermore, if you ask why the continental Scandinavian languages have changed in ways strikingly similar to English -- including, in some dialects, the disappearance of grammatical genders -- you can't find any historical forces analogous to those commonly invoked to explain the changes in English. At the end, such theories can be maintained only by special pleading.


The tendency to erode gender distinction is indeed found in many Germanic languages. The Northern West-Germanic languages Dutch and Low German (English genetically belongs to this group) display the same erosion process as Scandinavian languages, namely an almost complete merger of male and female while neuter remains separate leading to a _common-neuter_ gender system.
 
In late OE/early ME the male and female forms of the demonstrative/article _se_ and _sēo_ merged to _þe_ while the neuter form _þæt_ stayed on to become two separate words in Modern English: _the_ and _that_. I would be interested to know if this is a sign of a similar development in OE to that of other West-Germanic languages, namely that the morphological distinction between male and female eroded earlier than the morphological characteristics of neuter.
 
The start of the erosion of the gender system in late OE/early ME seems to be the weakening of vowels in non-stem syllables (merger of /a/, /o/ and /u/ to become Shwas), including suffix syllables which carry most of the gender information. This process happened in all major West-Germanic languages with the transition from Old English to Middle English, Old Dutch to Middle Dutch, Old Low German to Middle Low German and Old High German to Middle High German.


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## Alxmrphi

> The start of the erosion of the gender system in late OE/early ME seems to be the weakening of vowels in non-stem syllables (merger of /a/, /o/ and /u/ to become Shwas), including suffix syllables which carry most of the gender information.


 
I have read something similar, with the erosion of gender in adjectives, that the sounds that defined gender (suffixes) were so similar it was easy to see where they kind of developed into one entity (I haven't got my source here right now, but I'll edit my post tonight to see if I can include an example).

Basically it was saying, with the GSR (Germanic Stress Rule) adding stress to the front of words, the endings that carried the gender were very weak and hard to distinguish between, and has been put forwarded as a credible case to explain how adjectives lost their gender.


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## Hulalessar

Athaulf said:


> I don't think this is a good analogy. "It" is a part of the idiomatic phrase "is it X or Y?" here, which can refer to persons of known gender in other situations, as well as any other entities. In this phrase, "it" refers to the outcome of a process abstracted away from the concrete entities that are involved in it. For example, imagine you were curious about the outcome of last year's Wimbledon men's finals, but unable to watch it. You could then ask someone who had just watched the game: "Is it Nadal or Federer?" By analogy with your above example, we could then conclude that "it" can refer to men too. (Notice that "Is he...?" would not be appropriate this context.)
> 
> (That's at least my analysis. Someone more knowledgeable about English syntax and semantics might disagree.)


 
You are of course quite right and my point was not entirely serious. I do though recall a mother saying to someone: "Don't call it it!"


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## gordon e-d

> You are of course quite right and my point was not entirely serious. I do though recall a mother saying to someone: "Don't call it it!"


We are getting frivolous compared with some of these postings ! !
I remember from my childhood being reprehended in a similar way with the phrase " Don't say _it  _, it is the cat's mother !


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## berndf

*Moderator note:*
*This is getting chatty, lads. Let's stay focused on the topic.*


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## J.F. de TROYES

effeundici said:


> An interesting word with respect to word gender is the word *sun / sonne / sole / soleil *which is male in the southern and hot countries and feminine in the cold and northern countries, as far as I know.
> 
> It would be interesting to know the relevant gender in Icelandic and Arabic (if genders exist in those languages,though).


 
What do you mean with northern and southern countries, those located in Europe ?
 The Arabic has two genders : the word _shams_ sun is feminine , while _qamar_, moon , is masculine, and it the same  in German, just a coincidence undoubtly.
In languages with genders I think that the distribution between two or three genders was influenced by various factors that besides can be different from one to another languages, except when sex is concerned. And even in that case ther are sometimes exceptions.


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## Erick404

Athaulf said:


> I don't think this is a good analogy. "It" is a part of the idiomatic phrase "is it X or Y?" here, which can refer to persons of known gender in other situations, as well as any other entities. In this phrase, "it" refers to the outcome of a process abstracted away from the concrete entities that are involved in it. For example, imagine you were curious about the outcome of last year's Wimbledon men's finals, but unable to watch it. You could then ask someone who had just watched the game: "Is it Nadal or Federer?" By analogy with your above example, we could then conclude that "it" can refer to men too. (Notice that "Is he...?" would not be appropriate this context.)
> 
> (That's at least my analysis. Someone more knowledgeable about English syntax and semantics might disagree.)



I dont think that in this case the pronoun "it" refers to a person. It's rather a dummy pronoun; in other words, there isnt a real subject. In a null-subject language, there wouldnt be any pronoun in this sentence, regardless of the gender.


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## szammel

effeundici said:


> An interesting word with respect to word gender is the word *sun / sonne / sole / soleil *which is male in the southern and hot countries and feminine in the cold and northern countries, as far as I know.
> 
> It would be interesting to know the relevant gender in Icelandic and Arabic (if genders exist in those languages,though).



In Arabic is the word "shams" (Sun) feminine.


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## szammel

MarX said:


> I was just thinking about *die Mail* today. I've no idea why Germans end up saying that insted of _das _or_ der Mail_. There doesn't seem to be any explanation for that.
> 
> Perhaps just like Brian said: Genders were just there.



I think this is analog to "die Post" (Mail). (Mail means in German Email).


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## boadicea7

Why and how do you think (or preferably know) that genders were come up with in languages.

And I don't mean genders as applied to people (men and women) but rather applying genders to objects and nouns.

As a latin-language speaker I find  that speaking of things and ideas as being femenine or masculine is quite normal, but when speaking (and therefore thinking) in English I realise that genders can be rather useless and non sensical.
I mean how can a table be femenine, a pencil masculine and a pen femenine?
I think the gender neutral aspect of English makes more sense.

I also am pretty sure that there's no such thing as a universal standard behind the human psyche or a collective imaginary that can explain why some peoples see certain things as being masculine or femenine because no word  is femenine or masculine in _all_ languages.
So, was it a random thing? Or Has it got something to do with a culture's perception of sex, applying it not only to people but extending to every thing?

And do you think that it would be better if all languages were gender neutral like English. What can be the advantage of having genders?


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## miguel89

Hola:

En el caso del indoeuropeo, es probable que en una etapa muy antigua se agrupara a las palabras según designasen entidades animadas o inanimadas. Posteriormente este sistema se habría trastornado, dando lugar en griego, latín, en las eslávicas y en las demás lenguas derivadas a una división en tres grupos (masculino, femenino y neutro). 

La causa de este cambio de criterio la desconozco, si bien es probable que en la distribución de las palabras entre los grupos desempeñara un papel determinante la analogía y la forma de las mismas palabras, como sigue ocurriendo en las lenguas actuales cada vez que una palabra cambia de género.

Por consiguiente, si es que en efecto hubo un cambio de criterio, no sería de extrañar que provocase muchas arbitrariedades. Lo razonable hubiera sido que en esta etapa se hubiese reorganizado todo y que el masculino y el femenino se reservara para designar entidades sexuadas. Pero esto no es ni sería posible bajo ninguna circunstancia, por las mismas razones que impiden que tal reorganización ocurra hoy y que impiden cualquier variación a gran escala y a voluntad que aspire a ser duradera.

La evolución del latín en las diversas lenguas romances sirve para ilustrar todo esto. Todas las palabras que tenían genero neutro se unieron en un mismo grupo con las de género masculino, y esto debido a cambios fonéticos sin atender a lo que sería más razonable.


En cuanto a las ventajas y las desventajas de hacer esta distinción, yo creo que no hay ni unas ni otras. Cada lengua se acomoda a sí misma, por decirlo de alguna manera. Las lenguas que marcan el género lo usan muchas veces como un recurso para sortear ambigüedades y para crear nuevas palabras o para hacer derivaciones. No obstante esto los hablantes de inglés, pongamos por caso, no parecen muy acongojados ni se parten la cabeza por no poseerlos. Si pudieramos suprimir el género de golpe en italiano, por ejemplo, seguramente al hacerlo colapsaría el sistema. Pero en inglés no son necesarias, no sabríamos que hacer con ellas, las cosas estan dispuestas de modo que podamos prescindir de ellas.

Mil disculpas por haber respondido en castellano, vengo muy oxidado con el inglés y la redacción me hubiera tomado el triple.

Saludos


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## sokol

Mod note:
Please use *search function.* I merged with an older thread with the very same topic.


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## wtrmute

gordon e-d said:


> One of the biggest problems for me in learning a language is the gender of nouns .
> Could someone  please tell my how it came to exist and why it persists in so many languages when English has managed to get rid of it (or perhaps never had it ) ?
> I have searched the internet for information without result; could I be pointed in the direction of sites which may enlighten me?



Sorry, but you say it like gender's a bad thing...

The use of genders is when you have referents.  For example, English still has the remains of a gender system in its pronouns.  So when I say:

_Alice told Bob he could borrow her car, but he had to go get it at the shop first._

Notice that you can tell whose car it is and who should get what at the shop.  Now, if we replace all pronouns by a generic, genderless pronoun, which we'll denote as N in subjective form (he/she/it), A for oblique form (him/her/it) and G for possessive form (his/her/its):

_Alice told Bob N could borrow G car, but N had to go get A at the shop first._

Notice that now we don't know if Alice is borrowing Bob's car or vice versa, and who it is who has to pick up what at the shop (you could infer that it's the car that must be picked up, but it's equally valid that either of them would need to go).  So gender does make a difference.

The issue with gender for English-speakers is that the English gender system is mostly semantic, so men are masculine, women are feminine, and everything else is neuter.  If when you study other languages, you keep in mind that gender is part of the noun, then you'll memorise it and not worry about it.  For example, if you memorise that the word for _girl_ in German is _Mädchen_, you'll never know which gender it is, and you'll probably guess feminine, since it's a woman.  If, instead, you memorise it as _das Mädchen_, whenever you think of the word the correct gender will pop up and you'll be able to use the correct referents.

I hope that was helpful...


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## Alxmrphi

> What can be the advantage of having genders?


I think to an extent, clarity, an example of what I mean might help:
In Italian:

*Marco è andato al negozio e ha comprato una torta, un albero e un computer.*
(Mark went to the shop and bought a cake, a tree and a computer)

If someone said in response to this statement "Fammela vedere." it indicates the cake (_una torta_) and not the other two (un albero, un computer), in English if you said "Let me see it." - it really wouldn't be obvious what you are talking about.

I'll try another example in Icelandic:
*
Katrín er hérne, hún færði epli, köku og geisðladisk.*
(Katrín is here, she brought an apple, a cake and a CD.)

If someone said in response to this: "Gefðu það Snorra, gefðu hana Þór og gefðu hann Aðalbirni." it's easy to see what is being referred to, in English it'd sound like:
"Give it to Snorri, give it to Þór and give it to Aðalbjörn." Here the gender of 'it' in Icelandic indicates what is being talked about in an easier way, the English would be so confusing so this is an advantage that gender-based languages have.

So one aspect of gender is clarity when it comes to pronouns.
The chapter I'm reading now in one of my linguistics books is one on redundancy, and it points out that redundancies aren't pointless, they certainly aren't essential to the language (as someone mentioned before that English gets along fine without grammatical gender, using natural gender instead) but the end point the book makes is that redundancies in language make it more difficult to be misheard / for mistakes to be made.

The more different a word acts means the less likely it's going to get confused with another word, that's why we don't have words made up of all the possible letter combinations, like "lenk" - it's not a word, but it's a possible word. If we had a logical system where words sounded and were spelt like each other, with one letter (or combination) indicating a different aspect, shouting it at a marketplace might be difficult if the other person thinks you are saying a different word. If however these 2 words were different genders in a different language, this aspect of redundancy makes it much more difficult for the other person to mishear if you use your grammar to indicate the gender of the thing you want him to give you.

I hope that sort of makes sense!


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## Lars H

Hej

And old thread, I know...



gordon e-d said:


> One of the biggest problems for me in learning a language is the gender of nouns. Could someone please tell my how it came to exist?



My (wild) guess is that if you deal with live stock of any kind, it will be efficient to use genders to distinguish between cocks/hens, bulls/cows and so on. And I believe that keeping live stock was very much a PIE activity.
If you then add, as is mentioned previously in this thread, an animistic view of the world, that all things are alive and have a soul of their own, it is only logical to give rocks, trees and wireless broad bands, genders as well.

The development in Swedish is in this aspect quite similiar to English. Most use of feminine/masculine genders has been replaced by utrum. But when it comes to the inhabitants of barns, henhouses and stables, the genders are still today as much alive as they have ever been.


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## Alxmrphi

Hi Lars, what's utrum? (I'm not familiar with Swedish).


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## berndf

Alxmrphi said:


> Hi Lars, what's utrum? (I'm not familiar with Swedish).


Neuter.


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## Lars H

First, my apologies, I took for granted that "utrum" was an international expression, but it seems to be home made. But to be exact, "utrum" is not neuter. 

Traditionally, Swedish has four genders:
Maskulinum: en man, mannen
Femininum: en klocka, klockan
Neutrum/Neuter: ett hus, huset
Reale: en sten, stenen (soulless things, called "den/it") 

Nowadays we basicly have two genders (although masc./fem. is still used in some cases):
*Utrum *comes from "either of" (either masc. or fem.) and has pretty much come to replace these two genders. And it is now rather difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish Utrum from Reale.
*Neutrum*/Neuter is unaffected and no neuter words has been transformed to utrum as far as I know.


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## XiaoRoel

Disculpadme por expresarme en español, pero las otras lenguas que escribo son más raras o minoritarias.
La cuestión del género en ide. No es una cosa difícil de captar en líneas generales, pero sí algo confuso en sus sutilezas.
Lo que sí es necesario es no mezclar épocas alejadísimas entre sí de lenguas con conexiones entre ellas muy remotas.
No quiero entrar al tema de la definición de los términos "indoeuropeo común", "protoindoeuropeo", "familia, diaistema y lenguas en contacto".
Refirámonos sólo al género en la morfología nominal (y pronominal) en las lenguas ie.
En los más antiguos estadios que podemos ver sólo se distingue entre animado e inanimado, y esto sólo en los casos nominales (sujeto-objeto, o SUJ y OD) ya que el inanimado en los casos oblicuos no tiene diferencias con los animados. Esta diferenciación en los casos rectos proviene de una mentalidad lingüística que sólo concibe agentes animados, siendo las "cosas" naturalmente objetos. Por tanto, no es una diferenciación de género, sino funcional y tiene que ver con el papel de sujeto-objeto, o más bien, de agente-paciente.
Este sistema morfológico que todavía no marca género se daba en lo que luego vino a ser en las lenguas históricas la conjugación atemática (las terceras del latín y del griego).
Junto a esta declinación y por medio de una alternancia de sufijo morfemático *-e-/-o-, se crea otro paradigma que tendrá gran éxito en derivados sufijales. En cuanto a la marca de género, se sigue conservando la indefinición de la declinación atemática: los agentes (animados) diferencian el caso sujeto del caso objeto, los pacientes (inanimados) sólo tienen una forma de objeto directo.
Ejemplificando en el latín: hay dos tipos de paradigma nominal: uno sin vocal temática y otro con vocaltemática alternante.
Así nacen los modelos de nox (nokt-s), caso objeto noct-em (con el morfema de caso tematizado en -e-), y cor, caso objeto y, secundariamente objeto, que sería la declinación atemática y otro tipo que opone lupus (caso agente) con lupum (caso objeto) a templum, caso objeto y sujeto).
En este estadio lingüistico con dos morfemas, uno sufijado con Vt. y el otro atemático en los que no hay diferenciación todavía de género.
A este estadio va a suceder otro en el que las lenguas (dadas sus peculiares evoluciones sociales, ideológicas, económicas, etc.) van a sentir necesidad de distinguir según el sexo. Este proceso se puede observar en los primeros documentos hititas, aun sin ser sistemática la oposición masculino-femenino (con base sexual social).
El mecanismo es la especialización de un sufijo *-yH2 (>-ya,-a) que, siguiendo el sistema del paradigma con vocal temática, también un primitivo sufijo -ye/-yo (o -yH1/-yH3), empiez a distinguir ciertas palabras con el nuevo sufijo como sexualmente diferentes de las del mismo campo semántico con sufijo-e/o-, que se empiezan a considerar como masculinos.
A partir de aquí el desarrollo es sencillo:
1. El sufijo -a- se convierte en Vt y marca de femenino frente a -e/o-, que pasa a serlo de masculino. El sistema atemático continua como está.
2. Como consecuencia de lo anterior, en los temas en -e/o-, la forma de objeto (paciente) se empieza a polarizar como inanimado: quedan así un sistema fem/masc/inanimado en el caso sujeto (a+ø/o+s/o-m) y por el otro lado en el mismo caso sujeto la declinación atemática que enfrenta -s (agente) a -ø (paciente) y que se amolda al anterior esquema pasando -s a representar los animados y -ø los inanimados.
3. Poco a poco la oposición en las declinaciones temáticas se va inclinando hacia la distinción final de géneros: -a- (fem.), -os (masc.), -om (neutro, 'ni uno ni otro'). La declinación atemática se ajusta a este sistema opositivo y distinguirá un masc-fem. (animado) en -s a un neutro (inanimado) en -ø.
4. En el curso de los siglos, siguiendo con el latín (pero el mismo o parecido proceso se da en todas las lenguas ides), el paradigma de tre géneros, paradigmatizado en el adjetivo de tres terminaciones, en alternancia con el más indefinido sistema de género de los paradigmas atemáticos.
5. En latín vulgar el valor moderno de femenino-a, masculino o, debió universalizarse en el latín hablado y poco a poco fué eliminando excepciones de género y el neutro que correspondía a otro eje sistemático y que en las lenguas romances desaparece (otras lenguas modernas lo mantienen).
6. A día de hoy las lenguas romances mantienen los paradigmas con Vt (ahora morfema de género) y los restos del atemático.
7. Toda esta evolución intralingüística ha llevado a que la primitiva distinción de género natural haya desaparecido como criterio de género para volver éste a sus inicios morfosintácticos ya que el morfema de género indica concordancia gramatical y es arbitrario.
Creo que este esquema sitúa el proceso en su correcta perspectiva temporal y estructural.


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## berndf

Lars H said:


> But to be exact, "utrum" is not neuter.


Oops, sorry.


Lars H said:


> *Utrum *comes from "either of" (either masc. or fem.) and has pretty much come to replace these two genders. And it is now rather difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish Utrum from Reale.


In English, I believe this is called "common".


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## brian

berndf said:


> In English, I believe this is called "common".



http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/utrum


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## edwardtheconfessor

Mod note:
Original thread (posted in Latin) merged with an older EHL thread.

Any Latin scholars out there who can clarify?
Latin noun gender: why does it have _three_ (masc., fem., neuter) unlike modern 'Latin' languages - which have only masucline and feminine (French, Italian, Spanish, Portugese, Rumanian) - but in all cases including randomly even for _inanimate_ (therefore sexless!) objects, whereas modern English, say, by contrast, has masculine and feminine only for actual _living_ things (which have a sex)?

_Examples: _Latin: octopus (masc.) - plural: octop*i*
radius (masc.) - pulral: radi*i*
BUT opus (neut.) - pural: op*era*
genus (neut.) - plural: gen*era*

YET mensa (fem.) - plural ??

English; lost the use of masculine and feminine nouns, (except those denoting things with an actual sex) - perhaps around the time it lost so many of its word endings, as a result of the fusion of old Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse?
Modern 'Latin' langauages did the opposite (ALL nouns are masculine or feminine, quite randomly it seems, including all _inanimate_ objects: NONE are neuter!)

_Examples:_
French: table (fem.)
chaise (fem.)
BUT livre (masc.)

Italian: tavola (fem.)
sedia (fem.)
BUT libro (masc.)

And we often, in some of the 'Latin' langauages, can't tell simply by the noun ending whether it is masculine or feminine (see French examples above) or, in the case of Latin itself, we can't tell whether masculine or neuter simply by the word ending? (see Latin examples above e.g. octopus *(masculine)* but opus *(neuter)*).

Can anyone shed any light as to _how come_?

Cheers - edwardtheconfessor; amateur philologist (but not a Latin scholar!)


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## jazyk

> unlike modern 'Latin' languages - which have only masucline and feminine (French, Italian, Spanish, Portugese, Rumanian)


Romanian has three.



> _Examples: _Latin: octopus (masc.) - plural: octop*i*


Not a Latin noun. The Latin for octopus is polypus, plural polypi.



> YET mensa (fem.) - plural ??


Its plural is mensae.



> in the case of Latin itself, we can't tell whether masculine or neuter simply by the word ending?


No, but I would say that most us nouns are masculine.



> Can anyone shed any light as to _how come_?


I have no idea. I can only suggest that you use Latin nouns according to their declension. There are five declension types and the most importation things to know are a noun's nominative and genitive. If you know that and know how the five declensions work, you should be able to decline anything (with a couple of exceptions).


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## bibax

Besides the nominative singular you have to know the stem of the given noun and if the noun is neuter or not. The stem is obvious from e.g. genitive sing. or nominative plur., but usually NOT from the nom. sing.

Latin inherited 6 stem types from the Proto-IE language:

a-stem (1st decl.): femina, poeta, tabula, mensa (stem ending with -a: femina-, ...);

o-stem (2nd decl.): dominus, liber, templum (stem ending with -o: domino-, libro-, templo-);

consonantal stem (3rd decl.): amor, miles, vox, opus (stem ending with a consonant: amor-, milit-, voc-, oper-);

i-stem (also 3rd decl.): civis, navis, mare (stem ending with -i: civi-, navi-, mari-);

u-stem (4th decl.): spiritus, manus, genu (stem ending with -u: spiritu-, manu-, genu-);

e-stem (5th decl.): dies, spes, materies (stem ending with -e: die-, spe-);

The gender does not depend on the stem type. In Latin only a-stem and e-stem nouns cannot be neuter.

The particularity of the neuter gender:
1) accusative = nominative in both numbers;
2) ending -a in nom./acc. plur. (opus/opera, addendum/addenda, mare/maria);
It is common feature in all conservative IE languages (Old Greek, Latin, Slavic languages,...).


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## relativamente

jazyk said:


> No, but I would say that most us nouns are masculine.



Many nouns ending nominative in us are feminine
example or 2 declination quercus , pinus, all nouns of trees are feminine, 
Also from the 4 declination manus is femenine
But from the second all nouns ending in um are neuter.There is no exeption at all, being one of the few rules without exception.


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## bibax

> ...being one of the few rules without exception.


You can create many rules without exceptions. For example:

The nouns of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th declension can be of any gender.
The nouns of the 1st and 5th declension can be only masculine or feminine.
The nouns ending with -tudo or -itas in nom. sing. are always feminine.
The nouns ending with -a in nom. plur. are always neuter.
....


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## relativamente

consideration, constitution, restitution, creation, and so many words ending in tion in English in the end are derived from abstract Latin words ending in -tio derived from Latin verbs.All this nouns liberatio, ratio, emancipatio and so on are femenine nouns.


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## edwardtheconfessor

Thank you so much: relativamente, bibax, jazyk (and any other enlightening contributors).

As I say, I am not a Latin scholar, so I'm afraid the subtleties of Latin declensions are way beyond me - sorry! However; some interesting points all of you!
Rumanian (of which I know only a few words) has three genders. Hmmmm! Well this explains a bit of the puzzle, doesn't it? I guess this would be because the Latin dialect of Roman Thracia and Dacia (from which modern Rumanian evolved), unlike Gaulish or Tuscan or Lombard Latin, say (modern Italian evolved chiefly from Tuscan Latin), had no original uderlay or palimpset of native Celtic speaking - although Thracia and Dacia must surely have had their own native peoples and languages too even so, even if these were not Celtic - whatever these were ... pre Roman conquest (perhaps someone knows more about this?).

Maybe it was that these Celtic languages (about the modern descendants of which I, alas, also know very little) had only the two genders for all nouns; so perhaps this is why most modern 'Latin' languages (e.g. French, Italian) have only masculine and feminine gender nouns and have lost the Latin neuter gender (again, any experts here who can enlighten us about these Celtic languages?).

The loss of noun endings which might, had they remained, have provided clues as to gender, in French say; maybe this was due, in the cae of French anyway, to the Frankish dialect of Latin (ancestor of modern French) 'clipping' or 'closing' so many open vowels or open vowel endings, often by the addition, or even contraction of these, with nasalised consonants. I note, however, that many Latin nouns, too, appear to have 'closed' consonant endings. And this would not explain, either, what happened in the case of Spanish and Portugese.

Italian, though, clearly went in the OPPOSITE direction - with almost all words ending in open vowels, and these (rather handily in modern Italian) rendering almost invariable noun gender endings -o for masculine -a for feminine (e.g. libr*o - *libr*i *(masc.); tavol*a *- tavol*e *(fem.) .. and so on), so the 'work' is all done for you, so to speak ... but, of course, no neuter nouns. Again; hmmmm! We still haven't really answered why these were lost in all modern 'Latin' languages (except, it seems, Rumanian), have we? 

Now, the point about the (originally) FEMININE gender of so many English abstract nouns (ultimately derived from Latin verbs) is a very interesting one. I hadn't realised this (or, at least, it hadn't occurred to me)! It does seem to look as though I was right, then: masculine and feminine genders for nouns denoting _inanimate_ objects DID once exist in English (although not all abstract nouns in English end with 'ion' by any means, of course: 'honesty', 'courage', 'virtue' and so on .. many of these too, interestingly, having gradually changed from their original meanings over time - cf Chaucerian and Bunyanian Middle English, for example) neither, of course are all English nouns ending in 'ion' abstract e.g. 'station'. 

And it would seem as if I was right in suggesting that these masucline and feminine genders for all but a handful of nouns denoting living things disappared along with so many word endings/inflexions as English evolved out the fusion of old Anglo Saxon and Old Norse (which had different word endings and different grammatical inflexions), many of these being simply thrown away! English lost, of course, in the same way, most of its verbal conjugations (for tense, mood, person etc.) and case inflexions, as we know (don't know if these case inflexions would be anything like equivalent to the Latin declensions? Excuse my ignorance here! Enlightenment please!).

But now, if this is correct, then it follows, does it not, that the reservation of neuter gender in modern English for only _animate_ things (which have a sex) is really an etymological trick, isn't it? (And, yet again, any etymological experts here who can shed further light on this, please do so!). And, if so, then what of the other Teutonic (and Nordic) languages (German, Alsatian, Dutch, Luxembourgesch, Flemish, Afrikaans, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, Faroese)? Have these all retained the three genders, even for nouns denoting inanimate objects? (Experts here too, again, speak forth please!).

The seeming logical nonsense (to a native English speaker like myself) of having masculine and feminine gender nouns for things like books, tables, chairs etc. which have no sex, then, is clealry not so - and the loss of these genders in modern English for all but animate or living objects is, then, not, in fact a _logical_ process at all, but rather a mere accident of philological history. Correct? (experts and opinions here too, please!).

As to minor matters: for my embarassing ignorance in not knowing that 'octopus' is not an original Latin word; apologies and thanks for correcting!
For enlightening me also regarding Latin feminine gender nouns ending in
'-a' (e.g. mensa) and their correct pluralisation; many thanks also. Do I take it, then, that _all_ feminine gender Latin nouns ending '-a' should be pluralised with '-ae' ? If so, can anyone shed light on the many other Latin nouns which seem to end with '-um', '-us' (which, in this case, apparently, may be either masculine or neuter and one cannot know by the word ending alone?)
.. and yet other Latin noun endings such as 'on', 'ion' and goodness knows what else - anyone offering any guidance here? - or, as with French nouns and their gender, does one simply have to learn and memorise all these individually (alas and oh dear!)?

Do please keep the discussion going - so long as this remains on subject and informative as well as both interesting and helpful (as it is thus far!). And thanks, also, moderator for blending this thread with another of close similarity. I think this helps the discussion!

- edwardtheconfessor


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## bibax

> For enlightening me also regarding Latin feminine gender nouns ending in
> '-a' (e.g. mensa) and their correct pluralisation; many thanks also. Do I take it, then, that all feminine gender Latin nouns ending '-a' should be pluralised with '-ae' ? If so, can anyone shed light on the many other Latin nouns which seem to end with '-um', '-us' (which, in this case, apparently, may be either masculine or neuter and one cannot know by the word ending alone?)


The Latin nouns ending in -a are the so called a-stem nouns. Their nominative plural always ends in -ae (remember larva/larvae, antenna/antennae). They are either feminine or masculine, never neuter.

feminine: femina (woman), puella (girl), dea (godess),  ...
masculine: poeta (poet), nauta (sailor), agricola (farmer), ...
inanimate thing are always feminine: mensa (table), terra (earth), cauda (tail), ...

The Latin nouns ending with -us are o-stem (dominus, abacus) or u-stem (spiritus, manus) or rarely consonant-stem nouns (opus, tempus). They can be of any gender, mostly masculines, rarely feminines (names of trees, countries, manus, domus) and very rarely neuters (vulgus, opus, tempus).

The Latin nouns ending with -um are o-stem nouns, always neuter.

The modern Romance languages merged the masculine and neuter o-stem nouns, for example:

Petrus (masc.) became Pietro, Pedro, ...
castellum (neuter) became castello, ....

So we cannot say the Romance languages lost the neuter gender. They only lost the morphological distinction between masculine and neuter. Then it would be redundant to say that Pietro is masculine and castello is neuter in Italian when there is no morphological distinction between them.
I think it is not a Celtic influence.


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## berndf

edwardtheconfessor said:


> And it would seem as if I was right in suggesting that these masucline and feminine genders for all but a handful of nouns denoting living things disappared along with so many word endings/inflexions as English evolved out the fusion of old Anglo Saxon and Old Norse...


The Old English declension system survived the Viking period virtually intact. Only the instrumental case merged with the dative but this happened in continental West Germanic (e.g. in Old High German) too and is probably not a sign of Old Norse influence. The further simplification to 3 cases (nominative/accusative, genitive and dative), two numbers and no gender distinctions happened during the 12th and 13th centuries in the Middle English period. By the mid 13th century, gender inflections were generally lost but gender associations must still have existed because the Old English masculine definite article "se" (rather than "Þe") stayed in use until about 1300 for formerly masculine noun.




edwardtheconfessor said:


> ... [W]hat of the other Teutonic (and Nordic) languages (German, Alsatian, Dutch, Luxembourgesch, Flemish, Afrikaans, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, Faroese)? Have these all retained the three genders, even for nouns denoting inanimate objects? (Experts here too, again, speak forth please!).


Most Germanic languages _in principle_ know all three genders though Dutch, Low German and modern North Germanic languages with exception of Icelandic for all intends and purposes lost the distinction between masculine and feminine and in practice distinguish only between "common" and neuter. Standard German and Icelandic still distinguish all three genders.




bibax said:


> So we cannot say the Romance languages lost the neuter gender. They only lost the morphological distinction between masculine and neuter. Then it would be redundant to say that Pietro is masculine and castello is neuter in Italian when there is no morphological distinction between them.


More important than the loss of morphological distinctions for nouns are those for adjectives. As long as you have to inflect adjectives according to the gender of the attributed noun, noun genders remain relevant even it noun exhibit no gender makers any more by which you could distinguish masculine and neuter.


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## irinet

"the origins irretrievably lost in the distant mists of time". You can only think of Adam and Eve and, probably the answer is there! The gender issue is everywhere, in Br., too: a cat is male when we say Tom-cat, is it not? You have actor and actress, a.s.o.


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## Lars H

edwardtheconfessor said:


> And, if so, then what of the other Teutonic (and Nordic) languages (German, Alsatian, Dutch, Luxembourgesch, Flemish, Afrikaans, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, Faroese)? Have these all retained the three genders, even for nouns denoting inanimate objects? (Experts here too, again, speak forth please!).



Hej

A recent thread in the Nordic forum regarding Swedish genders can be found here. 

The thread's title is completely misleading, but what happened was that the thread deviated far away from its intended topic and instead became partly relevant for this thread. And it's in English.

But in short; masculin and feminin nouns do still exist in Swedish, but they are diminishing. Meaning that we don't say "han/hon" (he/she) any more (with a few exceptions), but the masculin or feminin inflection rules still apply.


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## poetpenpassion

Hello! How are you? I`am fine, thank you! My name is Yelena, i`am from Russia, from Moscow. A think that it`s about how to sound words, beautifully or not. Excuse me, please, for my bad English! 
Here is some words in Russian lenguage: 
stol (tavola, table, mesa) - masc. 
kniga (libro, livre, book) - fem. 
kryeslo (sedia, butaca) - neuter
solntse (sun, le soleil, el sol) - neuter

It`s impossible tosay el mesa, la sol, la libro, la soleil.  Ye
In Russin language we don`t have articles. Thank you for your atention! Yelena, Russia, Moscow.


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## edwardtheconfessor

irinet said:


> The gender issue is everywhere, in Br., too: a cat is male when we say Tom-cat, is it not? You have actor and actress, a.s.o.


 
Well, thank you, irinet, for bringing this to my attention. You are right, of course ... 'a.s.o.' (and so on) indeed! :-
_sculptor (masc.) - sculptress (fem.), sorceror (masc.) - sorceress (fem.), God (masc.) - Godess (fem.) _or even _author (masc.) - authoress (fem.) ..._
There are even such examples as: _he-wolf, she-wolf; billy goat, nanny goat _or, of course _dog - bitch, pig - sow, fox - vixen _(where the word changes totally) or (curious reversal of default gender here): _duck - drake._
You could even take such (in my view) etymologically 'dubious' derivatives as: _dominator - dominatrix,_ or _executor - executrix _(a term much loved, for some reason, by lawyers!)
In some cases, even the 'parent' noun ITSELF has no gender (or has lost it) but has masculine and feminine 'spin-offs' bearing no phonetic resemblance whatever to the 'parent' noun e.g. :
deer (or rabbit): buck or doe; swan : cob (masc.) or pen (fem.); horse: mare or stallion -
And so on (as you rightly say) ...

*BUT *what do all these nouns have in common? Answer: they all denote LIVING or _animate_ things (yes, even gods!), which therefore have a sex (and, therefore, logically, _should_ have a gender)!

I never yet, in English, heard of a 'she-table' or a 'table-ess', a 'he-chair' or a 'billy/Tom (or any other gender, masculine or feminine) sofa' , nor of a (feminine gender) 'refigeratrix' !!!
We could, of course, say "girl's (or girls') book", "men's room", "girly neglige" or we could even say (in colloquial slang and euphemism) "girlie magazine" - but we are not here ascribing gender to the ACTUAL NOUN (or to the object that it denotes); merely adding a (gender specific) pronoun in posessive case, or, in the case of "girlie magazine", in fact describing its contents, and providing in the process a clue as to the likely gender of its interested readership (in fact, not female but male!).

What we are trying to establsih here (or I am, anyway) - if possible, once and for all (or do I ask too much?) - is: how come/came that which seems to me to be the logical _absurdity_ of ever having had or of still having gender (and therefore ascribing a sex) to ANY *IN*ANIMATE(and therefore, by definition, sexless) thing or things at all ... be these concrete nouns, denoting tables, chairs, books etc.; abstract nouns, denoting such things as courage, strength, virtue etc. (which might, perhaps, poetically, be depicted as muses etc. having gender, but which, of course, are, in reality, sexless); or even collective nouns denoting numbers of inanimate objects,
e.g a fleet/aramada/flotilla of ships; a weaponry/armoury/arsenal of weapons and armour; a sheaf/wadge/ream etc. of paper or paper products; a heap/pile/collection/display/assortment etc. of many and various inanimate things. .....

How come any of these sexless things should ever, in any language actually, have been ascribed a gender (and, therefore, a sex) as seems to be the case in so many European languages???

So far, several contributors to this thread have brought their specialist knowledge and informed opinions to bear on this question, and I thank you all for your illuminating comments thus far! 
For those who are interested (and I shall not too far stray off-subject here, I promise!), this question arose for me recently when working on my professional website and with, as I have indicated, an extremely poor knowledge of Latin, I sought to find (by browsing on the internet, of course), the correct Latin pluralisation for the word 'opus', denoting, of course, a piece of work and, to my surprise (call me very ill-informed or naive!), discovered that 'opus' is a NEUTER GENDER noun in Latin.

Having studied only Italian and some French, I had not even _realized_ that their 'parent' language had three genders - yes, do please call me ill-informed and naive!! Thus, then, 'opus' must be (for strict correctness) pluralised as 'opera'. And thus the English neologism 'opuses', denoting a plurality of orchestral works by a composer (or  writings by an author) is (in Latin) a grammatical nonsense, as is the widespread use (common now in many European languages) of 'opera' to denote a _single_ performed and staged musical work, coming as it does from the sixteenth century Italian name '_opera in musica'_ ('work*s*' - not 'work' -'in music') - these opera, of course, conceived, as originally intended, as comprising a fusion of several (hence the plurality) art forms - drama, dance, song and instrumental music.

The question which immediately arose for me, of course, is: why, in this case (if Latin recognised three genders), have all modern 'Latin' languages (or call them 'Romance' or 'Romantic' languages, if you like) - except, it seems, for Rumanian - lost, fused or otherwise abandoned all the neuter gender nouns? And, in addition, why would ANY language (as Latin, for example, clearly did) recognise - quite randomnly it seems - some INANIMATE things as 'male', some as 'female' and yet still others as 'sexless' (neuter) when they are ALL sexless! And I'm afraid we have still not answered this question - have we?

It seems I have been 'guessing in the dark' in suggesting that the Celtic predecessors of Latin in Roman Gaul, Cisalpine Gaul (modern day Northern Italy) and Iberia (modern day Spain and Portugal) - as distinct, it seems, from Thracia and Dacia (modern day Rumania) - influenced this development of abandoning neuter gender. This remains, however, in the absense of informed opinion, still an open question?

It seems, too, that I was only 'half right' at best in supposing that English lost its true array of noun genders, including, as I see it once had, masculine and feminine genders for many inanimate objects (is this so?) ...
and in suggesting that this happened during the great denudation of word endings which arose from its growth out of the fusion of Old Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse (thank you, berndf, for clearing this up also, a little (but not completely!), for me!).

And then, of course, what of the pre-Latin, and even parallel to Latin (as in 'Koine' form) Greek, which was still being widely spoken throughout the Eastern Mediterranean well into late Roman and Byzantine, and even Ottoman times - some roots of which indubitably fed into many evolving Teutonic languages (perhaps even some Slavic and Turanian languages too???)? Hmmmm. Here again, alas, my scholarly prowess finds its limits, for I am not, alas either, really a Greek scholar ... Any offers of informed opinion here?

I do believe I am becoming vindicated, though, in my view that the ascribing of 'neuter' gender to so many English nouns IS really an etymological 'sleight of hand' since, as you righly point out, berndf, if you sheer the associated adjectives (as well as the definite and indefinite article) of all gender inflexions, and in addition, you discard all gender differences in the noun plurals and in case inflexions (or even, as English has, discard most of these inflexions themselves altogether) then, yes, noun gender _does_ effectively disappear, doesn't it? It's all a 'trick with smoke and mirrors' really, isn't it (to coin a phrase!)?

I am grateful, too, to you, bibax, for further enlightenig me about Latin noun endings and correct pluralisations. This ceratinly does take away, for me, a little of the daunting mystery of Latin nouns. However, everyone, we haven't put this whole discussion 'to bed' yet by any means, have we?

For, as to why any European languages at all ever did, or still do, ascribe gender (and therefore sex) to nouns denoting sexless things remains an unanswered question - and remains as a logical absurdity. Does one not agree?
As to the case of gender in _pronouns, _Lars H and berndf, I thank you for clarifying this also. Not all world languages, in fact, have gender in pronouns; not even in the third person singular. In Tagalog or Pilipino, for example (the native language of my first wife), there is no pronoun gender of this kind. Some e.g. African languages (such as Yoruba and Swahili, of which I know a little) have no noun gender either. Swahili, for exmaple, has noun CLASSES, with their own rules of inflexion (for plurals etc.) - but these have no sex or gender attribute to them. Oh, and thank you, poetnpassion (Yelena) for enlightneing us about Russian nouns and gender. My finacee is Russian - so I must quizz her about this!

We are making progress here, but we have still this real 'tough nut' question to crack yet, don't we? Any further thoughts of informative value - most welcome! Thank you.

edwardtheconfessor


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## berndf

edwardtheconfessor said:


> You could even take such (in my view) etymologically 'dubious' derivatives as: _dominator - dominatrix,_ or _executor - executrix _(a term much loved, for some reason, by lawyers!)


Not at all dubious. The word forms are perfectly regular in Latin. _Dominat- and execut- _are the participle stems of _dominari_ (_to rule, to govern_) and exequi (variant of _exsequi_, _to carry out_, literally _to follow out_) respectively. The participle stem of verb _XXX_ followed by _-or_ means a_ male person who does XXX_ and followed by _-(t)rix_ (-_t-_ is omitted if the stem ends in _-t_) means a_ female person who does XXX_. The modern Romance forms, e.g. French _dominatrice _and_ exécutrice_, are derived from the accusative forms _dominatricem_ and _executricem_ with the final _-m_ removed.




edwardtheconfessor said:


> For, as to why any European languages at all ever did, or still do, ascribe gender (and therefore sex) to nouns denoting sexless things remains an unanswered question - and remains as a logical absurdity. Does one not agree?


After all we know about primitive societies, our Neolithic ancestors would probably not have understood your question. They most likely did not know the very concept of inanimate things. "Of course does a stone or a tree have a spirit", they would probably have answered. "And of course, these spirits have genders", they might have added.


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## edwardtheconfessor

berndf said:


> Not at all dubious. The word forms are perfectly regular in Latin. _Dominat- and execut- _are the participle stems of _dominari_ (_to rule, to govern_) and exequi (variant of _exsequi_, _to carry out_, literally _to follow out_) respectively. The participle stem of verb _XXX_ followed by _-or_ means a_ male person who does XXX_ and followed by _-(t)rix_ (-_t-_ is omitted if the stem ends in _-t_) means a_ female person who does XXX_. The modern Romance forms, e.g. French _dominatrice _and_ exécutrice_, are derived from the accusative forms _dominatricem_ and _executricem_ with the final _-m_ removed.
> 
> Thank you, berndf - I stand corrected (as they say!) .. by the way, everyone - I don't need any posts correcting my error in suggesting that "girl's (or girls') book", "men's room", "girly neglige" or "girlie magaznie" is a use of a gender-specific PRONOUN. I spotted my error as soon as I sent the post: they are, of course, a use of (gender specific) adjectival subsitutes in the possessive case, or of actual (gender indicating) adjectives. "Slip of the keyboard" (or, perhaps more accuratley, "slip of my mind") there - apologies!
> 
> After all we know about primitive societies, our Neolithic ancestors would probably not have understood your question. They most likely did not know the very concept of inanimate things. "Of course does a stone or a tree have a spirit", they would probably have answered. "And of course, these spirits have genders", they might have added.


 
As to what Neolithic peoples actually believed; well, we do have much excellent educated guesswork about this - but there is an awful lot that we don't know (and perhaps never will!) - at least about pre-literate Neolithic, or for that matter Mesolithic or even Paeleolithic, cultures. But from what I know of the fragmentary attempts which have been made to reconstruct, for example, 'pre-Nostritic' and 'Nostritic' words and fragmentary phrases (and these are believed to have been the true ancestors, at any rate, of the Indo-Aryan language stem - circa, perhaps 6-8,000 BC or earlier) - there does seem (as far as I am aware - correct me here if I am wrong, please do, any experts?) to be no evidence of any emergent noun gender denotation for "inanimate" objects such as, say, rocks, stones, caves etc.

I think I am right (am I not?) in believing that the pre-Roman Druids believed in local 'nature Gods' of rocks, trees, rivers etc. .. and many early Bronze Age peoples, and even some early Iron Age peoples, throughout the world it seems, had similar theogenies.  The plethora of Ancient Egyptian Gods and Godesses, in fact, grew (from late Neolitihic/early Bronze Age times) originally out of local tribal 'totems'.  I am not either (alas!) a real scholar of Ancient Egyptian, but I think I am right in saying that their language did not assign gender to any of its nouns denoting natural (or man-made) sexless objects - as distinct from its deities or images of them?  So also (am I right?) within the early pre-Vedic, Vedic and Dravidian languages of India?  So too, again, with the evolving Native American languages? Hmmmm.

It is well-known, I think, that the pre-Islamic and pre-Christian missionary African tribal religions had similar local 'totems' and divinities - who also dwelled, they believed, in streams, rocks, stones, trees, caves, mountains. Yet, from what I know of the development of African languages, and from what I know of their modern descendants (as I have indicated in my previous post), their nouns denoting "inanimate" objects: rocks, stones, mountains, caves, even trees (which ARE living, but tend to be bisexual) have never recognised gender in these.  I think I'm right in saying, too, that Mandarin Chinese (of which I know a few phrases) and also Turkish and Japanese (ditto) and even Arabic (which I have attempted to learn) have no history, either, of noun gender in the denotation of such "inanimate" objects. Am I correct here (any experts in these fields)?

I think we need to distinguish VERY carefully here between ancient peoples atrributing DIVINITIES or DEITIES (or call them tribal Gods or 'totems', if you wish), which might have been thought to INHABIT specific rocks, stones, caves, rivers, streams, mountains or even trees - between these and the nouns generically denoting such OBJECTS.

This being so, berndf, with the greatest respect, I do not think this is bringing us very much closer to the answer (and I shall not give up hope of there being one!) - sorry!  Please continue this discussion, though, and therefore, by all means everyone!

  - edwardtheconfessor


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## Uriel-

wtrmute said:


> Sorry, but you say it like gender's a bad thing...
> 
> 
> The issue with gender for English-speakers is that the English gender system is mostly semantic, so men are masculine, women are feminine, and everything else is neuter.  If when you study other languages, you keep in mind that gender is part of the noun, then you'll memorise it and not worry about it.  For example, if you memorise that the word for _girl_ in German is _Mädchen_, you'll never know which gender it is, and you'll probably guess feminine, since it's a woman.  If, instead, you memorise it as _das Mädchen_, whenever you think of the word the correct gender will pop up and you'll be able to use the correct referents.
> 
> I hope that was helpful...



As a speaker of a language that has no grammatical gender, let me just say that that is easier said than done.  Although we are always encouraged to learn the article with the noun as a way of reinforcing the noun's gender (_el gato, la silla, el artículo_), it's just really hard to do in practice --probably because in English, articles are pretty interchangeable and largely unassociated with their nouns.  (_A_ and _an_ being the exceptions.)  

Even when I _know_ a word ends with _a_ or _o_ in Spanish, deep down it's just a sound to me, devoid of significance, and by the time I get to the noun I've already said the article -- and it probably didn't agree with the noun that followed it -- because I wasn't even thinking about the noun when I said the article; if you speak a genderless language, the article is just something you say _on the way_ to the noun.  I can't speak for other English speakers, but the complete lack of that dimension in my own language makes it hard for me to "tack on" that dimension (mentally) in another -- I just don't naturally think of words that way when they don't refer to something that has an intrinsic natural gender.  It's a conceptual stumbling block.



> The use of genders is when you have referents. For example, English still has the remains of a gender system in its pronouns. So when I say:
> 
> _Alice told Bob he could borrow her car, but he had to go get it at the shop first._
> 
> Notice that you can tell whose car it is and who should get what at the shop. Now, if we replace all pronouns by a generic, genderless pronoun, which we'll denote as N in subjective form (he/she/it), A for oblique form (him/her/it) and G for possessive form (his/her/its):
> 
> _Alice told Bob N could borrow G car, but N had to go get A at the shop first._
> 
> Notice that now we don't know if Alice is borrowing Bob's car or vice versa, and who it is who has to pick up what at the shop (you could infer that it's the car that must be picked up, but it's equally valid that either of them would need to go). So gender does make a difference.




I have no mental issues with words like his or her or its having a trace of gender associated with them, because I only apply them to nouns of a known natural gender -- it'd be a whole different story if I had to apply them to tables and chairs.  

What's ironic, though, is that Spanish, for being chockful of feminine and masculine indicators at every other turn, doesn't have his or her -- preferring instead to use the ambiguous _su_. (I've always wanted someone to explain _that_ to me!)  

In fact, in your example:  _Alice told Bob N could borrow G car, but N had to go get A at the shop first, _you could drop the pronoun "he" and be forced to use that ambiguous _su_, and have even _less_ of an idea of whose car was being borrowed by whom than you would in genderless English:

_(_at least in my bad Spanish_) Alice le dijo a Bob que podía prestar su carro, pero tenía que ir por ello al taller primero.

_I'm always reading _su_-laden texts in Spanish and wondering exactly what belongs to who!


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## effeundici

As a native speaker of a language with genders, my opinion is:

- Genders are a useless complication
- The fact that, in Italian, a fork is a "she" and a knife is a "he" doesn't have any serious meaning for me. It just reminds me when physicists name subatomic particles as red/green - up/down - positive/negative. They could call the genders first/second class, up/down class, a-ending/o-ending class and nothing would change. (

Nonetheless when my 3 years old daughter makes a mistake with genders I simply can't stand that and, of course, correct her.

Just my 2 cents.


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## berndf

edwardtheconfessor said:


> I think I'm right in saying, too, that Mandarin Chinese (of which I know a few phrases) and also Turkish and Japanese (ditto) and even Arabic (which I have attempted to learn) have no history, either, of noun gender in the denotation of such "inanimate" objects. Am I correct here (any experts in these fields)?


- It is always difficult to transport grammatical concepts to so radically different languages as Japanese or Mandarin but I think it is fair to say those languages have no concept of grammatical gender as we know it.
- Turkish definitely does not have grammatical gender. And this has nothing to do with animate or inanimate; there simply is no grammatical gender. 
- Arabic, like all other Semitic languages, from the oldest attested Semitic language, Akkadian, to modern Semitic languages, has a strict two gender system where every noun, with animate and inanimate referents alike, is either masculine or feminine with no third possibility. In Arabic, a stone or rock, _ḥ__ajar_, is masculine while a small pebble is feminine, _ḥ__ajarah_; _-ah _is a typical feminine suffix and a _ḥ__ajarah_ is so to speak a _stone-ess_. This shows how gender in objects is used to convey properties which are customarily associated with gender, in this case size.




edwardtheconfessor said:


> ... the Indo-Aryan language stem - circa, perhaps 6-8,000 BC or earlier) - there does seem (as far as I am aware - correct me here if I am wrong, please do, any experts?) to be no evidence of any emergent noun gender denotation for "inanimate" objects such as, say, rocks, stones, caves etc.


The three-gender system is ubiquitous in IE languages and it therefore hard to imagine they should not be rooted in a concept which already existed in PIE. What we do not know is what these three genders were used for. Generally, IE languages do not grammatically distinguish between animate and inanimate objects now do we (the speakers of gender-inflected IE language like my own mother-tongue) feel we are missing anything by not doing so. English is a bit special within the IE language family in drawing this distinction through its use of the pronoun _it_. E.g. in my language I can use the word _Erzeuger_ (_creator_) for a company or factory producing a certain good, for an abstract concept in mathematics and for animate beings, i.e. God or a biological father. In referring to an _Erzeuger_ I always use _er_ (=_he_) and thus am not forced to distinguish between the uses. On the other hand, being a gendered language, I cannot formulate sentences like "I will visit a friend tomorrow" without disclosing my friend's gender. The gender-inflection is even stronger in Semitic languages like Arabic or Hebrew. In Hebrew, e.g., I cannot say "I love you" without making explicit both your own and the addressed person's gender (a man says to a woman _'ani 'ohev 'otakh_ and a woman to a man _'ani 'ohevet 'otkha_).
Back to the meaning of the neuter case: While it is a fairly safe bet to assume the three gender system is rooted in PIE we do not know what it might have been used for. As IE languages do not systematically distinguish between animate and inanimate beings, it might have had a very different connotation then it has in English. In German, e.g., the neuter has the connotation of being small. The German word for _child_ is (_Kind_) is neuter and all diminutive suffixes convert the gender of a noun to neuter. So, one possible interpretation of the three-gender system is representing the trinity of father, mother and child without any consideration for inanimate objects. I am mentioning this to show you that there are other possible interpretations of the three gender system than the one you are used to in English. Reconstructing of the actual meaning of the PIE gender system is and probably ever will be beyond the capacity of linguistics.




edwardtheconfessor said:


> The plethora of Ancient Egyptian Gods and Godesses, in fact, grew (from late Neolitihic/early Bronze Age times) originally out of local tribal 'totems'. I am not either (alas!) a real scholar of Ancient Egyptian, but I think I am right in saying that their language did not assign gender to any of its nouns denoting natural (or man-made) sexless objects - as distinct from its deities or images of them?


Egyptian, being related to Semitic languages, had the same two-gender system as Arabic or Hebrew. Every noun, with animate or with inanimate referents, was either masculine or feminine.



edwardtheconfessor said:


> I think we need to distinguish VERY carefully here between ancient peoples atrributing DIVINITIES or DEITIES (or call them tribal Gods or 'totems', if you wish), which might have been thought to INHABIT specific rocks, stones, caves, rivers, streams, mountains or even trees - between these and the nouns generically denoting such OBJECTS.


The distinction of _a stone being a spirit, a stone having a spirit_ or _a stone being inhabited by a spirit_ is made by us to be able to comprehend animistic views of the world because otherwise we wouldn't. To a member of such a cultural group these distinctions would make no sense at all. It suffices to go back to Greek mythology where _Helios_ traverses the sky with his chariot. The question whether _Helios_ is the Sun or the god of the Sun is absurd. The same is true for the question whether _Gea_ is the Earth or the goddess of the Earth. Of course, _Helios_ is the Sun and is a god and _Gea_ is the Earth and is a goddess.


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## Outsider

edwardtheconfessor said:


> For, as to why any European languages at all ever did, or still do, ascribe gender (and therefore sex) to nouns denoting sexless things remains an unanswered question - and remains as a logical absurdity. Does one not agree?


It doesn't seem like much more of a logical absurdity than so many other things in natural languages, such as the countable/non-countable distinction in nouns (which English finds so important, but is pretty much irrelevant in the Romance languages), or the choice between certain prepositions, or even the choice between noun cases, sometimes, or phrasal verbs.


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## Alxmrphi

It's important to understand that language gender isn't about a man / a woman, it's _an abstract concept_ applied to language to show they belong to different groupings.
I personally think it's unfortunate that these labels were used because it makes people think that in these languages _a book_ is like _a man_ while_ a pen_ is like_ a woman,_ when this is not the case at all. It's equally possible back in time the speakers decided to denote some nouns as _hands_, and the other ones_ feet_. Then people would be asking _'Is this noun a hand or a foot_?' and it'd be perfectly normal to us. Differing genders were probably a very logical separation of two groupings to the ancient peoples so they categorised their language (that behaved in different ordered ways) as such.


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## berndf

Alxmrphi said:


> It's important to understand that language gender isn't about a man / a woman, it's _an abstract concept_ applied to language to show they belong to different groupings.





Alxmrphi said:


> I personally think it's unfortunate that these labels were used because it makes people think that in these languages _a book_ is like _a man_ while_ a pen_ is like_ a woman,_ when this is not the case at all. It's equally possible back in time the speakers decided to denote some nouns as _hands_, and the other ones_ feet_. Then people would be asking _'Is this noun a hand or a foot_?' and it'd be perfectly normal to us. Differing genders were probably a very logical separation of two groupings to the ancient peoples so they categorised their language (that behaved in different ordered ways) as such.


I am not sure. There are cultures where masculinity and femininity are viewed as universal forces of nature applying to all being. E.g. in traditional Chinese philosophy you may very well speak of the _Yin Qi _of a _book_ or the _Yang Qi_ of a _pen_.

Virtually all views off nature are laden with anthropomorphisms. In our modern Western culture, we describe the physical world around us in terms of_ laws of nature_, a concept which is not even 500 years old, without even thinking for a split-second how extremely anthropomorphic this very concept is. Similarly, other civilizations describe nature in terms of male and female principles or forces or energies, whatever you choose to call it, regarding this as the most natural thing in the world.


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## Alxmrphi

Well then that can apply to be more of a backing of what I said. This male / female split being so ingrained in the psyche of people that when chosing to label words that behaved in different groups, they chose the most natural groupings they were aware of, that of different genders.

What I aimed to show with my post was that (responding to edwardtheconfessor) nobody had ascribed a sex to an inanimate object, the differences have been labelled as male/female (but in a parallel universe it could have been night/day, hand/foot), the inherent properties of what it means to be male/female aren't characteristics attributed to the nouns (for example) they represent, but rather a label used to categorise words that behaved in a systematically 'different' pattern.


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## jmx

Outsider said:


> ... the countable/non-countable distinction in nouns (which English finds so important, but is pretty much irrelevant in the Romance languages) ...


Really? In Spanish you can say "quiero leche" (I want (some) milk) but you can't say "*quiero libro", instead you should say "quiero un/el/ese/algún/... libro" (I want a/the/that/some/... book), because 'milk' is uncountable while 'book' is countable. This is even more evident in French.


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## berndf

Alxmrphi said:


> What I aimed to show with my post was that (responding to edwardtheconfessor) nobody had ascribed a sex to an inanimate object, the differences have been labelled as male/female (but in a parallel universe it could have been night/day, hand/foot), the inherent properties of what it means to be male/female aren't characteristics attributed to the nouns (for example) they represent, but rather a label used to categorise words that behaved in a systematically 'different' pattern.


Seen as a "rational reconstruction" to describe this within the framework of how we view the world, I agree with you completely. A person who has never known any non-animistic outlooks of the world would most likely fail understand what you are talking about.


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## irinet

Right. I am amazed to find such a debate on this topic here!
Let's see what we have here: I think  gender helps Romanian how to speak correctly because we have, for instance:  un (1) idiom - doua (2) idiomuri (Neuter) and not doi (2) idiomi like in 1 idiot - 2 idioti (masculine)
As to English, things are easier since you have: a table - two tables or a chair - 2 chairs or a floor - 2 floors, etc.
How can I speak correctly without making this difference? Is this about inanimate things that do not need of gender or it's just about *gender as an inflexion rule?*


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## sokol

Moderator note:

This thread is definitely _*not*_ about whether gender is "useful" or not - except insofar it is relevant for development of the feature; also it isn't one about whether it is nice to have it or superfluous, or which languages have it and which don't (that is of course, except if another point concerning the etymology is made - in this case it is of course relevant to point out that this or that language does have gender, or doesn't).

Thus, I would like to remind you of the topic proper of this thread, which is _*the evolution of word gender in languages*_ - so the when's and why's, but not anecdotes about the feature itself.

Thank you very much!
Cheers
sokol
Moderator EHL


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## Outsider

jmartins said:


> Really? In Spanish you can say "quiero leche" (I want (some) milk) but you can't say "*quiero libro", instead you should say "quiero un/el/ese/algún/... libro" (I want a/the/that/some/... book), because 'milk' is uncountable while 'book' is countable. This is even more evident in French.


There are certainly instances where the distinction is useful, but it's much less pervasive than in English.



Alxmrphi said:


> It's important to understand that language gender isn't about a man / a woman, it's _an abstract concept_ applied to language to show they belong to different groupings.
> I personally think it's unfortunate that these labels were used because it makes people think that in these languages _a book_ is like _a man_ while_ a pen_ is like_ a woman,_ when this is not the case at all. It's equally possible back in time the speakers decided to denote some nouns as _hands_, and the other ones_ feet_. Then people would be asking _'Is this noun a hand or a foot_?' and it'd be perfectly normal to us.


Or like _de_-words and _het_-words in Dutch.

But I would disagree a bit with you. We cannot deny a certain correspondence between grammatical gender and "true" gender. After all, when you apply an adjective to a person you will normally employ the masculine version for males and the feminine version for females. 

There is certainly a correlation, but it's only a statistical trend with many exceptions. Different factors contribute to the grammatical gender of a word. Meaning is certainly important in some cases, but equally determinant are regularizing tendencies that just look at a word's "shape" to decide gender. Rather than a careless use of semantics, I see grammatical gender as the result of a competition between semantics and word morphology.


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## Angelo di fuoco

berndf said:


> The three-gender system is ubiquitous in IE languages and it therefore hard to imagine they should not be rooted in a concept which already existed in PIE. What we do not know is what these three genders were used for. Generally, IE languages do not grammatically distinguish between animate and inanimate objects now do we (the speakers of gender-inflected IE language like my own mother-tongue) feel we are missing anything by not doing so. English is a bit special within the IE language family in drawing this distinction through its use of the pronoun _it_. E.g. in my language I can use the word _Erzeuger_ (_creator_) for a company or factory producing a certain good, for an abstract concept in mathematics and for animate beings, i.e. God or a biological father. In referring to an _Erzeuger_ I always use _er_ (=_he_) and thus am not forced to distinguish between the uses. On the other hand, being a gendered language, I cannot formulate sentences like "I will visit a friend tomorrow" without disclosing my friend's gender. The gender-inflection is even stronger in Semitic languages like Arabic or Hebrew. In Hebrew, e.g., I cannot say "I love you" without making explicit both your own and the addressed person's gender (a man says to a woman _'ani 'ohev 'otakh_ and a woman to a man _'ani 'ohevet 'otkha_).
> Back to the meaning of the neuter case: While it is a fairly safe bet to assume the three gender system is rooted in PIE we do not know what it might have been used for. As IE languages do not systematically distinguish between animate and inanimate beings, it might have had a very different connotation then it has in English. In German, e.g., the neuter has the connotation of being small. The German word for _child_ is (_Kind_) is neuter and all diminutive suffixes convert the gender of a noun to neuter. So, one possible interpretation of the three-gender system is representing the trinity of father, mother and child without any consideration for inanimate objects. I am mentioning this to show you that there are other possible interpretations of the three gender system than the one you are used to in English. Reconstructing of the actual meaning of the PIE gender system is and probably ever will be beyond the capacity of linguistics.



You don't really take the Slavic languages into account, do you?
There the differentiation between animate and inanimate objects is quite persistent within the three gender system of the Slavic languages (declension of masculine nouns!) and was even more so in archaic forms than it is today. If there someone who has decent knowledge of the Old Church Slavonic he could tell more than I can without doing research in order to avoid telling rubbish.
I am not quite sure about it, but as far as I know it is possible to draw certain conclusions from the rather conservative pronominal system of Czech and what was considered animated or inanimate about the social positions of the different sexes and, yes, genders.

Don't know if the Baltic languages also have the distinction between animate and inanimate objects.


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## berndf

Angelo di fuoco said:


> You don't really take the Slavic languages into account, do you?
> There the differentiation between animate and inanimate objects is quite persistent within the three gender system of the Slavic languages (declension of masculine nouns!) and was even more so in archaic forms than it is today. If there someone who has decent knowledge of the Old Church Slavonic he could tell more than I can without doing research in order to avoid telling rubbish.
> I am not quite sure about it, but as far as I know it is possible to draw certain conclusions from the rather conservative pronominal system of Czech and what was considered animated or inanimate about the social positions of the different sexes and, yes, genders.
> 
> Don't know if the Baltic languages also have the distinction between animate and inanimate objects.


The interpretation of genders has changed over time and some languages use the neuter gender to differentiate between animate and inanimate and others don't. 1000 years ago, English used genders like German still does today and now uses "it" to distinguish animate from inanimate objects. Slavic languages, by and large, seem to have gone in the opposite direction during the same time.


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## sokol

Angelo di fuoco said:


> There the differentiation between animate and inanimate objects is quite persistent within the three gender system of the Slavic languages (declension of masculine nouns!) and was even more so in archaic forms than it is today. If there someone who has decent knowledge of the Old Church Slavonic he could tell more than I can without doing research in order to avoid telling rubbish.


Yes of course, those differences exist - in Slovene for example with animate nouns accusative ending is the same as genitive ending:

- človek = man: gen. = acc. = človek*a*
- korak = step: gen. = korak*a*, acc. = korak

I haven't checked my OCS grammar (= Old Church Slavonic) as I couldn't anyway give any decent guesses whether or not this is considered an old, common Proto-IE feature or else a Slavic innovation, but I would expect that this feature was even more pronounced in OCS.

It would be indeed interesting to know whether this is some remnant of the original development of gender in IE.
In another thread I mentioned that Hittite had the "commune" gender distinction (non-distinction between women and men) - but this was different, it means that Hittite differentiated between:
- things alive (and considered*) being alive), be they male or female; and
- things not alive (or considered not being alive).

*) I don't remember exactly anymore, to illustrate - I'm rather sure that e. g. Gods were considered of falling into this category.


The Hittite genus commune is considered by some historical linguists being at the very core of Indo-European gender development; personally, I've never come across a statement of any linguist that the same were true for Slavic distinction in masculine declension - but I cannot rule out that such theories exist.


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## bibax

> You don't really take the Slavic languages into account, do you?
> There the differentiation between animate and inanimate objects is quite persistent within the three gender system of the Slavic languages (declension of masculine nouns!) and was even more so in archaic forms than it is today.





> Yes of course, those differences exist - in Slovene for example with animate nouns accusative ending is the same as genitive ending:
> 
> - človek = man: gen. = acc. = človeka
> - korak = step: gen. = koraka, acc. = korak


Not completely correct (from historical point of view).

Common Slavic did NOT distinguish animate masc. and inanimate masc. nouns in its declension system. The o-stem masc. nouns _chlap_ (= guy) and _dub_ (= oak) were declined exactly the same way. Similarly the u-stem masc. nouns _syn_ (= son) and _med_ (= honey) were declined the same way (but differently than the o-stem nouns).

The form *človeka* (*človek* = hu/man, masc.) is historically genitive singular, not acc. sing. In Common Slavic (as well as in Old Czech) the accusative sing. was always equal to nom. sing. for both animate and inanimate masc. nouns.
It is possible to use genitive as a direct object instead of accusative, in the terms of syntax it is the so-called partitive (or negative) genitive. For some reasons *the partitive genitive prevailed over the accusative only in the case of the animate masculine nouns* and effectively replaced it. In the case of the inanimate masc. as well as all fem. and neuter nouns the subtile distinction between part. genitive and accusative in the direct object remained in many Slavic languages.

Replacing accusative by genitive is also obvious in the personal pronoun declension. In Old Czech the accusative form of _my_ (= we) was _ny_ which is non-existent in Modern Czech. Nowadays we say that accusative of _my_ is _nás_ which strictly speaking is genitive.


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## irinet

sokol said:


> Moderator note:
> 
> This thread is definitely _*not*_ about whether gender is "useful" or not - except insofar it is relevant for development of the feature; also it isn't one about whether it is nice to have it or superfluous, or which languages have it and which don't (that is of course, except if another point concerning the etymology is made - in this case it is of course relevant to point out that this or that language does have gender, or doesn't).
> 
> Thus, I would like to remind you of the topic proper of this thread, which is _*the evolution of word gender in languages*_ - so the when's and why's, but not anecdotes about the feature itself.
> 
> Thank you very much!
> Cheers
> sokol
> Moderator EHL



Sorry to think that I tell anecdotes here.
I meant that in my language the gender issue is complex. What is striking for me is how inanimate things can be feminine (in the plural), masculine (in the singular) and neuter when you 'draw the line', like: "Let's see, what do we have here, now?" 
*un stilou*(sg., masc.) - *2 stilouri* (pl., fem)
_un blog_ (sg., masc.) - _2 blog_*uri *(pl., fem) - foreign word + Rom. morpheme - as you can see
To sum up, first time masculine, second time feminine; all in all, they are neuter. How is this possible? Neuter gender does not refer to being inanimate. It's about a blending process of [+masc.] + [+fem.] altogether. For instance, we have the word 'animal'[+animate, +living, +neuter]. 
But what about the word 'soul'. Is this animate, inanimate? I know it's abstract and neuter.
What am I missing here about this subject matter? I also want to have a clear picture about this evolution and if it works for us or doesn't because as I see it, the forumists here have plenty of questions to answer and many, many interesting ideas.

Cheers to all!


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## sokol

irinet said:


> What am I missing here about this subject matter?


Well, the thing is that in IE neuter did _not_ develop as a 'blend' of masculine and feminine; rather, or so it is believed by those who think that Hittite is representing an old (the _oldest)_ stage of gender development, it could have been like that:

Step 1: gender distinction only distinguishes between masculine/feminine = animate "gender" and non-animate "gender".

Step 2: animate gender splits into masculine and feminine, so that we now have a three-gender-distinction.

Note that this is a _hypothesis_, accepted by some but (to my knowledge) not all comparative linguists.
Hittite did not have masculine vs. feminine, it had only animate vs. inanimate; the case of Hittite _could_ be the "original" IE gender system but it might be a Hittite innovation not shared by any other branch of IE languages.

Your suggestion of neuter developing as a merger from masculine and feminine is based on observation of modern languages only; for this (to my knowledge) there's no evidence to be found in ancient languages.
So while this might have happened in other language groups it is rather safe to say that in Indo-European gender did not develop like this.



bibax said:


> For some reasons *the partitive genitive prevailed over the accusative only in the case of the animate masculine nouns* and effectively replaced it. In the case of the inanimate masc. as well as all fem. and neuter nouns the subtile distinction between part. genitive and accusative in the direct object remained in many Slavic languages.


Thanks for the detailed explanation - this is exactly what I was looking for, but as I have hardly any resources for OCS and Common Slavic available I wasn't able to to say whether or not there's a (any) relation to an inanimate/animate distinction. Obviously this is not the case, so it is clear that this Slavic feature has no relevance for the development of gender in Common Slavic and Indo-European.


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## edwardtheconfessor

_"We stand in sight of The Promised Land" - after Paul Cezanne.._ 

Mikael Thompson (The sci.lang FAQ: 28, 14 Sept 2010, cached by google http://www.zompist.com/lang21.html#28) 'How did genders and cases develop in IE?' (Indo-European) :- 
"The ANIMATE nouns are the historical source for the *masculine* gender, and the INANIMATE nouns for the *neuter*. This is why in all classic IE languages" _[Meaning Greek and Latin and archaic languages such as Hittite and (Ancient) Persian - to which he also refers?] _"the neuter nominative and accusative have identical forms and the only basic difference between masculine and feminine neuter nouns is in the accusative" _[i.e. in the case of proto Indo-European] _" ... PIE" _[Proto-Indo-European] _"didn't bother much with specifiying plurals, but when it did, it added an '-s' or other endings. The neuter plural is *NOT* descended from this, however- active/stative languages simply didn't make plurals for inanimate nouns - but instead a COLLECTIVE NOUN, treated grammatically as a singular. This collective noun ended with '-a' in the nominative and accusative and eventually it developed into the *feminine*, which in all the old IE languages has the same form in the nominative singular as does the neuter plural nominative-accusative. It is also why the correct neuter plural takes a singular verb. The reason it is called the *FEMININE*, of course, is that nouns ending in females " _[Does he mean the nouns which had now taken this '- a' collective noun suffix?] _" fell in this gender most of the time." _[This, if he is correct, would have been a kind of etymological 'trick' or 'sleight of hand' ? He effectively acknowledges this .. ] _"This is puzzling and probably we must accept it as a fact whose explanation can't be recovered from the depths of time." _[I refer your point about this last, berndf, post #65, 22nd Sept para. 5]_

Anne Curzan, University of Michigan; 'Gender Shifts In the History of English' (Cambridge UP, 2003) :- 
"Gender, although a common feature in many languages throughout the world is NOT essential to a language; many languages have never had gender systems and others have lost them with no lethal reprecussions." _[I heartily agree! It is organic to my arguments. I respectfully cannot agree that "the three gender system is ubiquitous in IE languages." - berndf post #65, 22nd Sept, para. 4 - if by 'ubiquitous' you mean 'multi-useful' or 'multi-purposeful'. Some other posters, I think, agree ; post #64, effeundici, 22nd Sept.__] _"Many European languages other than English have witnessed a noticeable decay in the original grammatical gender " _[ I refer Lars H, re: the tendency to 'falling off' of usage of these in pronoun use - post #58, 20th Sept.] _"although few are as dramatic as English." _[Then Curzan refers to Corbell's observation (SEE REFS BELOW) that in many SLAVIC languages (I think you seek to bring our attention to this, Angelo di fuoco; post #75 , 23rd Sept) there has been a reversal against the trend, with subgenders being added to the gender system.__] _"the triple gender system has been maintained in, for example, German and some Slavic languages." _[As poetnpassion shared with us, post #59, 20th Sept.] _"This has been reduced to a two-gender system in the Romance languages " _['Latin' languages.] _"Ibrahim (1973) " _[SEE REFS] _"notes that the neuter was always only 'vaguely' distinguished from the masculine;" _[BUT see Thompson's (above) explanation of how this really happened.__] _"its paradigm of inflectional endings often differing in only two cases," _[Here, Curzan refers, by way of reference to Ibrahim, to what I call this etymological 'trick' of emergent modern 'Latin' languages - creating, by this process of 'merger', what I call the 'logical absurdity' of ascribing masculine or feminine gender to such sexless objects as tables, chairs, desks, pens, books - even though a similar 'chop logic'/random/arbitrary logic had already occured (as we have seen) even before the eclipsing of any logic of animacy/ inanimacy e.g. in emergent Greek and Latin.__] _"so the merger of the two classes did not involve the restructuring of entire paradigms." _[This, then, was how the logical absurdity was accomplished. __Of the even more abstruse and inexplicable etymological 'trick' of English attributing a 'concocted' 'neuter' gender - much later - to all nouns denoting all inanimate objects, Curzan writes:] _" This shift from grammatical to natural gender " _['Natural gender': she means gender reflecting the actual sex of (animate only) things.] _"renders English unusual among Indo-European languages." 
_[And all evidence DOES suggest that this process in English began 'big time' (though it took a few centuries to complete), during the emergence in Middle English of a uniqely 'shorn' grammar with so many noun, verbal, pronomial inflections abandoned altogether. This left, of course, word *order* , instead, as the only viable way of indicating case (and much else). Change the word order of many nouns and you change the case completely._
_This 'concocting' of a deceptively logical 'neuter' gender for inanimate things after the fact seems to have been an etymologically 'disingenuous' manouvre - possible, I suggest, only because of this great 'robbery' of so many grammatical inflexions. __Erades (1956) (SEE REFS) remarks:]_ " The gender of English nouns, " _[Emergent modern English nouns] _"FAR FROM BEING SIMPLE AND CLEAR " _[as modern English speakers suppose] _"is compicated and obscure and the principles underlying it are baffling and elusive, no less, and perhaps even more so than in other languages." _[__Overstatement? Several etymologists point to the inherited anomaly of modern English having, for example, a triple gender pronoun system persisting in the personal pronouns: 'he/she/it' ( 'him/her/it', 'his/her/its') yet an animate/inanimate (but genderless) distinction in the relative pronouns; 'who/which' ('whom', 'whose'.). - surely a survival from an older logical 'set' originating in, and persisting from, PIE (cf Thompson - above)? _
_This last would seem to make my response to berndf (my post #62, 22nd Sept, para.1) valid in its assertion that the ascribing of spiritual animacy to objects, such as stones, rocks, trees, rivers, mountains, caves or even trees was NOT the causation of attributing gender to inanimate objects by ancient (Neolithic or earlier) peoples - again, I refer to Thompson's careful explanation of how and why this happened. And this also happened, clearly, quite a bit later in historical (or prehistoric) terms. This will be true if we assume Thompson correct. It is far the best explanation I have thus far come across._

_Thompson's assertion that the first DI-partite (NOT tri-partite) attempt at classifying nouns in PIE, perhaps early Bronze Age times circa 3- 4,000 BC - took account, indeed, of - and, at first only of - this distinction between animate and inanimate things I find credible. The ascribing of 'masculine' and 'neuter' (NOT 'feminine' at all - at this stage) gender to these respectively - which probably began, as Curzan would call it, by natural as opposed to 'semantic' or 'grammatical' gender, was then later, by degrees, confused and obfuscated by the more random assigning of either of these two genders to nouns denoting increasing varieties of things both animate and inanimate._ 
_Thompson himself, we note, comments on this strange, illogical and inexplicable development - whose origins appear to be 'lost in the mists of time' (to paraphrase him). As I have said, on that - the problematical remoteness in time - you berndf and Irinet ( your post #57, 20th Sept) are both right._ 
_I cannot, respectfully, accept any explanation (I refer post #61, 21st Sept, berndf, final para.) of the emergence of noun gender as having any root whatever in such a belief system. This belief system of spirits, souls, deities and similar inhabiting certain natural objects was, in fact, almost universal among prehistoric Homo Sapiens and, as Curzan also points out, a little earlier in her work (REF IBID.), there are other world language systems - e.g. Bantu languages such as Swahili, some Turanian languages (e.g. Turkish), which have never had anything resembling what we call gender of nouns - though classify them otherwise they assuredly did and do._
_Leaving aside 'Nostritic' (or 'Nostratic') and 'pre-Nostritic'; here's my hunch:- this di-partite classification of nouns (animate and inanimate), became 'Hobson-Jobson'd' into some kind of emergent gender-based attempt at noun classification AND created as it did so many anomalies in emergent Iron Age languages and their grammars - the descendants of which we still live with today. Clearly this had, somewhere down the line, a (probably Neolitihic) ancestor in this (I say logical) distinction between ANIMATE AND INANIMATE things - and this same kind of (genderless) logic has been, in my view, the inception of noun designation in other world (e.g. Bantu ,Tagalog/ Pilipino (refer my post #62, 22nd Sept , para. 3)) languages._

_Thanks all who assisted/ inspired me in this quest for an elusive 'holy grail'! _

REFERENCES:
Corbett, Greville G.; 'The World Atlas of Language Studies' (Cambridge UP, 1991)
Ibrahim, Muhammed, Hassan; 'Grammatical Gender; Its Origin and Development' (Jana Linguanum Series Minor 166, Mailon, The Hague and Paris, 1973)
Erades, P.A.; 'Points of Modern English Syntax', 1956 (published in 'English Studies' Vol. 38, Issue 1-6, 1957).

- edwardtheconfessor


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## berndf

edwardtheconfessor said:


> _"We stand in sight of The Promised Land" - after Paul Cezanne.._
> 
> Mikael Thompson (The sci.lang FAQ: 28, 14 Sept 2010, cached by google http//www.zompist.com/lang21.html) 'How did genders and cases develop in IE?' (Indo-European) :-
> "The ANIMATE nouns are the historical source for the *masculine* gender, and the INANIMATE nouns for the *neuter*....


No disagreement, except maybe the reminder that these are result obtained by a technique called _internal reconstruction_. Reconstruction of proto-languages from attested languages is already a daring endeavour and reconstruction of a pre-proto-language from another reconstructed language should always be taken with a grain of salt.

If you read Mikael Thompson's explanations carefully, especially those about water and fire, you will find that the relevant definition of "animate" in the context of an active/stative language is "capable of acting" and is not necessarily linked to any biological sense of the word.


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## Istriano

jmartins said:


> Really? In Spanish you can say "quiero leche" (I want (some) milk) but you can't say "*quiero libro", instead you should say "quiero un/el/ese/algún/... libro" (I want a/the/that/some/... book), because 'milk' is uncountable while 'book' is countable. This is even more evident in French.



In (Brazilian) Portuguese, you can perfectly say:


Água é bom.  (no article) [Water is good]
A água está boa. (article) [This water is/tastes good]
_
Quero um livro._ (article) [I want a book]
_Quero o livro _(article) [I want this book]
_*Quero livro* _(no article) [I want any book]
Quero livros (no article) [I want books]
_Quero os livros_  (article) [I want the/these books].

_Mulher brasileira é bonita =_ Brazilian women are nice.
_Quero praia já já! _= I want (any) beach right now!

It's not logical being forced to say
_two pieces of advice_ in English instead of _dois conselhos,_


Going back onto the topic,
Dravidian languages have the ''natural'' gender,
so boys are masculine, the Miss World is feminine, but a table or a cat is neutral.


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## Istriano

effeundici said:


> An interesting word with respect to word gender is the word *sun / sonne / sole / soleil *which is male in the southern and hot countries and feminine in the cold and northern countries, as far as I know.
> 
> It would be interesting to know the relevant gender in Icelandic and Arabic (if genders exist in those languages,though).




Sometimes, the gender is decided morphologically and not semantically,

*pesadilla, paradoja *end in -a, so they are  feminine (in Spanish)
*pesadelo, paradoxo *end in -o, so they are masculine (in Portuguese)


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## sekelsenmat

effeundici said:


> An interesting word with respect to word gender is the word *sun / sonne / sole / soleil *which is male in the southern and hot countries and feminine in the cold and northern countries, as far as I know.
> 
> It would be interesting to know the relevant gender in Icelandic and Arabic (if genders exist in those languages,though).



In Polish it is słońce (neutral), Russian солнце (neutral)


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## sekelsenmat

Istriano said:


> _*Quero livro* _(no article) [I want any book]
> Quero livros (no article) [I want books]



But that's child-speech. I don't think this is acceptable in adult speech, unless you are pretending to be a child.

Edit: Now I remembered one ocasion where this is indeed valid. For example if someone asks:

Você quer pizza ou macarrão?

A valid answer is: Quero macarrão.

But still this isn't valid as a general sentence. In general sentences one would require an article.


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## Explorer41

berndf said:


> The standard hypothesis has been that primitive cultures are (almost) all characterized by animistic world views.  Therefore, applying homomorphic concepts like gender to *all* things seems obvious.


Do you mean, they supposed (or "felt") that many thinkable objects have an associated human-like quality - some human nature, similar to our minds and having a will, a thought and everything else? I can't understand the words "spirit" and "animus", I don't know what do they mean here in this discussion.

If it is what you mean (or if you mean some other thing and you're able to explain what), what are evidences for this theory? They should be strong enough, as the theory itself looks strange. Why did we lose that associations between things and human natures? We could have them as well in our life, they wouldn't interfere our feeling. Why did we need such associations at that time? What is a nature and what is a cause of such supposed correlations between a type of a society and having that associations? From where do we know about it?

Answers for these questions are seemingly obvious for you, but I can't see them. For me, it is a whole strange idea. I should also add that giving a human nature to the Sun or to the Earth is not the same as giving a human nature to every non-abstract object (to every stone and to every stick). And also, that stories about gods may strongly concern some parts of a human mind, limited, but leave other parts untouched.

And by the way, if every material object had a human nature of a particular gender, then such genders had to be learned together with language. So the idea doesn't give an answer to the question about the origin of grammatical genders -- it just reformulates it for some unknown for me reason. From where did animus genders arise?

Thanks in advance for clarifying


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## berndf

Explorer41 said:


> ...I can't understand the words "spirit" and "animus", I don't know what do they mean here in this discussion.
> 
> If it is what you mean (or if you mean some other thing and you're able to explain what), what are evidences for this theory?...


You could start by reading this Wikipedia article about _Animism_.


Explorer41 said:


> So the idea doesn't give an answer to the question about the origin of grammatical genders -- it just reformulates it for some unknown for me reason. From where did animus genders arise?


In PIE, the origin of genders has been explained further in the thread. My point is that the development of the original _active/stative collective/stative individual_ into _masculine/feminine/neuter _is a re-interpretation which seems paradoxical from a modern perspective but not from an Animistic perspective which prevailed in many older cultures and in some still does to some extend, like in Shintoism or Hinduism.


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