# gender neutral pronouns



## catnip101

Hi! I'm wondering if there are any languages with gender neutral pronouns?


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## Dymn

Many, probably most languages, make no distinction between "he" and "she". 257 out of the 378 languages surveyed in the WALS don't. These include amongst others Hungarian, Turkish, Hindi, Vietnamese, Indonesian. Chinese should be white too because the distinction between "he" and "she" is only in the written language (they're effectively the same word and sound the same).


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## Circunflejo

Dymn said:


> Many, probably most languages, make no distinction between "he" and "she".


And even languages that do differentiate between he and she may have neutral pronouns too like, for example, Spanish lo.


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## jekoh

Persian also makes no difference between _he_ and _she_. The "3rd person singular only" distinction is between _neutral_ and _common_.


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## Dymn

Circunflejo said:


> And even languages that do differentiate between he and she may have neutral pronouns too like, for example, Spanish lo.


Hmmm but when it's used for people it can only refer to a man.


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## Circunflejo

Dymn said:


> Hmmm but when it's used for people it can only refer to a man.


There's no reference in the OP to humans but if we talk about humans we could talk about le that in the leísmo de cortesía may refer to either a man or a woman.


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## Awwal12

Dymn said:


> Many, probably most languages, make no distinction between "he" and "she".


Indeed. English has lost its grammatical genders but kept the gender-specific 3p. pronouns (though now the correct pronoun is chosen based on purely semantic criteria). However, for most languages without grammatical genders (and that's the absolute majority of human languages) there's also no gender distinctions in pronouns. It's not just Hungarian and Turkish but all Finno-Ugric and Turkic languages, Mongolian languages, Astronesian languages - the list can be continued on and on. Chinese, curiously, doesn't make any distinction in the oral form but nevertheless uses different symbols for "he", "she" and "it". Even North-Eastern Caucasian languages which do have class systems resembling IE genders (but more extensive) often don't have gender distinctions in 3p. personal pronouns (for example, that's the case in Chechen).


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## Michael Zwingli

Dymn said:


> Many...languages, make no distinction between "he" and "she". 257 out of the 378 languages surveyed...do.These include amongst others...Hindi...


This fact begs a rather academic question for me: did Sanscrit, the ancestor of Hindi, make the distinction? In like manner, does Hindi's Islamic "brother", Urdu? For that matter, what portion of the IE family makes this distinction, and when did it manifest in IE history?


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## Welsh_Sion

Welsh is particularly rich in pronouns (frontal, internal, echoing), but essentially only distinguishes between 'he' and 'she' in the singular. (There is no 'it' and masc. plur. is generic to both genders for 3rd pers. plur.)

However, if we revert to front, dependent, pronouns (what others call 'possessive adjectives'), then in the sing. 'ei' is used for both masc. and fem. Where a following word has a mutable consonant or begins with a vowel, then without the accompanying echoing pronoun, then this can tell you if the possessor is male ('ei' as 'his') or female ('ei' as 'her'). 

Where the item possessed neither begins with a vowel or a mutable consonant, then you have no idea (outside context) if it's 'his sister'. 'her sister' or 'its sister'.)


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## Penyafort

Most Romance languages don't use the pronouns as English does, since the verb ending already marks the person. In a way, that's just as undefined as if the same pronoun was used for both genders, because when we read _cant*a* _we don't know whether it's he or she who sings.


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## Michael Zwingli

Penyafort said:


> ...when we read _cant*a* _we don't know whether it's he or she who sings.


That's fine, indeed, @Penyafort, so long as you don't start describing yourself as a "Latinx" person! (If you don't already know of _that_ madness, Google will certainly serve to instruct...)   ;-)


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## AndrasBP

What about Basque? It doesn't have gender, does it?


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## Dymn

It doesn't. It uses _hura _(literally "this one") and _haiek _("those ones") for "he/she" and "they".


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## Olaszinhok

Formal and literary Italian does have a sort of "neuter" pronoun, actually two:* esso *and *essa*, which are traditianally used for things and, to a lesser extent, animals. They generally correspond to English _*it*._


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## Michael Zwingli

Olaszinhok said:


> Formal and literary Italian does have a sort of "neuter" pronoun, actually two:* esso *and *essa*, which are traditianally used for things and, to a lesser extent, animals. They often correspond to the English _*it*._


They may represent the idea of "it", of an inanimate thing, but seem to exhibit grammatical gender nonetheless. (Don't forget that inanimate objects are assigned grammatical gender in Latin derived tongues.) Grammatical gender is impossible to hide in the Latin daughter languages, which wear the old IE masculine (-os) and feminine (-a) gender designations "on their sleeves", as it were. Indeed, _esso_ is of masculine gender, and _essa_ is of feminine. 

What is more curious is that _esso_ appears to be descended from the masculine *accusative* of _ipse_, while _essa_ seems to descend from the feminine *nominative* (though it could be argued that it descend from the feminine accusative as well) form. It seems strange to me that the Latin accusative forms seem often to have been the source used for lexemes in the daughter languages, but one can't argue with the results, though, which generally evince a nicely bilateral symmetry. Descent into the Romance languages seems to have often been a "willy-nilly" process, especially where Latin did not address the grammatical issue under consideration (e.g. third person pronouns).


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## Olaszinhok

Michael Zwingli said:


> They may represent the idea of "it", of an inanimate thing, but seem to exhibit grammatical gender nonetheless


Yes, of course, that's why I wrote _a sort of neuter pronoun_.  However, it is something that does not exist in the other Romance languages. _Ese, esa_ _esse_ or _essa _and so on are demonstrative pronouns in Spanish and Portuguese, for instance.


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## Penyafort

There's also the pronoun _hom _in Catalan and _on _in French, both meaning 'one, people, somebody, everybody' (from Latin HOMO) which are regarded as indefinite rather than neutral, but they are third-person pronouns covering both genders. Although _on _in French has become a sort of 'we' in many cases and _hom _in Catalan has become literary and is hardly ever used in common speech.



Michael Zwingli said:


> That's fine, indeed, @Penyafort, so long as you don't start describing yourself as a "Latinx" person! (If you don't already know of _that_ madness, Google will certainly serve to instruct...)   ;-)


Well, I'm a Latin European but not a Latina/o in the English sense of the word, so I wouldn't describe myself as that. But if I were, I'd certainly not call myself a _Latinx_.  To me, x = unknown, and _ego nosco me ipsum_, I know what I am.


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## Michael Zwingli

Penyafort said:


> To me, x = unknown, and _ego nosco me ipsum_, I know what I am.


This is, perhaps, the most ingenious argument against the "Latinx" absurdity that I have heard.


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## Włoskipolak 72

In Polish and I think in other Slavic languages there is a neuter singular pronoun "*ono*/*jego*" but that can be considered dehumanizing, similar to "it/its" in English.
Some neopronoun forms have been proposed, such as;

onu/jenu
ono/eno
vono/vego
ne/nego



*Third person singular, masculine and neuter*


nom.acc.gen.dat.instr.loc.OCSjь; je
[onъ; ono]jь; jejegojemuimъjemъRussianon; onójegójegójemúimnëmBelarussianën; janójahójahójamúimimUkrainianvin; vonójohójohójomúnymn'ómu/nimLemko-Rusynvin; onojoho/hojoho/hojomu/munymnymPolishon; onojego/niego/go; je/niejego/gojemu/munimnimCashubianon; ono/nojego/jen/go; jejegojemu/munimnimLower Sorbianwon; wonojogo/jen; jojogojomunimnjomUpper Sorbianwón; wono/wonejeho/jón; jo/jejehojemunimnimCzechon; onojeho/jej/ho; je/jej/hojeho/jej/hojemu/mujímněmSlovakon; onojeho/ho; hojeho/hojemu/munímňomSloveneon; ononjeganjeganjemunjimnjemSerbian/Croatianôn; ònonjèga/ganjèga/ganjèmu/munjîmnjèmuMacedoniantoj; toanego/go—nemu/mu——Bulgariantoj; tonégo/go—mu/nému——


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## Sobakus

Michael Zwingli said:


> What is more curious is that _esso_ appears to be descended from the masculine *accusative* of _ipse_, while _essa_ seems to descend from the feminine *nominative* (though it could be argued that it descend from the feminine accusative as well) form.


The outcome of both _ipsa_ and _ipsam_ would be the same _essa,_ so nothing points to its descending from the nominative. On the other hand, because in the vast majority of cases where the source can be established it's clearly the accusative, the starting assumption must be that _essa_ likewise reflects the accusative. By the way, _esso_ could theoretically reflect the alternative nominative _ipsus_ (Sardinian has _isse_ alongside _issu_, but this probably reflects the nominative and the accusative_)._


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## Michael Zwingli

Sobakus said:


> ...in the vast majority of cases where the source can be established it's clearly the accusative...


Tell me, @Sobakus, do you have any idea why this might have been the case? It is something that I noticed early on in my considerations of how Latin lemmas descended into the Romance languages, and I have always found it rather strange...no, wrong word...rather _curious_, myself.


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## Sobakus

Michael Zwingli said:


> Tell me, @Sobakus, do you have any idea why this might have been the case? It is something that I noticed early on in my considerations of how Latin lemmas descended into the Romance languages, and I have always found it rather strange...no, wrong word...rather _curious_, myself.


You're right, it would be strange for this to happen in a nominative-accusative language (where nom. is the default case). Which is why it's believed that (most varieties of) Late Latin wasn't such a language, but exhibited an active-stative alignment (aka split intransitivity), where the subject of an intransitive clause takes the same case (acc.) as the object of a transitive clause - halfway to an ergative language. This survives in the more conservative Romance languages that have participle agreement with the subject in intransitive constructions that take the auxiliary "to be", and the subject can appear in the object position (_è venuta Maria < *est venūtam Marīam_).

It appears that the accusative became the default case, starting with the exclamatory accusative and things like shopping/ingredient lists and inventories; then the accusative became the subject case in intransitive constructions (incl. passives), and this cemented its role as the default  or at least the most common case. The nominative may have usually appeard with highly agentive, personal and animate nouns (_fluid intransitivity_).


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## Michael Zwingli

Sobakus said:


> ...it's believed that (most varieties of) Late Latin wasn't such a language, but exhibited an active-stative alignment (aka split intransitivity)...


Thanks, Sobakus, I was not aware of the theory, but it seems to make sense. I have always thought of what we call "Classical Latin" as being a _prestige dialect_ of a more widespread "Latinic" (for lack of a better word, as the more widespread language was unnamed) language composed otherwise of what we now call "vulgar" dialects, said "prestige" dialect being spoken by the Patrician class, the Novi Homines, and other aristocratic types. Perhaps even in the Classical/Imperial Period, the movement, within these "vulgar" tongues, toward "nominativizations" of what were accusative forms in the "high/prestige language" (that is, "Latin" as we know it)    had already begun? Of course, this is but speculation.


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## Michael Zwingli

Awwal12 said:


> English has lost its grammatical genders but kept the gender-specific 3p. pronoun...


Being firmly entrenched in the IE linguistic mindset, and never having studied any non-IE languages which do not include grammatical gender, I have trouble concieving of how gender neutral 3rd person pronouns would appear. Would everything be referred to as "it"? I think it is believed (if I am recalling correctly) that in the earliest forms of PIE, there was no grammatical gender, but rather a distinction between animate and inanimate nouns. Yet, even understanding that, it remains difficult for me to picture.


jekoh said:


> Persian also makes no difference between _he_ and _she_. The "3rd person singular only" distinction is between _neutral_ and _common_.


Thanks, @jekoh. I am prompted to wonder: what sort of treatment is this given in Farsi-English translation? Perhaps it might help me to concieve of life without grammatical gender to know this.


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## Awwal12

Michael Zwingli said:


> I have trouble concieving of how gender neutral 3rd person pronouns would appear. Would everything be referred to as "it"?


It depends on how exactly the personal pronouns of the language are organized. But most typically it would be either "he/she" (an animate 3p.sg. pronoun) or "he/she/it" (an universal 3p.sg. pronoun). It should be noted that even languages which contrast animacy and inanimacy at some level (a rather widespread feature, apparently) don't necessarily have separate animate and inanimate 3p.sg. personal pronouns. Cf. Tatar (Turkic) kem "who", närsä "what", ul "he/she/it"; or Moksha (Finno-Ugric) kiye "who", meze "what", son "he/she/it". 
P.S.: English "that" may be worth considering, especially since 3p. personal pronouns do frequently evolve from deictic words.


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## Armas

Finnish has gender neutral pronouns. Instead, distinction is made between humans (_hän_ "he/she", _he_ "they") and non-humans (_se_ "it", _ne_ "they"), at least in the standard language. In many/most dialects it is very common to use _se/ne_ for everyone and everything indiscriminately.


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## Michael Zwingli

Azeri (Azerbaijani) has gender neutral 3rd person pronouns, which is not surprising if related Farsi does. Also, Estonian, Hungarian (it is apparently a thing with Uralic languages), Georgian (Kartvelian), most Polynesian languages, Korean (but only in the polite form...think Spanish _usted_), Mongolian, and Mandarin Chinese.


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## apmoy70

Michael Zwingli said:


> *Azeri (Azerbaijani)* has gender neutral 3rd person pronouns, which is not surprising if *related Farsi* does. Also, Estonian, Hungarian (it is apparently a thing with Uralic languages), Georgian (Kartvelian), most Polynesian languages, Korean (but only in the polite form...think Spanish _usted_), Mongolian, and Mandarin Chinese.


Azerbaijani is a Turkic language with high percentage of intelligibility with Istanbul Turkish (both belong to the Oghuz sub-branch)


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## Michael Zwingli

apmoy70 said:


> Azerbaijani is a Turkic language...


Ah, that's right...my mistake!


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## Welsh_Sion

STOP PRESS - from Norway

Gender neutral pronoun ‘hen’ to enter dictionary in Norway due to popularity

Gender neutral pronoun ‘hen’ to enter dictionary in Norway due to popularity​John Dunne 22 mins ago


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## ain'ttranslationfun?

Michael Zwingli said:


> Azeri (Azerbaijani) has gender neutral 3rd person pronouns, which is not surprising if related Farsi does. Also, Estonian, Hungarian (it is apparently a thing with Uralic languages), Georgian (Kartvelian), most Polynesian languages, Korean (but only in the polite form...think Spanish _usted_), Mongolian, and Mandarin Chinese.



Aren't Esp. 'Usted (abbreviated as 'Vd.)', FR 'vous' and IT 'Lei'* only used as the polite/formal form for people when addressing them in speech and in writing, not as substitutes for "he/she, him/her" in other contexts? (Of course, I'm not talking about 2nd person plural 'vous' or third person singular 'lei' as opposed to 'tu' in everyday use.) 
*And for that matter, outside Romance languages, 'du' in German.


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## Michael Zwingli

Welsh_Sion said:


> STOP PRESS - from Norway
> 
> Gender neutral pronoun ‘hen’ to enter dictionary in Norway due to popularity
> 
> Gender neutral pronoun ‘hen’ to enter dictionary in Norway due to popularity​John Dunne 22 mins ago


Haha. they must take instruction from all of us here!


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## Red Arrow

Michael Zwingli said:


> Being firmly entrenched in the IE linguistic mindset, and never having studied any non-IE languages which do not include grammatical gender, I have trouble concieving of how gender neutral 3rd person pronouns would appear. Would everything be referred to as "it"? I think it is believed (if I am recalling correctly) that in the earliest forms of PIE, there was no grammatical gender, but rather a distinction between animate and inanimate nouns. Yet, even understanding that, it remains difficult for me to picture.


Dutch die (that, those) is used to refer to both men and women, like an informal version of he/she/they.

And I am pretty sure die is at least partially related to English they.


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## marrish

Michael Zwingli said:


> jekoh said:
> 
> 
> 
> Persian also makes no difference between _he_ and _she_. The "3rd person singular only" distinction is between _neutral_ and _common_.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> This fact begs a rather academic question for me: did Sanscrit, the ancestor of Hindi, make the distinction? In like manner, does Hindi's Islamic "brother", Urdu? For that matter, what portion of the IE family makes this distinction, and when did it manifest in IE history?
Click to expand...

The map is definitely wrong Re. _Persian_ (at least) which, as jekoh stated, makes no such a distinction as there as there is between the English 'he' and 'she'. No gender exists in Persian whatsoever save in some Arabic phrases perhaps, and the "3rd person singular only" remark on the map can only possibly be relating to the following (_ironically from the source linked to under the map_) ie. to the difference between human and nonhuman referents instead:


> _(“Persian,” Shahrzad Mahootian, Routleledge 1997) (paragraphs not in original order-marrish)_
> 2.1.2.1.8 Gender/Class Distinction in Pronouns
> *No masculine/feminine distinction is made in the pronouns.* The third person singular /u/ can mean ‘he’ or ‘she’ for human referents. The third person pronoun /un/ refers to nonhuman objects. No gender distinction is made in the pronouns with regard to the speaker. No formal distinctions are made in the pronoun system with regard to social class. However, polite forms of the second and third person singular pronouns are used in certain contexts. See section 2.1.2.1.2. ===>
> 2.1.2.1.2   Pronouns reflect one of three persons and two numbers. The third person singular has separate forms for humans and nonhumans. /una/, the plural of /un/ ‘that’ refers to either human or nonhuman third person plurals. /anan/ is a literary/formal alternative which is only used for humans. …
> 2.1.1.9.1-3 Gender and Noun Classes
> Persian has neither noun classes nor grammatical gender. The third person singular pronoun /u/ and the third person plural pronouns /išun/ and /una/ refer to both male and female humans. *A distinction is made in third person forms with regard to humanness* (See 2.1.2.1.2).



_Sanskrit_ had masculine, feminine, and neuter personal/demonstrative pronouns in singular, dual, and plural, but its finite verbs didn't betray gender.

On the other hand, the _Urdu_ 3rd person pronouns (یہ، وہ _yih, wuh [spacial difference]_) don't exhibit any of the above (= neither gender nor number). These functions are neatly fulfilled by the verb etc., so actually, in spite of Urdu being typed by the gender-neutral personal pronouns the finite forms of the verbs always display gender, barring in 'ergative' settings. Late Prakrit and Apabhransha, from which Urdu gradually emerged, underwent a drastic implosion of grammar in favour of simplification so I suspect that it must've stopped differentiating between 'he' and 'she' early on if it ever did, but unfortunately, I don't possess any particular info about this.

_Hindi_ follows roughly in the footsteps of its direct ancestor Urdu in the gender matter but the pronouns यह _yah_ वह _vah_ (3 pers. sg. gender-neutral) do sport the plural forms ये _ye _वे_ ve _in Modern Standard Hindi, which Urdu's been done with by the mid-18th century.

BTW It is not particularly prudent to assign a creed to a language , and "language" being feminine in Skt, Urdu and Hindi we say "sister languages". Actually it's the first time I've come across "brother languages"  _[gender, wasn't it the topic?]._

In the _Dravidian_ languages, the distinction for Tamil, Malayalam (lost gender distinction in finite verbs), Kannada, Irula, Toda, Kota, Kodagu is five-way: human m., human f. and nonhuman (it) (sg.) + human they, and nonhuman they (pl.). Some dialects of Kannada and Tamil have made changes to this system or lost the gender distinction completely, only retaining the number.
Telugu has m. sg. “he” and human f. + nonhuman “she, it”.  The masculine plural has bearing on mixed-gender groups “men and women”.  _Brahui_ from Pakistan has no gender distinction, be it in pronouns or verbs [he-she-it], only in number [sg.-pl.]. In the process of gender-number neutralisation, the singular and non-masculine categories tend to broaden their ranges of usage, not the other way around.


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## Michael Zwingli

ain'ttranslationfun? said:


> Aren't Esp. 'Usted (abbreviated as 'Vd.)', FR 'vous' and IT 'Lei'* only used as the polite/formal form for people when addressing them in speech and in writing, not as substitutes for "he/she, him/her" in other contexts?


Well, _usted/ustedes_ are second person formal/polite pronomials which take the third person verbal conjugatives (evidencing a respectfully indirect form of speech). I only referenced it to illustrate, particularly to a European sensibility, an example of a "polite form", which is what the Korean genderless pronouns apparently are.


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## Michael Zwingli

marrish said:


> ..."language" being feminine in Skt, Urdu and Hindi we say "sister languages".


Oh, sorry! Being a rather patriarchal fellow myself, I go to the masculine by default....


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## ain'ttranslationfun?

Michael Zwingli said:


> _Well, __usted_/ustedes* are second person formal/polite pronomials which take the third person verbal conjugatives (evidencing a respectfully indirect form of speech). I only referenced it to illustrate, particularly to a European sensibility, an example of a "polite form", which is what the Korean genderless pronouns apparently are.



_De acuerdo*_ with the underlined part (but I have absolutely no knowledge of Korean).
*They're not capitalized in this case, though, are they?


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## Michael Zwingli

marrish said:


> _Hindi_ follows roughly in the footsteps of its direct ancestor Urdu...


I did not know that Urdu is considered to be an ancestor of Hindi! Rather, I thought they developed side by side from the common ancestor. Ya learn something new every day.


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## desi4life

Michael Zwingli said:


> I did not know that Urdu is considered to be an ancestor of Hindi! Rather, I thought they developed side by side from the common ancestor. Ya learn something new every day.



To be precise, Hindustani is the direct ancestor of both Hindi and Urdu. Since Urdu was standardized in the 18th century and influenced the standardization of Hindi in the 19th century, it can also be considered a direct ancestor of Hindi in a way.


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## marrish

"The Indo-Aryan Languages" - Colin P. Masica, CUP 91-2001


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## ain'ttranslationfun?

Can  we extend this to include  gender neutral nouns? While in English there will probably still be 'kings' and 'queens'*, 'dukes' and 'duchesses'; 'counts' and 'countesses', 'barons' and 'baronesses', 'earls' and 'ladies', there are now (for example) 'actors' for both sexes and 'Congressmembers'** for 'Congressmen/Congresswomen'.
*'monarch' works for both.
**Meaning 'Representatives'; in fact both Senators and Representatives are members of Congress.


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## Michael Zwingli

ain'ttranslationfun? said:


> ...in fact both Senators and Representatives are members of Congress.


Now, don't leave all the lovely senatresses (senatrixes (?)) off the list!  Senatress/Senatrix Sinema clearly has enough problems from her fellow Democrats these days!


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## Sobakus

Michael Zwingli said:


> Thanks, Sobakus, I was not aware of the theory, but it seems to make sense. I have always thought of what we call "Classical Latin" as being a _prestige dialect_ of a more widespread "Latinic" (for lack of a better word, as the more widespread language was unnamed) language composed otherwise of what we now call "vulgar" dialects, said "prestige" dialect being spoken by the Patrician class, the Novi Homines, and other aristocratic types. Perhaps even in the Classical/Imperial Period, the movement, within these "vulgar" tongues, toward "nominativizations" of what were accusative forms in the "high/prestige language" (that is, "Latin" as we know it) had already begun? Of course, this is but speculation.


You may want to take a look at this thread: The status of Latin. As I explain in the previous message, the movement probably began with the exclamatory accusative and commodity-related things like lists and hawker cries, as attested in written Latin of every period.


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## Sobakus

Michael Zwingli said:


> Now, don't leave all the lovely senatresses (senatrixes (?)) off the list!  Senatress/Senatrix Sinema clearly has enough problems from her fellow Democrats these days!


Is this a crack at gender-specific words in English or at something else?


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## Michael Zwingli

Sobakus said:


> Is this a crack at gender-specific words in English or at something else?


Haha, well kind of...a "little bitty crack" at peoples' metaphysical angst regarding the tenacity of grammatical gender, I suppose.


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## Sobakus

Michael Zwingli said:


> Haha, well kind of...a "little bitty crack" at peoples' metaphysical angst regarding the tenacity of grammatical gender, I suppose.


Then that would make you be in favour of seriously using words like 'senatress/senatrix' because you believe that those who oppose them are victims of said metaphysical angst?


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## Michael Zwingli

I can understand the motive underlying the questioning of grammatical gender in language. Linguistic gender seems to have been taken for granted by those old "Protos" on the Pontic Steppe. Personally, I have always thought it carried too far in certain branches of the IE family...in the Romance languages in particular. I see no need to assign gender to every noun...why "a stone" should be considered masculine or feminine is a bit beyond me. I have always felt that assignations of grammatical gender to inanimate objects, as well as to animate objects which do not exhibit "sex differentiation", is folly. In like manner, and following that, definite articles appear to perform quite well without being gendered. I do feel, however, that gender in personal pronouns is an important grammatical asset, as it has the ability to carry certain _emotional information_ in speech. The statement "he's gonna come mess you up" (thinking of a big, hairy gorilla of a  man) seems to carry a much greater _gravitas_ than does the statement "she's gonna come mess you up", since in a "state of nature", recognizing physical differences, an agressive man seems, very generally, a much greater threat than an agressive woman. Do you not agree?


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## Michael Zwingli

Sobakus said:


> Then that would make you be in favour of seriously using words like 'senatress/senatrix'...


Not so much...only in jest, I suppose. BTW, I entirely agree with you regarding the meaning of Biblia Vulgata, elsewhere stated.


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## Awwal12

Michael Zwingli said:


> Linguistic gender seems to have been taken for granted by those old "Protos" on the Pontic Steppe. Personally, I have always thought it carried too far in certain branches of the IE family...in the Romance languages in particular. I see no need to assign gender to every noun...why "a stone" should be considered masculine or feminine is a bit beyond me.


That's basically the difference between grammatical gender and different nouns for people of different biological genders. The first has nothing to do with semantics (consider how modern Russian commonly uses masculine "professional" nouns regarding women, even though suffixated feminine feminitives are also quite common), the second has nothing to do with grammar at all (since grammatical gender is not about nouns per se, but mostly about which gender forms other parts of speech, like adjectives or verbs, can take accordingly; if there's none, then using masculine or feminine anaphoric pronouns for inanimate nouns becomes poorly motivated and gets quickly phased out, as it happened in Middle English after the Old English gender forms were gone, effectively destroying grammatical gender as a category).


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## Sobakus

Michael Zwingli said:


> I can understand the motive underlying the questioning of grammatical gender in language. Linguistic gender seems to have been taken for granted by those old "Protos" on the Pontic Steppe. Personally, I have always thought it carried too far in certain branches of the IE family...in the Romance languages in particular. I see no need to assign gender to every noun...why "a stone" should be considered masculine or feminine is a bit beyond me. I have always felt that assignations of grammatical gender to inanimate objects, as well as to animate objects which do not exhibit "sex differentiation", is folly. In like manner, and following that, definite articles appear to perform quite well without being gendered. I do feel, however, that gender in personal pronouns is an important grammatical asset, as it has the ability to carry certain _emotional information_ in speech. The statement "he's gonna come mess you up" (thinking of a big, hairy gorilla of a  man) seems to carry a much greater _gravitas_ than does the statement "she's gonna come mess you up", since in a "state of nature", recognizing physical differences, an agressive man seems, very generally, a much greater threat than an agressive woman. Do you not agree?


I may be forgiven for saying that your view of language falls under the umbrella of the egocentric fallacy of the kind that often gets people labelled as aspies and leads to an obsession with conlangs. When a concept made use of in a great number of languages seems like folly, it's generally safe to assume that one doesn't understand the concept. Based off what you write, some of the questions that would help one navigate out of this situation include:

Who does the need to assign gender to nouns exist in relation to?
Is it the speakers developing the language teleologically? If so, why would they end up using a concept they have no need for?
Is it language as a system, the development being unavoidable or teleological, or neurobilogically determined? If so, what is the mechanism? Does one then mean that the development of grammatical gender clashes with that mechanism? This would be paradoxical by definition.
If no immediate answer comes, one can assume the aforementioend fallacy being involved.

Does one's native language possess the concept?
If yes and it still makes no sense, it's worth to reconsider the answer because this would be highly anomalous.
If no, and one believes they understand the concept as it exists in other languages, only it makes no sense, then one has to consider the fact that knowledge-about is widely different from knowledge-of. If one doesn't speak those other languages at a near-native level, chances are they don't understand the concept at all.

What is the function of grammatical gender any way?
For example, you say:


Michael Zwingli said:


> Perhaps it might help me to concieve of life without grammatical gender to know this.


I found this remark striking, since as Awwal12 mentions above, English has no grammatical gender, only natural. 'sorceress, senatrix, woman, table, he, it' are semantically-gendered/-less words similarly to how 'microwave, TV, hammer' are semantically-(non-)electronic words. They are determined by objective (hence 'natural') properties or cultural categories, and in absence of grammatical gender have no influence on grammar by definition. Grammatical gender aka noun class is when a language separates its nouns into different classes according to their grammatical agreement with other parts of speech such as adjectives and verbs. This definition provides the answer to at least the last of those questions - though naturally it requires grasping the concept and function of grammatical agreement.

It's incorrect to say that one has nothing to do with semantics and the other nothing to do with grammar - clearly the most common noun class systems are based on biological sex which also underlies semantically gendered words like 'sorceress/she', and clearly noun classes exhibit various degrees of semantic motivation, such as the feminine gender being associated with abstractness and mildness, the masculine with concreteness and sharpness in the IE languages - and grouping together feminine and inanimate semantics also seems to be common.

Here's the first article that came up when I googled for _grammatical gender vs natural gender_: Gygax et al. (2019), _A Language Index of Grammatical Gender Dimensions to Study the Impact of Grammatical Gender on the Way We Perceive Women and Men_. There's also the Wikipedia article for a shorter and perhaps less techincal read.


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## Awwal12

Sobakus said:


> When a concept made use of in a great number of languages seems like folly, it's generally safe to assume that one doesn't understand the concept.


Well, grammatical gender is one of the things which are called "empty categories", that's for certain. While it may arise from certain indirect benefits which it provides to the grammatical structure, we must also remember that its relative abundance in the linguistic landscape of the world is, largely, accidental. The three-gender system is an inherited feature exclusive to IE languages (and their extensive spreading *should* be regarded as a historical accident); the two-gender system is found predominantly in the languages of the Afroasiatic macrofamily. Overall, however, the absolute majority of linguistic families don't demonstrate that kind of noun classification, and all those languages seem to feel perfectly OK about it.


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## Sobakus

Awwal12 said:


> Well, grammatical gender is one of the things which are called "empty categories", that's for certain.


I was hoping that our previous discussion regarding arbitrariness, randomness, stochastic character or whatever in linguistics would make you more cautious of using these terms. To put it bluntly, the only informational content of such statements is to say that the author is clueless about the mechanisms underlying the phenomenon in question (cf. _the God of the Gaps_), and that in addition the author lacks any sort of self-awareness and is untrained in scientific thinking (cf. _the Socratic Paradox_). My recommendation in our case would be to employ a basic google search like _grammatical gender motivation_ or even your own _empty cathegory,_ which will net one many opportunities to reconsider dogmatic statements about linguistic arbitrariness_._


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## Michael Zwingli

Sobakus said:


> ...your view of language falls under the umbrella of the egocentric fallacy of the kind that often gets people labelled as aspies...


Good grief, I hope that I am not an "aspy" ("aspie"?)...



Sobakus said:


> and leads to an obsession with conlangs.


...but at least I have avoided that problem!


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## Sobakus

Michael Zwingli said:


> Good grief, I hope that I am not an "aspy" ("aspie"?)...


It's only a bad thing of one is in the dark about it and doesn't know how to compensate for it. You just gotta learn how not to annoy the _normies_


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## Michael Zwingli

Sobakus said:


> I found this remark striking, since as Awwal12 mentions above, English has no grammatical gender, only natural.


Yes, I should have said "natural gender" here, which (my not being a linguist, I must assume) is what the OP is talking about. What I meant was "perhaps it might help me to concieve of life without gendered pronominals to know this".


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## Awwal12

Sobakus said:


> To put it bluntly, the only informational content of such statements is to say that the author is clueless about the mechanisms underlying the phenomenon in question


The point is that such categorizations aren't based on any semantic criteria, it's as simple as that. If they may serve some side purposes in syntax is an entirely different question.


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## Sobakus

Michael Zwingli said:


> Yes, I should have said "natural gender" here, which (my not being a linguist, I must assume) is what the OP is talking about. What I meant was "perhaps it might help me to concieve of life without gendered pronominals to know this".


Even so, from your other remarks such as this


> I see no need to assign gender to every noun...why "a stone" should be considered masculine or feminine is a bit beyond me. I have always felt that assignations of grammatical gender to inanimate objects, as well as to animate objects which do not exhibit "sex differentiation", is folly.


it's clear that a big part of the reason for your being perplexed about this is conflating natural and grammatical gender.


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## Sobakus

Awwal12 said:


> The point is that such categorizations aren't based on any semantic criteria, it's as simple as that.


Is there no way to convey to you that you're mistaken about something without telling you that what you say is plainly false? Was it not clear from my previous reply that I wanted you to spend some time in google learning about the semantic motivation of such categorisations, after which you should no longer be inclined to deny the existence of such motivation?


Awwal12 said:


> If they may serve some side purposes in syntax is an entirely different question.


Side purposes? What do you believe is their main purpose?


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## Awwal12

Sobakus said:


> Is there no way to convey to you that you're mistaken about something without telling you that what you say is plainly false? Was it not clear from my previous reply that I wanted you to spend some time in google learning about the semantic motivation of such categorisations, after which you should no longer be inclined to deny the existence of such motivation?


Sorry, apparently I needed to be more precise. These categorizations aren't *defined* by any semantic criteria, which means they cannot be consistently deduced by any formal semantic analysis. That obviously doesn't mean that they aren't influenced by them (for staters, nouns denoting women will be typically feminine, and nouns denoting men will be masculine - something which is difficult to miss).


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## Michael Zwingli

Sobakus said:


> it's clear that a big part of the reason for your being perplexed about this is conflating natural and grammatical gender.


Quite so. I have been unfamiliar with the term "natural gender" in language before the present time. Now, I realize that I have been confusing the two. I must read up on the concept of natural gender in language.


Sobakus said:


> It's only a bad thing of one is in the dark about it and doesn't know how to compensate for it. You just gotta learn how not to annoy the _normies._


I would say, "bring me into the light, brother (sister?)", but so-doing might involve digressions into topics well beyond what is subsumed by the term "language theory". We cannot, and I will not, go thenceward other than to state that (naturally, I think) my view of language, and what you indicate as my not being a "normie" (which I think debatable, if I understand what you mean by the term), are informed _not only_ by an understanding, or by a lack thereof, of the mechanisms underlying language development, as is your assumed status a a "normie". For instance, dare I suggest that, if you were an American, yourself and myself might evidence political and philosophical differences? Indeed, do we now? Who knows? (These questions are purely rhetorical, and require no answer.) As you have suggested, the motivations underlying such as the instant categorizations are often extra-linguistic in nature. Enough said. I will read, digest, and consider whatever you may post regarding this. My extra-linguistic opinions are not set in stone; they are quite amenable to change, should cogent arguments be made. Unfortunately, since this is a site composed of _language_ forums, we cannot argue those finer points here. Here, I do greatly _admire_ and _appreciate_ your obvious linguistic knowledge and depth of understanding. I can learn much from you about language, and wish to avoid annoying to facilitate that.


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## ain'ttranslationfun?

Michael Zwingli said:


> Haha, well kind of...a "little bitty crack" at peoples' metaphysical angst regarding the tenacity of grammatical gender, I suppose.



This is CC, so I'll say "None of your 'trix', Michael!"


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## Michael Zwingli

ain'ttranslationfun? said:


> This is CC, so I'll say "None of your 'trix', Michael!"


Apparently, I was confusing "grammatical gender" and linguistic "natural gender". Personally, I don't like most expressions of grammatical gender, but find said natural gender (if I understand that), which I believe to be the topic of this thread, to have linguistic benefits.

CC?


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## marrish

Awwal12 said:


> The three-gender system is an inherited feature exclusive to IE languages



That can't be right, e.g. it's been already mentioned in No. 34 that


marrish said:


> In the _Dravidian_ languages, the distinction for Tamil, Malayalam (lost gender distinction in finite verbs), Kannada, Irula, Toda, Kota, Kodagu is five-way: human m., human f. and nonhuman (it) (sg.) + human they, and nonhuman they (pl.).


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