# What are genders good for?



## lioninacoma

I had discussion recently about whether nouns are conferred a sense _biological sex_ by their _grammatical gender_ in the minds of speakers of such languages. For example, do Spanish speakers regard a bed as somehow having intrinsic feminine qualities? Is the archetypal panther (la pantera) female, but the archetypal leopard (el leopardo) male? 

The consensus was a pretty resounding "no", although some native speakers felt that there was a maybe sliver of truth in the idea. 

But it made me wonder: why bother at all? Were genders assigned in any logical way? Is there (or was there once) some practical benefit that languages with genders have that English is missing out on? If so, does this benefit outweigh the overhead that comes with it (ie for new learners). And if there is no benefit, why has gender persisted in some languages while others have lost it? Is there something about the structure of English that allowed it to shed gender, or something about (say) Spanish that prevented it from doing so?


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## gengo

...I'll just say that Japanese not only has no gender, it has no plural, either, which might make one wonder if number is necessary.  In English we have countable nouns with no plural form, such as one deer, two deer, so why do we need number for other nouns?

The short answer is that each language has evolved to meet the needs of its users as best it can, and like any evolved thing, it will not be perfect.


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## ahvalj

There is a huge benefit: languages that have one or another kind of grammatical agreement (the more the better) allow for more freely organized phrases with clearer connections between their elements. As a consequence, the sentences can be longer and more nuanced. The English phrases are shorter and much more monotonous than in these languages, with consequences for such areas as the complex writing, fiction and poetry.


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## lioninacoma

Can you give me an example (preferably in Spanish)?  

I would have thought that the only time grammatical agreement would help in the way you describe would be when there are _exactly_ two protagonists of _different_ gender that might otherwise be confused but for, say, an adjective agreeing with the gender of one.  If the protagonists are of the same gender, surely there's no benefit.


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## lioninacoma

Also, I would say anecdotally that English text is almost always shorter in side-by-side comparison than other languages - is this because English has larger vocabulary to draw from?


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## organdöner

There is no sense of biological gender in table, chair and so on.  Even in animals.  

For example, people in Gulf Arabic dialects use multiple variants of "cat" (domestic cat) interchangeably (sennūr, bezzūn, gaṭwa) even when knowing the gender of the cat in particular.  

In Arabic the moon is masculine but the sun is feminine, but "moon" (qamar, often pronounced gamar) is used as an adjective for a pretty woman (she is gamar) and Qamar (pronounced correctly) is a woman's name.   The grammatical and biological genders here are not aligned.


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## Nino83

lioninacoma said:


> Is there (or was there once) some practical benefit that languages with genders have that English is missing out on?


No, I don't think so.


lioninacoma said:


> If so, does this benefit outweigh the overhead that comes with it (ie for new learners).


As far as Romance (except French) and Slavic languages are concerned, most of the times you are able to say if a word is masculine or feminine (or neuter, in Slavic languages), and plurals are very regular (add an "s" in Western Romance languages, a > e, o > i, e > i in Italian), so I don't think it's a "big" problem for new learners.
It's different in German or in Scandinavian languages, where final vowels were dropped and it's impossible to say if a word is masculine, feminine, common (in Scandinavian) or neuter by looking at it, so you've to learn every word with its article.


lioninacoma said:


> And if there is no benefit, why has gender persisted in some languages while others have lost it?


Who knows?
It is said that just during the Old English period, most nouns passed from the other declensions to the strong masculine declension and, at the same time, the strong stress that in Germanic languages is put on the first syllable of the word led to the lost of the final vowels and syllables.
But a similar phonological process happened also in French but it didn't lead to the loss of grammatical gender.
Swedish, Danish/Norwegian and Dutch lost one gender (masculine and feminine formed a common gender).


lioninacoma said:


> Is there something about the structure of English that allowed it to shed gender, or something about (say) Spanish that prevented it from doing so?


No, the structures of Old English and Latin were similar (both Indo-European languages).


lioninacoma said:


> the only time grammatical agreement would help in the way you describe would be when there are _exactly_ two protagonists of _different_ gender that might otherwise be confused but for, say, an adjective agreeing with the gender of one.


Seeing that the verb agrees only in person and number in Romance and Germanic languages, I think there's no way to make a distinction between the subject and the direct object based on gender.
In both languages the adjective is placed near the name it qualifies, so there is no ambiguity.


lioninacoma said:


> Also, I would say anecdotally that English text is almost always shorter in side-by-side comparison than other languages - is this because English has larger vocabulary to draw from?


I don't think there is some constraint that stops English speakers from writing long sentences.
As you probably know, English and Spanish syntaxs are quite similar (subject - verb - object order, subordinate clauses are formed in a very similar way), and the relatively freer word order of the Spanish language is not due to the existence of grammatical gender, but to the fact that you don't need to put every time a subject pronoun before the verb, without any ambiguity.

In conclusion, I don't think English lack somethings because of the loss of the grammatical gender.

I hope it helps


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## lioninacoma

@Nino83 Thanks, that's very useful.


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## berndf

lioninacoma said:


> For example, do Spanish speakers regard a bed as somehow having intrinsic feminine qualities? Is the archetypal panther (la pantera) female, but the archetypal leopard (el leopardo) male?


The have been some studies that suggest such an effect exists. These studies usually take words that are feminine in one language and masculine in another language and let speakers of those languages associate attributes with the object the words refer to.

A well known example where it has been conjectured that grammatical gender interacts with perceived attributes is the gender of sun and moon in Germanic and in Romance languages: In the south, the hot sun is perceived as "hard", i.e. masculine (il sole), and the cool night is soft and the moon therefore feminine (la lune) while in the north the biting cold of the night is "hard" and the moon therefore masculine (der Mond) while the soft warming sun is feminine (die Sonne).


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## ahvalj

lioninacoma said:


> Can you give me an example (preferably in Spanish)?
> 
> I would have thought that the only time grammatical agreement would help in the way you describe would be when there are _exactly_ two protagonists of _different_ gender that might otherwise be confused but for, say, an adjective agreeing with the gender of one.  If the protagonists are of the same gender, surely there's no benefit.


I confess I can't invent any good example right now (the evening?), which is a shame, but there were quite a few cases in my practice when I had to split the long sentences of the Russian original into shorter ones when translating scientific texts into English exactly because the lack of agreement in English would have made the sentences more obscure or simply unintelligible. Overall, Spanish itself isn't a good example of the syntactic flexibility: for an extreme case, let's take "Iliad" or "Odyssey": how free is the word order there and how restricted and arid these sentences become in most translations into modern Western European languages.

Of course, the genders are only one element of this flexibility: ideally, words should have several axes of coordination. When the adjective agrees with the noun in gender (class in some languages), number, case, person (in some languages), it can be placed anywhere in the sentence — for emphasis, rhythm or even without purpose. The speech flows better, the verses become more elaborate — whatever reason.


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## fdb

Curiously, if you read Greek authors, both the poets and the prose writers, you will see that they nearly always put adjectives immediately before or immediately after the noun to which they refer, unless there is some very strong rhetorical reason to put them somewhere else. This despite the fact that adjectives agree with their antecedent in gender, number and case. Then, if you look at Semitic languages like Akkadian and Arabic (both of which have two genders, three numbers and three cases), you will observe that adjectives invariably stand immediately after their antecedent, again despite the fact that they agree with the antecedent in number, gender and case. It seems therefore that the preservation of a complex system of inflection does not rule out a fixed word order.


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## Pugnator

I think gender are useful not only to a more variegation of the language (as the Latin said "Variatio delectat" )  but also a better comprehension of the text.  The gender anyway isn't strictly related on the word, at example the most male thing, the penis, both on Latin and Sicilian (and, thank to a sicilianism even on Neapolitan and Italian) , is on female gender. (mentula on Latin and minchia on Sicilian)


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## lioninacoma

Pugnator said:


> I think gender are useful not only to a more variegation of the language (as the Latin said "Variatio delectat" )  but also a better comprehension of the text.  The gender anyway isn't strictly related on the word, at example the most male thing, the penis, both on Latin and Sicilian (and, thank to a sicilianism even on Neapolitan and Italian) , is on female gender. (mentula on Latin and minchia on Sicilian)


So, how does gender (especially a feminine penis!) help with text comprehension?


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## ahvalj

A more trivial example of the usefulness of the grammatical gender is the very widespread situation when an adjective can be understood as belonging to one of two adjacent nouns: when the nouns are invariable and lack grammatical coordination, it is sometimes hard to understand, which one is characterized, whereas when the nouns differ in gender and/or case, number etc., this can be more transparent. E. g. (sorry for the rough examples, just to illustrate the idea) _grey cat's fur_ can in principle mean "grey fur of a cat" or "fur of a grey cat": the brain either doesn't analyze this sequence at all or interprets it in the most logical way: the grammar itself doesn't help. In the Russian translation of Shelley's Ozymandias (Озимандия. Сонет (Шелли/Бальмонт) — Викитека), we find Обломок статуи распавшейся лежит "fragment of_statue broken_apart lies": here "broken apart" could in principle be understood as an adjective to both "fragment" or "statue", but since the adjective stands in the Genitive Singular feminine, the reader realizes immediately and without any additional analysis that only the latter is right (for the former, the adjective should have been in Nominative Singular masculine: _обломок статуи распавш*и*йся лежит_).


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## Angelo di fuoco

ahvalj said:


> I confess I can't invent any good example right now (the evening?), which is a shame, but there were quite a few cases in my practice when I had to split the long sentences of the Russian original into shorter ones when translating scientific texts into English exactly because the lack of agreement in English would have made the sentences more obscure or simply unintelligible. Overall, Spanish itself isn't a good example of the syntactic flexibility: for an extreme case, let's take "Iliad" or "Odyssey": how free is the word order there and how restricted and arid these sentences become in most translations into modern Western European languages.



Italian texts from roughly 1740 ("Ombra mai fu") and 1870 ("Mortal giammai né Dio")

Ombra mai fu
Di vegetabile
Cara ed amabile,
Soave più.

Mortal giammai né Dio
Arse d'amor
al par del mio
possente.

Especially the first has, to put it mildly, extremely free word order, subject only to verse and rhyme. Other than that, stilted and incomprehensible.

"Normal" contemporary word order would be:

"Ombra di vegetabile mai fu più soave, cara ed amabile."

"Giammai mortal né Dio arse d'amor possente al par del mio".

When I was asked to give a translation when I was talking to somebody at the telephone, I had to do the operation of putting the puzzle together spontaneously. Not an easy task, I tell you.



ahvalj said:


> Of course, the genders are only one element of this flexibility: ideally, words should have several axes of coordination. When the adjective agrees with the noun in gender (class in some languages), number, case, person (in some languages), it can be placed anywhere in the sentence — for emphasis, rhythm or even without purpose. The speech flows better, the verses become more elaborate — whatever reason.



See above.



fdb said:


> Curiously, if you read Greek authors, both the poets and the prose writers, you will see that they nearly always put adjectives immediately before or immediately after the noun to which they refer, unless there is some very strong rhetorical reason to put them somewhere else. This despite the fact that adjectives agree with their antecedent in gender, number and case. Then, if you look at Semitic languages like Akkadian and Arabic (both of which have two genders, three numbers and three cases), you will observe that adjectives invariably stand immediately after their antecedent, again despite the fact that they agree with the antecedent in number, gender and case. It seems therefore that the preservation of a complex system of inflection does not rule out a fixed word order.



Or you have Latin authors having you putting together the puzzle (meaning) out of a bunch of elements where those that belong together are miles away one from the other.

I know next to nothing about Semitic languages, but maybe you can tell whether there are other possibilities in either Akkadian or Arabic to construct sentences with a free or variable word order, eve without separating nouns and adjectives.


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## ahvalj

fdb said:


> Curiously, if you read Greek authors, both the poets and the prose writers, you will see that they nearly always put adjectives immediately before or immediately after the noun to which they refer, unless there is some very strong rhetorical reason to put them somewhere else. This despite the fact that adjectives agree with their antecedent in gender, number and case.


Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ πλάγχθη…

P. S. By the way, _ὃς_ ("which" masc.) suggests that it was the man who was forced to wander a lot, whereas _ἢ_ ("which" fem.) would say this about the muse. This is the direct illustration of the original poster's question.


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## ahvalj

Angelo di fuoco said:


> Italian texts from roughly 1740 ("Ombra mai fu") and 1870 ("Mortal giammai né Dio")
> 
> Ombra mai fu
> Di vegetabile
> Cara ed amabile,
> Soave più.
> 
> Mortal giammai né Dio
> Arse d'amor
> al par del mio
> possente.
> 
> Especially the first has, to put it mildly, extremely free word order, subject only to verse and rhyme. Other than that, stilted and incomprehensible.
> 
> "Normal" contemporary word order would be:
> 
> "Ombra di vegetabile mai fu più soave, cara ed amabile."
> 
> "Giammai mortal né Dio arse d'amor possente al par del mio".
> 
> When I was asked to give a translation when I was talking to somebody at the telephone, I had to do the operation of putting the puzzle together spontaneously. Not an easy task, I tell you.


Or something like _я тебя в твоей не знала славе_ (Ахматова Анна Андреевна — «Маяковский в 1913 году&raquo): I have no idea how to convey this in English (I — thee — in — your — not — knew — glory).


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## organdöner

Angelo di fuoco said:


> I know next to nothing about Semitic languages, but maybe you can tell whether there are other possibilities in either Akkadian or Arabic to construct sentences with a free or variable word order, eve without separating nouns and adjectives.



Is there an n missing there in even?

Spoken Arabic dialects (many of them) have a very free word order, which is very different from Standard or Classical Arabic.


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## berndf

lioninacoma said:


> But it made me wonder: why bother at all? Were genders assigned in any logical way?


That is probably not a good way of asking. There are nobody who decided that it was a good idea to have genders. In animistic societies, the concept probably developed quite naturally. In the specific case of Indo-European languages, there is good reason to believe that the three gender system (masculine, feminine and neuter) we know today has developed out of an earlier two gender system (the predecessors of masculine and neuter) that denoted something completely different than sex, namely the _ability to act_ (masculine) or the lack of it (neuter), or, in other words, _animate _vs. _inanimate_, the gender system in Hittite. Under this theory, the predecessor of neuter had two plurals: an individual and a collective one and feminine developed out of the collective neuter plural.


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## Nino83

Sex-based genders are widespread among Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic (Semitic), Dravidian and Australian languages. Most of the time they are two or three (neuter or inanimate gender).
Non-sex-based genders are widespread in Niger-Congo (expecially Bantu) languages (with more than 5 genders), and rare in the Americas (two genders, human and non-human).
WALS Online -             Feature 30A: Number of Genders
WALS Online -             Feature 31A: Sex-based and Non-sex-based Gender Systems


ahvalj said:


> but since the adjective stands in the Genitive Singular feminine


I think case agreement is more important than gender for a free word order.

About gender agreement, let's make an example.
Fredda in inverno era la notte. Cold in the winter was the night. 

Is it possible for an English native speaker to think that the adjective "cold" is referring to the winter?


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## bibax

Angelo di fuoco said:


> Or you have Latin authors having you putting together the puzzle (meaning) out of a bunch of elements where those that belong together are miles away one from the other.


A simple example (Ovidius):

Alta puellares tardat arena pedes. (high/deep girlish delays sand feet)
The deep sand is delaying the girl's feet.

In Czech we can preserve the word order:
Hluboký dívčiny brzdí písek nohy. (písek - _masc. sing._, nohy - _fem. plur._)

The case is not important as the nominative and accusative of písek and pedes/nohy have the same form.

I've found a German translation (completely different stucture of the sentence):
_Im tiefen Sand, der meinen* Fuß verweilet._
*in fact, it is a direct speech of a girl, therefore '_my feet'_

If we change the endings of both adjectives:

Altos puellaris tardat arena pedes.
Vysoké dívčin brzdí písek nohy.
The girl's sand is delaying the high feet.


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## Hulalessar

I think it is unhelpful in discussions such as this to bring poetry into it to prove a point. Even in a language like English standard word order may not be followed in poetry. See for example Gray's Elegy. The jigsaw element found in Horace's poetry is absent from Cicero's prose even if the word order in the latter is freer than in English and can be varied to give different shades of emphasis. Confining ourselves to standard prose or speech, it may be the case that gender is useful to make distinctions which cannot be made in a language without gender, but it is marginal.

It is perfectly understandable that someone whose mother tongue is a synthetic language should believe that "words should have several axes of coordination", but you just have to accept that languages have different ways of doing things. It is just as misconceived to think a language is defective because it cannot do something your own language does as it is to think it has superfluous elements because it insists on doing something your own language does not bother with. Native English speakers may puzzle why other languages bother with gender, but they just do and there is no need for native speakers to come up with reasons to justify it anymore than native English speakers need to justify using definite and indefinite articles to native speakers of languages which do not have them and consider them unnecessary.


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## Nino83

bibax said:


> A simple example (Ovidius):


But here the most important marker (for a free word order) is case marking, not gender marking, in the Latin text.


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## bibax

IMO all three markers (gender, number, case) are important as they create more combinations which reduces the possibility of misunderstanding.

alta arena (high/deep sand) - fem. sing. nom.
puellares pedes (girl's feet) - mas. plur. nom./acc.

"Alta puellare tardat arena corpus" is unambiguous due to the gender. So the gender is an extra bonus.

"Altum puellare tardat mare corpus" would be ambiguous though.


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## Nino83

Iuvenis discipula bonae magistrae longam litteram scripsit.
Iuvenis discipulus bono magistro longam litteram scripsit.
Iuvenis discipula bonam magistram vidit.
Iuvenis discipulus bonum magistrum vidit.

In this case both nouns are feminine (masculine in the second and forth sentence) singular.
Also in this case free word order is possible.

I don't know if theorically the only existence of grammatical gender could be sufficient in order to have a free word order, but historically (at least in Romance languages) it seems that the loss of case was the most important factor.

It's true that we could write a sentence like "un uomo la ragazza molto bello vide", but it is very rare (maybe in poetry).


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## olaszinho

Hulalessar said:


> It is just as misconceived to think a language is defective because it cannot do something your own language does as it is to think it has superfluous elements because it insists on doing something your own language does not bother with. Native English speakers may puzzle why other languages bother with gender, but they just do and there is no need for native speakers to come up with reasons to justify it anymore than native English speakers need to justify using definite and indefinite articles to native speakers of languages which do not have them and consider them unnecessary.



 I couldn't agree more. If we applied the same reasoning to other areas of grammar we could say, for instance, that Russian is defective compared to English or most Romance languages because it only has a couple  of verbal tenses. Russian  я читал/а -  прочитал/a     can be translated into English with the following  tenses: I have read/ I read/ I have been reading/ I had read/I had been reading/ I did read/ I was reading/ I used to read/ I would read.


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## fdb

ahvalj said:


> Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ πλάγχθη…



In the first verse of the Odyssey (as quoted) and also in the first verse of the Iliad the direct object is extrapositioned at the beginning of the verse, and thus separated from its adjective. This is a rhetorical figure. If, however, you read through a few hundred verses you will see that in the vast majority of occurrences adjectives stand immediately before or immediately after their noun. In Attic prose this is even more so the case.


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## ahvalj

Hulalessar said:


> I think it is unhelpful in discussions such as this to bring poetry into it to prove a point. Even in a language like English standard word order may not be followed in poetry. See for example Gray's Elegy. The jigsaw element found in Horace's poetry is absent from Cicero's prose even if the word order in the latter is freer than in English and can be varied to give different shades of emphasis. Confining ourselves to standard prose or speech, it may be the case that gender is useful to make distinctions which cannot be made in a language without gender, but it is marginal.
> 
> It is perfectly understandable that someone whose mother tongue is a synthetic language should believe that "words should have several axes of coordination", but you just have to accept that languages have different ways of doing things. It is just as misconceived to think a language is defective because it cannot do something your own language does as it is to think it has superfluous elements because it insists on doing something your own language does not bother with. Native English speakers may puzzle why other languages bother with gender, but they just do and there is no need for native speakers to come up with reasons to justify it anymore than native English speakers need to justify using definite and indefinite articles to native speakers of languages which do not have them and consider them unnecessary.


And how would _you_ answer to the topic starter? I was trying to explain that the gender is not necessarily a burden for the language and, if properly implemented, the gender agreement (together with other categories, the more the better) may serve as a useful tool to increase the syntactic flexibility.


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## ahvalj

fdb said:


> In the first verse of the Odyssey (as quoted) and also in the first verse of the Iliad the direct object is extrapositioned at the beginning of the verse, and thus separated from its adjective. This is a rhetorical figure. If, however, you read through a few hundred verses you will see that in the vast majority of occurrences adjectives stand immediately before or immediately after their noun. In Attic prose this is even more so the case.


Vīcistī. Yet this is the peculiar deficiency of literary Greek at its attested stages: the grammatical structure in principle allows for much greater freedom in this respect.


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## fdb

Exactly. My point was merely that the language is not compelled to make use of this freedom.


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## Sobakus

One thing I find perplexing about the OP is that it assumes English lacks gender altogether – it has gender, albeit natural as opposed to grammatical. Ask yourself: why bother differentiating between _he_, _she _and _it _at all? "Normal" genderless languages don't do it, they have just one 3d. person pronoun and are doing just fine. This brings me to the next point.

The assumption that a language has a choice of "bothering" or not "bothering" with a particular grammatical category doesn't make much sense to me either. Instead, I find it much more compelling to assume that a language will try to create a grammatical category in order to regularise a non-systematic pattern (the more distinctions a language can make the better), and try to keep it as long as the distinction is possible to maintain. In case of English and grammatical gender, the neutralisation of all case endings coupled with the conflation of the Masculine and Feminine articles to the single _"the"_ made it impossible to maintain the system of grammatical gender – but it didn't disappear, instead the language found a way to still assign one of the three available pronouns based on biological gender or metaphor. Why? Because, again, expressing a nuance is better than not expressing it if the means of doing it are systematic and unambiguous enough.

Basically the answer to why grammatical gender appeared is "because it could", and the answer to why it disappeared in English is "because it could no longer be determined", which also answers the question of why it exists elsewhere. In my view those are universal to any grammatical category, even such utterly useless as strong verbs.

Ultimately, I think any English speaker can come up with an example when differentiating between _he, she_ and _it_ is better than not doing it and the intricacies of Latin poetry aren't really necessary to demonstrate their usefulness.


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## wtrmute

Rather than "natural" gender, isn't it more accurate to talk about "vestigial" gender?  After all, nobody has any difficulty in accepting that English and most Romances have vestigial case systems, which only work on (most of the) personal pronouns — and in English's case, the relative/interrogative "who(m/se)", as well.  English gender also only affects the personal pronouns, and only in the third person singular, so there's a case to be argued that it is even more vestigial than the case system!

That being said, there's absolutely nothing wrong with a vestigial system of anything.  As Sobakus rightly argued, languages make the distinctions that they do, and if they lose them it's usually as a result of phonetic erosion of markers, not because the speakers suddenly decide to not bother with making a distinction.


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## francisgranada

bibax said:


> Altos puellaris tardat arena pedes.
> Vysoké dívčin brzdí písek nohy.
> The girl's sand is delaying the high feet.


My_ ad hoc _(not linguistic) reaction:
May Latin is quite bad nowadays, while my understanding of the Czech language is (I dare say _very)_  good  (  ). Neverthless the Latin version "_Altos puellaris tardat arena pedes"_ seems to me spontaneously  somewhat more easy to understand (or to "decipher") than the Czech version "_Vysoké dívčin brzdí písek nohy_" (which is almost inunderstandable without analyzing the phrase ...). I dare say that this word order in Czech is not, and, never was natural. Plus, I don't think that such a word order is necessary or especially useful for composing beautiful poems .... Of course, such tendencies did exist in the past, in my opinion under the influence of Latin.

(I am not able to judge whether this  word order was "natural" among educated Latin speaking people in the very past or not ...)


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## bragpipes

lioninacoma said:


> For example, do Spanish speakers regard a bed as somehow having intrinsic feminine qualities?



I don't speak Spanish, but in Serbo-Croatian a bed can be krevet (masculine) or postelja (feminine) and there's no sense of femininity/masculinity in either word.   Slavic languages have 3 genders, but I don't think any Slavic speaker perceives inanimate objects as masculine or feminine, much less neuter.   Grammatical gender is dependent almost purely on the ending of the word (consonant or vowel) and has nothing to do with its perception. 

An example is "breast" (female organ) - in Czech it is prs (masculine), in Serbo-Croatian it's prsa (feminine).
Same word, same etymology, same concept.  It's the "a" that makes it feminine, not the concept.   

I don't know if I believe the "hot sun = feminine" vs "cold sun = masculine" theory - I think it's a coincidence.  Had Iberia stayed Germanic, we'd have a Visigothic country in sunny Spain using die Sonne/sunno in feminine.  Sun in Celtic languages is masculine: Cornish: howl, Breton: heol, Welsh: haul;  In Irish this word has become to mean "eye" and is now feminine: súil; Irish "sun" is grian and is feminine.  

Slavic languages, as has been said, use neuter for the sun and as for the moon, well, in some languages, it can be either feminine or masculine (luna, měsec).

The sun is neuter because the word is neuter.  Had Slavs used the other word for sun (PIE "*h₂rew-i-  not sure what that would have been today: something like ravь?) the sun could have an entirely different gender.

Not that people don't perceive gender for inanimate things or concepts.  For example, in English "Hope" is a girl's name, even though English has no gender.  As a matter of fact, the Old English word "hopa" (hope) is in masculine, so it's not a vestigial/intrinsic feeling native speakers get from the word "hope."   Arabic has the exact same thing.  The word "hope" is also masculine, but the name Emel (hope) is a girl's name.

A good way of getting a sense of how speakers of genderless languages perceive the biological gender of inanimate words is naming customs.   In English some guys refer to their guitars, guns and cars/boats with "she" but I think that "Hope" or "Dawn" being a girl's name tells us more.

Genderless languages like Turkish make no distinction between "He loves her" and "She loves him."  Pro-drop languages also make no distinction between "It was cold" (the weather) or "He was cold" (emotionally).  With gender, one can say "It was really hot" and it would be clear(er) if he's referring to his engine or the weather.


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## gburtonio

> The have been some studies that suggest such an effect exists. These studies usually take words that are feminine in one language and masculine in another language and let speakers of those languages associate attributes with the object the words refer to.



The PDF of one very well known study on this is available on the Stanford University website: http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/gender.pdf  (I presume this is OK to link to as it is not a commercial organisation).

Participants were L1 Spanish and L1 German speakers, and they were given a list of 24 nouns. They were then asked to note down three adjectives to describe each item on the list. The nouns on the list had opposite grammatical genders in Spanish and German (e.g. key, bridge etc.). In general, the adjectives chosen seemed to reflect the gender of the noun, i.e. German speakers used adjectives like 'hard', 'heavy' etc. to describe the noun 'key', whereas the Spanish speakers used adjectives like 'little', 'lovely', 'intricate' etc.


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## Penyafort

ahvalj said:


> There is a huge benefit: languages that have one or another kind of grammatical agreement (the more the better) allow for more freely organized phrases with clearer connections between their elements. As a consequence, the sentences can be longer and more nuanced. The English phrases are shorter and much more monotonous than in these languages, with consequences for such areas as the complex writing, fiction and poetry.



I do not know if the benefit is huge, but I agree, there is certainly higher accuracy when it comes to know if an adjective relates to a specific noun or to a whole noun phrase.

I would say English translators appreciate it too._ Un *núvol *d'*esperança **blanc *_will be translated as _A *white **cloud *of *hope*_, and not as _A *cloud *of *white **hope*, _thanks to that information about gender agreement. Maybe the Romance structure, in which adjectives follow the noun but may include another complement in between, has something to do with it.


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## wtrmute

Regarding grammatical genders and implied femiminity or masculinity, of course there is some, particularly if we personify an inanimate object.  Thus Father Time and Mother Nature (time is masculine in most Romance languages, and nature is feminine in all of them).  However, as bragpipes mentioned, not all synonyms for a word are of the same gender, so transferring the _word_'s gender to the _thing_ is something which can bite someone in the rear.  For example, in Spanish, _estrella_ is the common word for star and is feminine, but _astro_ can also be used, and it is masculine.

Even people can have their grammatical gender swapped: Consider the phrase _Él es una persona muy buena_.  The subject in question is a man, since he is referred as _él_, but when he is referred to as a _persona_ "person", suddenly the adjective used to refer to him goes to the feminine (_buena_).


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## Red Arrow

gburtonio said:


> The PDF of one very well known study on this is available on the Stanford University website: http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/gender.pdf  (I presume this is OK to link to as it is not a commercial organisation).
> 
> Participants were L1 Spanish and L1 German speakers, and they were given a list of 24 nouns. They were then asked to note down three adjectives to describe each item on the list. The nouns on the list had opposite grammatical genders in Spanish and German (e.g. key, bridge etc.). In general, the adjectives chosen seemed to reflect the gender of the noun, i.e. German speakers used adjectives like 'hard', 'heavy' etc. to describe the noun 'key', whereas the Spanish speakers used adjectives like 'little', 'lovely', 'intricate' etc.


I find this very hard to believe, but maybe that's because my mother longue (Dutch) has mostly lost the difference between masculine and feminine words.

I never thought of words with _de_ (the),_ deze _(this) and _die_ (that) as ''common'' words, and I never thought of words with_ het_ (the), _dit _(this) and _dat _(that) as ''neuter'' words.

In my opinion _de kat_ (the cat) is just as common/neuter as _het schaap_ (the sheep). Grammatical gender and real gender are completely different things.


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## Sobakus

Red Arrow :D said:


> I find this very hard to believe, but maybe that's because my mother longue (Dutch) has mostly lost the difference between masculine and feminine words.
> 
> I never thought of words with _de_ (the),_ deze _(this) and _die_ (that) as ''common'' words, and I never thought of words with_ het_ (the), _dit _(this) and _dat _(that) as ''neuter'' words.
> 
> In my opinion _de kat_ (the cat) is just as common/neuter as _het schaap_ (the sheep). Grammatical gender and real gender are completely different things.


Can you define the difference between thinking of a word as "common" or "neuter"? I think everyone has at least a vague idea what the difference between imagining the Moon to be feminine or masculine is, but I utterly fail to understand what you mean when you say you don't imagine it as "common" or "neuter" – how did you tell that you don't? Are there some qualities inherent to one but not the the other?

As I see it, the opposition between common and neuter genders has absolutely no basis in the real world, which is certainly something that cannot be said about feminine vs. masculine vs. neuter. I don't think it's even animacy, at least in case of Germanic which has plenty of neuter animate nouns.


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## Scholiast

Greetings


Sobakus said:


> Can you define what is the difference between thinking of a word as "common" or "neuter"?... Are there some qualities inherent to one but not the the other?



Old Norse has M, F and N, like PIE. But modern Danish, and I believe Swedish and Norwegian too, have assimilated M and F into the "Common" category, as distinct from the N.

In Latin and Greek too, there are certain words which may be either M or F according to context (e.g. ἄνθρωπος, _homo_, _sacerdos_), and are referred to in the technical terminology of classical grammarians as "Common" in gender.

Σ


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## Sobakus

I'm aware of its etymology and Russian too has words referring to people that can be of either gender. What I'm asking is what cognitive category can "common" and "neuter" genders supposedly be assigned to in order to determine whether speakers do or do not associate the words of one of those genders with those cognitive categories. If a "masculine" key is hard and heavy, what is a "common" key like?


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## Red Arrow

Sobakus said:


> I'm aware of its etymology and Russian too has words referring to people that can be of either gender. What I'm asking is what cognitive category can "common" and "neuter" genders supposedly be assigned to in order to determine whether speakers do or do not associate the words of one of those genders with those cognitive categories. If a "masculine" key is hard and heavy, what is a "common" key like?


The difference between common and neuter only exists in Dutch, Danish, Swedish and Frisian.

A common word is supposed to have either masculine or feminine characteristics. (''genderfull'') A neuter thing is supposed to have neither. (''genderless'')

the man = de man (common)
the woman = de vrouw (common)
the penis = de penis (common)
the child = het kind (neuter)
the thing = het ding (neuter)
the house = het huis (neuter)

My point was that no one actually associates common words with masculine or feminine traits. Mice (de muis) aren't more manly/feminine than sheep (het schaap).

Notice that all English loanwords get the article ''de'' in Dutch. (never ''het'') for example: de selfie
As you might have guessed: we do this because ''de'' looks like the English word ''the'', not because there isn't any genderless looking English word.


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## Hulalessar

ahvalj said:


> And how would _you_ answer to the topic starter?



I shall stick to the question posed in the thread title: What are genders good for? The short answer has to be: "Not a lot." It is the question I asked myself when aged eleven I started to learn French and Latin. To any boy who asked the teacher the question the answer given was that it was just the way things are. There is much in English that serves no useful purpose such as strong verbs and the negative and interrogative forms of verbs such as _be_, _can _and _must _not following the normal pattern. The longer answer is that all languages have features which may seem redundant to speakers of other languages. To enquire whether those features are good for anything may be interesting, but in the end serves no useful purpose because if you want to speak a language correctly you have to follow its rules.



ahvalj said:


> I was trying to explain that the gender is not necessarily a burden for the language and, if properly implemented, the gender agreement (together with other categories, the more the better) may serve as a useful tool to increase the syntactic flexibility.



No feature of a language is a burden to its native speakers. The benefits of gender as you have set them out are at best marginal. If we take adjectives it depends on the language. In Russian in the singular you always know if an adjective is feminine whatever the case, whilst masculine and neuter can only be distinguished in the nominative. There is no distinction between genders in the plural. In French many adjectives are the same for both genders (and indeed in speech do not change in the plural). If you can construct a sentence where using _vert _(masculine) or_ verte_ (feminine) shows it qualifies one word but not another, you cannot do the same with _rouge_ (both masculine and feminine). In Spanish it is the opposite because _verde _is both masculine and feminine, whilst _rojo _is masculine and _roja _feminine.

But even if gender were extremely useful in making distinctions that is not the same as saying that the distinctions cannot be made in another way in a language without gender. We can expand that to say that even if syntactic flexibility is extremely useful in making distinctions that is not the same as saying that the distinctions cannot be made in another way in a language without the same syntactic flexibility. Where the distinctions cannot be made they are often implied. Where they are not implied you just have to accept it. What is important is what a language can and must express, not what it cannot express. All languages are equally good at conveying information. Where they differ is what emphasis they put on different aspects.


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## Delvo

The thing about "common" and "neuter" genders, as well as languages that have more than three in general, is simplest to explain by the simple fact that genders aren't about sex. They're just classes of nouns that take different kinds of declension. (In fact the word "gender" originally mean "type, class, kind".) In languages that have more than one way to conjugate different groups of verbs, like Latin, they're called some other name like "first conjugation" and "second conjugation" and so on; this is the same thing in nouns. We could have called them "noun class 1" and "noun class 2" and so on. Or they could have been named for the final letters that they use in a given language in a given case, like German "noun class E" and "noun class R" and so on. But they got called "genders" instead, thus misleading generations of people about what they really are and how they really work.


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## Scholiast

Greetings again



Delvo said:


> genders aren't about sex



Hooray, well said. There are languages (including some native American tongues) with genders related to size, distance, edibility and other non-sexual differentiations.



Delvo said:


> They're just classes of nouns that take different kinds of declension



Hmmm... not necessarily, if that means different morphological forms. A majority of so-called 1st-declension nouns in Greek and Latin are feminine, but there are masculine nouns in both, and likewise the 2nd (predominantly masculine/neuter) declension shows feminine (and not just common) nouns in both tongues.



Delvo said:


> But they got called "genders" instead, thus misleading generations of people about what they really are and how they really work



Quite right. I suspect the issue has become confused in modern discourse partly because of a perverse (in this day and age) desire to avoid the word "sex" - oddly, propagated especially by some leading feminists of the 1960s-1990s.

Σ


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## berndf

Sobakus said:


> Can you define the difference between thinking of a word as "common" or "neuter"?


In some North Germanic languages as well as Low German and Dutch, masculine and feminine have merged. As a consequence, those languages only distinguish neuter and non-neuter.


Delvo said:


> But they got called "genders" instead, thus misleading generations of people about what they really are and how they really work.


I am sorry, but this sound like a blind man explaining the seeing that colours are artificial and meaningless. Maybe they are. But for the seeing a _colour_ is a completely natural concept.


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## Red Arrow

Delvo said:


> The thing about "common" and "neuter" genders, as well as languages that have more than three in general, is simplest to explain by the simple fact that genders aren't about sex. They're just classes of nouns that take different kinds of declension. (In fact the word "gender" originally mean "type, class, kind".) In languages that have more than one way to conjugate different groups of verbs, like Latin, they're called some other name like "first conjugation" and "second conjugation" and so on; this is the same thing in nouns. We could have called them "noun class 1" and "noun class 2" and so on. Or they could have been named for the final letters that they use in a given language in a given case, like German "noun class E" and "noun class R" and so on. But they got called "genders" instead, thus misleading generations of people about what they really are and how they really work.


I agree to some extent. It is not a coincidence that Icelandic, German, Norwegian, Latin, Greek and all Slavic languages have a different article for ''man'', ''woman'' and ''thing''. I think these articles _used _to be associated with gender, but after a while the association got lost. That's why masculine and feminine merged in some languages, while masculine and neuter merged in others.


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## berndf

Red Arrow :D said:


> I think these articles _used _to be associated with gender, but after a while the association got lost. That's why masculine and feminine merged in some languages, while masculine and neuter merged in others.


The creation of common gender in Dutch and other Germanic languages hat nothing to do with any "lost association" but is simply the result of phonetic simplifications of the morphological system, exactly as in English. The loss of the concept is a consequence of the loss of morphological distinctions and not the other way round.

Similarly, the loss of the neuter gender in Romance is a consequence of the loss of the case system (nouns are predominantly derived from accusative forms where many masculine and neuter nouns are indistinguishable in Latin) rather than the loss of morphological distinction being a consequence of a conceptual merger.


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## olaszinho

Red Arrow :D said:


> I agree to some extent. It is not a coincidence that Icelandic, German, Norwegian, Latin, Greek and all Slavic languages have a different article for ''man'', ''woman'' and ''thing''.



Arrow, what do you mean with "article"? Latin and most Slavic languages have no article?!


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## berndf

olaszinho said:


> Arrow, what do you mean with "article"? Latin and most Slavic languages have no article?!


In Germanic languages articles are the main gender marker. He probably just meant "gender marking", in Latin that would be _-us, -a, -um._


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## Red Arrow

Yes, I meant gender marking. In Romanian, Bulgarian and the Scandinavian languages, the articles are suffixes just like -us, -a, -um.


berndf said:


> The creation of common gender in Dutch and other Germanic languages hat nothing to do with any "lost association" but is simply the result of phonetic simplifications of the morphological system, exactly as in English. The loss of the concept is a consequence of the loss of morphological distinctions and not the other way round.
> 
> Similarly, the loss of the neuter gender in Romance is a consequence of the loss of the case system (nouns are predominantly derived from accusative forms where many masculine and neuter nouns are indistinguishable in Latin) rather than the loss of morphological distinction being a consequence of a conceptual merger.


But why would there be any phonetic simplifications if the speakers of said language keep associating certain words with manly/female/neutral things?
First the association should disappear, then the case system can be simplified (including the loss of the grammatical genders).

Or am I missing something?! Don't be afraid to correct me.


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## olaszinho

berndf said:


> In Germanic languages articles are the main gender marker. He probably just meant "gender marking", in Latin that would be _-us, -a, -um._



I see.  Thank you!


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## berndf

Red Arrow :D said:


> Yes, I meant gender marking. In Romanian, Bulgarian and the Scandinavian languages, the articles are suffixes just like -us, -a, -um.
> 
> But why would there be any phonetic simplifications if the speakers of said language keep associating certain words with manly/female/neutral things?
> First the association should disappear, then the case system can be simplified (including the loss of the grammatical genders).
> 
> Or am I missing something?! Don't be afraid to correct me.


From Old to Middle Dutch the difference between masculine and feminine was lost in nominative as a consequence of the loss of full vowels in unstressed ending (all becoming Schwas), a phenomenon that also existed in German and English and caused a lot of distinctions to disappear. In Middle Dutch, the definite article was die for both genders in in nominative but still differed in the other cases (acc: _den/die_, dat: _den/der_, gen: _des/der_) with the loss of accusative and dative markings, all except genitive became _de_ in modern Dutch. In the modern Dutch genitive, the distinction theoretically still exists (_des_ vs._ der_) but since the singular genitive is at the verge of extinction, the masculine and feminine are for all practical purposes indistinguishable. In sum, the process of loss of markings is a combination of phonetic simplification followed by loss of case markings which further reduced the possibilities to distinguish the two. Low German is currently in a stage in between Middle and modern Dutch: It still has the the masculine accusative _-n_ as a distinguisher but in the other hand, the genitive is completely extinct in Low German and, thus, masculine and feminine are very close to being indistinguishable and the language is in a similar stage as Dutch. In both, Germanic and Romance languages, the loss of the case system was the main driving in the simplification of the morphological system. The fact that High German has still retained all tree genders is mainly due to the fact that the case system is still alive and kicking with four or the original five Germanic cases being fully productive and distinguishable.


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## lioninacoma

Hulalessar said:


> The longer answer is that all languages have features which may seem redundant to speakers of other languages. To enquire whether those features are good for anything may be interesting, but in the end serves no useful purpose because if you want to speak a language correctly you have to follow its rules.



The discussion I had a few weeks ago (which eventually brought me here) centered around Esperanto.  (At the time, I assumed that its creation had been a collaborative effort among "experts" in several European languages... hey, I'm just a computer programmer with an interest in language).

Anyway, I thought Esperanto's lack of gender showed that gender was probably just a legacy issue, and that English (for one) had gradually shed gender because there was a net gain from doing so. Some of the comments above (esp from ahvalj, who thinks "the more the merrier") make me wonder.

But I would be interested to know whether, if you were to design an Esperanto 2.0 (with the same basic objectives), you would include gender.


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## olaszinho

lioninacoma said:


> But I would be interested to know whether, if you were to design an Esperanto 2.0 (with the same basic objectives), you would include gender.



No, I wouldn't. I'd also remove the accusative and the article.


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## Hulalessar

If I were redesigning Esperanto (a task already undertaken by others) I would not introduce gender.

The natural changes which take place in a language are not planned. The disappearance of gender in English did not come about because of any perceived advantage. The loss of gender has not really been a net gain. It just seems like it to us English speakers who are convinced that foreigners do not trouble with it when we are not listening. Gender has proved very tenacious in the Indo-European family with only a handful of languages abandoning it: English, Armenian, Persian, Afrikaans and Bengali


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## CapnPrep

Red Arrow :D said:


> Notice that all English loanwords get the article ''de'' in Dutch. (never ''het'') for example: de selfie


Most, not all. Some English loanwords are neuter in Dutch, although sometimes there can be hesitation/variation among speakers. Onze Taal has a summary here: Woordgeslacht Engelse woorden.


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## wtrmute

Delvo said:


> The thing about "common" and "neuter" genders, as well as languages that have more than three in general, is simplest to explain by the simple fact that genders aren't about sex



The thing that cracks me up about the "common" and "neuter" system is that, etymologically, _neuter_ means "neither", but there is aren't two other options such that it can be neither.  I know, I know, semantic drift.  But I still think it's funny.

But you're absolutely right, gender has nothing to do with sex.  Well, it might have a little bit, but jut incidentally.



Delvo said:


> (In fact the word "gender" originally mean "type, class, kind".)



Indeed, and the adjectives "general" and "generic", as well as the noun "genre" and the "genus"/"genera" of biology, are related to this meaning of "gender".  In Portuguese, too, we have _gêneros alimentícios_ "foodstuffs".  It's unfortunate that the word was coopted into sexual categorisation and then became such a loaded term nowadays.


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## berndf

wtrmute said:


> The thing that cracks me up about the "common" and "neuter" system is that, etymologically, _neuter_ means "neither", but there is aren't two other options such that it can be neither. I know, I know, semantic drift. But I still think it's funny.
> 
> But you're absolutely right, gender has nothing to do with sex. Well, it might have a little bit, but jut incidentally.


Etymologically, masculine and neuter were the original genders representing _animate _and _inanimate_. _Feminine _is a development separated from _inanimate=neuter_ (yes, they were quite sexist at the time); nevertheless the reinterpretation did stick. Neuter retained the in part the meaning of non-animate, in some languages it also became the associated with _small_. In this interpretation, think of the three genders as representing the trinity of _father, mother_ and _child_.


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## Red Arrow

CapnPrep said:


> Most, not all. Some English loanwords are neuter in Dutch, although sometimes there can be hesitation/variation among speakers. Onze Taal has a summary here: Woordgeslacht Engelse woorden.


Most of those words are both masculine and neuter.
For example ''de/het shirt''. Dictionaries call it neuter, but most people here call it masculine.


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## Nino83

I don't agree on the fact that gender has nothing to do with sex in Indo-European languages.  
In these languages, masculine nouns (i.e those that agree with masculine adjectives, articles, demonstratives) refer to male people and, with some exception, animals, and feminine nouns refer to female people and animals.  
It's clear that inanimate things, that don't have sex, like a table, can be masculine or feminine.  
In other languages, the gender distinction is based on the opposition between human and non-human, animate and inanimate and so on.  
In IE languages, grammatical genders are correlated to sex.  

WALS Online -             Feature 31A: Sex-based and Non-sex-based Gender Systems


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## Red Arrow

Nino83 said:


> I don't agree on the fact that gender has nothing to do with sex in Indo-European languages.
> In these languages, masculine nouns (i.e those that agree with masculine adjectives, articles, demonstratives) refer to male people and, with some exception, animals, and feminine nouns refer to female people and animals.
> It's clear that inanimate things, that don't have sex, like a table, can be masculine or feminine.
> In other languages, the gender distinction is based on the opposition between human and non-human, animate and inanimate and so on.
> In IE languages, grammatical genders are correlated to sex.
> 
> WALS Online -             Feature 31A: Sex-based and Non-sex-based Gender Systems


I agree.


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## Nino83

If someone finds it interesting, I add some info.
Languages that have two non-sex based genders (animate and inanimate):
Chinantec (Lealao), (Mexico);
Plains Cree, Eastern Ojibwa, and Passamaquoddy-Maliseet, (Algonquian) (Canada);
Hixkaryana and Macushi, (Carib) (Brazil);
Mundari, (Austro-Asiatic) (India)
languages having three non-sex based genders:
Nicobarese, (Mon-Khmer), (Car), two classes (common and proper) and two genders (animate and inanimate)
Wardaman, (non-Pama-Nyugan Australian), (Northern Australia), human, vegetable, other.
Then, there are Niger-Congo languages with more than five non-sex based genders, or noun classes.

http://allegatifac.unipv.it/silvialuraghi/Gender FoL.pdf


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## CapnPrep

Red Arrow :D said:


> Most of those words are both masculine and neuter.
> For example ''de/het shirt''. Dictionaries call it neuter, but most people here call it masculine.


It would be interesting if what you said originally were true (if "all" English words were always borrowed as _de_-words in Dutch, and "never" as _het_-words), because I have never encountered a rule like that for grammatical gender assignment. But it turns out to be only a tendency and not a categorical generalization. Which is still interesting, but a lot less surprising.


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## fdb

Nino83 said:


> It's clear that inanimate things, that don't have sex, like a table, can be masculine or feminine.



(or neuter, in languages that have it).




Nino83 said:


> In IE languages, grammatical genders are correlated to sex.



Do you not realise that these two statements contradict each another?


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## Nino83

fdb said:


> Do you not realise that these two statements contradict each another?


I don't see any contradiction.
Living things like people, animals are male or female and, with some exception, grammatical gender is related to sex.
A table is neither male nor female, so it is assigned, randomly, to one of these two genders. 
In languages with three genders (neuter) things are a little more complicated but, also in these languages, nouns like _man, son, father, grandfather, grandson, boyfriend, uncle, lion_ are masculine while _woman, daughter, mother, grandmother, granddaughter, girlfriend, aunt, lioness_ are feminine. 
Saying that grammatical gender has little to do with sex is a little exaggerated. A little.


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## wtrmute

Nino83 said:


> I don't see any contradiction.
> Living things like people, animals are male or female and, with some exception, grammatical gender is related to sex.
> A table is neither male nor female, so it is assigned, randomly, to one of these two genders.
> In languages with three genders (neuter) things are a little more complicated but, also in these languages, nouns like _man, son, father, grandfather, grandson, boyfriend, uncle, lion_ are masculine while _woman, daughter, mother, grandmother, granddaughter, girlfriend, aunt, lioness_ are feminine.
> Saying that grammatical gender has little to do with sex is a little exaggerated. A little.



My argument is that it has only incidentally to do with sex, because it was only incidentally that the ancient grammarians chose those labels to name the two active categories of nouns.  They could have picked instead _solare_ and _lunare_ (for important words in each category) or _fluviale_ and _arboreum_ (for classes of words which are usually contained in each gender), and then we'd have threads asking "why is a woman like a tree?"  It has to do with sex, but this correlation has been strengthened by an accidental relation made by the ancients.


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> A table is neither male nor female, so it is assigned, randomly, to one of these two genders


This is matter of historical fact and not of vivid imagination. One fact you got wrong is that PIE had 3 and not 2 genders. And the older of those were most likely masculine and neuter and not masculine and feminine. There is no reason to assume the the association was random, on the contrary.


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## Karton Realista

In Polish you can say "osoba" (person) which is feminine, and "człowiek" (human, person) which is masculine, and use them in one speech/text as synonyms - they can have the exact same meaning and yet differ in gender. This and other examples given above that gender is pretty arbitrary and in many cases doesn't have any inherent meaning. What makes "krzesło" (chair) and "stołek" (a certain type of chair, smaller, without back support) neuter and masculine respectively? Is "stołek" more manly? 
I also don't believe that Germans and Spanish gave the moon and the sun their genders because they felt that one was strong or weak. I live in the same climate as Germans and in my langauge they are - słońce (sun, n.), księżyc or miesiąc (moon, m.). Księżyc is a bad example, because it actually has a reason for being masculine, but that's off-topic etymology talk, the name was coined as a sort of metaphor. But old-fashioned "miesiąc" stands.
Since some people gave examples of the usefulness of gender in understanding the text correctly I'll also give my example.

Nad Kapuletich i Montekich domem,
Spłukane deszczem, poruszone gromem,
Łagodne oko błękitu.

Over the house of Capulets and Montagues,
Overpoured with rain, moved with thunder,
A calm eye of blue.

Blue is words in gender agreement.
How would you tell that the second line is referring to the last one and not the first? It could be the house, it could be the eye. It even seems at first that the house is more likely to be poured with rain and moved with thunder.
(the fragment comes from the poem "W Weronie" by Cyprian Kamil Norwid)


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## Nino83

berndf said:


> One fact you got wrong is that PIE had 3 and not 2 genders


Did I?
I was speaking of IE languages, not of PIE (which I don't know).


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> Did I?


Yes:
1) Within IE, the masculine-feminine gender system is a Romance idiosyncrasy and is not a IE feature.
2) Romance rarely assign genders. They inherited the vast majority of gender attribution.

Gender attributions are remarkable stable in most IE groups. Deviations from the three gender system are due to morphological mergers and not of re-systematizations of the gender system. These were after-the-fact re-interpretations.


----------



## merquiades

Here is a story I heard recently which can show just how important gender can be for the people speaking a language with genders.  The German Volkswagen car  _Der Wagen (m)_ was given the nickname _Der Käfer (m_) in German (literally Beetle) because of its shape but also this is gender appropriate for German because both of these nouns are masculine.  It works.  Beetle also works in English because there is no gender at all.  However, there is a big problem when translating this into French.  Car, _La voiture_, is feminine.  In French all car brands and words describing cars, such as adjectives, must be feminine.  So they say La _Volkswagen_.  But beetle in French is masculine, _Le scarabée_, so cannot be applied to cars.  It just doesn't sound right in this language.  Therefore, the problem was solved by taking the name of another insect, _La Coccinelle_, (Ladybug) which is indeed feminine and can be applied to a car to give the correct grammatical feel.  The whole cultural image became different.  When the French think of this car they think of ladybugs not beetles.

I personally had a terrible problem translating a text from French into Spanish, and fortunately most words usually have the same gender in these two languages! However the French text was about Idols.  _L'idole_, is feminine in French.  Every adjective was feminine, there was page upon page of feminine metaphors attributed to these idols that had been found in Provence.  _Elle, elle, elle_ was everywhere.  The authors apposed it to words like Princess, Beauty Queen, sweetheart etc.  For example:  They put the "little girl" on her throne to see what it would be like worship her.  It was just awful.  The reason being that Idol, _el ídolo_, is masculine in Spanish. I solved the problem by using _el ídolo_ every time I could realistically but when these metaphors appeared, I used _La Diosa_, goddess, instead which could could give this feminine flair in Spanish.  Not the best solution, but it worked.


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## berndf

merquCoccinelle : 15995674 said:
			
		

> But beetle in French is masculine, _Le scarabée_, so cannot be applied to cars. It just doesn't sound right in this language. Therefore, the problem was solved by taking the name of another insect, _La Coccinelle_,


It is a bit different. French does not have a word for _Käfer_. It only has names for individual types of _Käfer_, _scarabée (Mistkäfer) _and_ coccinelle (Marienkäfer) _being two of many types of _Käfer. _In English_, ladybird _is a separate word but is by the general definition of _beetle _also one. French lacks such a generic term. The type of beetle Germans think of when they call the car _Käfer_ is surly mostly a ladybug and not a scarab.


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## bragpipes

I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned this German example:

die See (the sea, ocean)
der See (lake)

Gender (+ definitive-article) can (theoretically, not in this example) reduce ambiguity from homonyms.  

German can also say things like "der Rote" (the red, the Communist - English can say "the Reds" but not in singular, sounds too strange) and make a distinction:  "der Rote" vs "das Rote" (the red, "the red suits you").


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## merquiades

berndf said:


> It is a bit different. French does not have a word for _Käfer_. It only has names for individual types of _Käfer_, _scarabée (Mistkäfer) _and_ coccinelle (Marienkäfer) _being two of many types of _Käfer. _In English_, ladybird _is a separate word but is by the general definition of _beetle _also one. French lacks such a generic term. The type of beetle Germans think of when they call the car _Käfer_ is surly mostly a ladybug and not a scarab.


Whatever the case, there is still the gender problem in French.  I think of a scarab when I think of the car not really of ladybug.  It's _escarabajo (m_) in Spanish too which is no problem because _coche_ and _auto_ are masculine.  It could never have been _mariquita_ (f) (coccinelle, MarienKäfer) since this is also a derogative terms for gays.


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## berndf

merquiades said:


> Whatever the case, there is still the gender problem in French


Sure. I just wanted to alert you that this is not the best of examples. The genders do indeed matter. For a German it is almost physically painful to say "elle" to a car or to a beer.


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## merquiades

berndf said:


> Sure. I just wanted to alert you that this is not the best of examples. The genders do indeed matter. For a German it is almost physically painful to say "elle" to a car or to a beer.


To be exact they could have used the generic term "_le coleoptère_" (beetle bug) but that also is masculine, and not common either.
I guess translating all those beer commercials with half naked women to match _La cerveza más fina, _especially with those puns on preferring dark or blond beers, is pointless in German


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## berndf

merquiades said:


> I guess translating all those beer commercials with half naked women to match _La cerveza más fina, _especially with those puns on preferring dark or blond beers, is pointless in German


Indeed.


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## Angelo di fuoco

berndf said:


> Sure. I just wanted to alert you that this is not the best of examples. The genders do indeed matter. For a German it is almost physically painful to say "elle" to a car or to a beer.



And then you have such curious advertisement slogans like "das König der Biere": the (n) king (m) of the beers (n pl). Awful from a purist point of view (and I am a purist of sorts), but it was so extravagant that it stuck (at least in my memory).

Ad now imagine how stupid it was (not anymore) for me to say "der Wodka" or "der Wolga" (both female in Russian).
"Mother Russia" makes sense in Russian, since both nouns are feminine.
In German, diminutive suffixes make the noun neuter, no matter what the original gender is, so "Mütterchen Russland" isn't completely coherent. On the other hand, you often have "ein / das Mädchen" and then use feminine pronouns to speak about the said girl.



merquiades said:


> I guess translating all those beer commercials with half naked women to match _La cerveza más fina, _especially with those puns on preferring dark or blond beers, is pointless in German



Not completely. "Ein kühles blondes" is a common expression.


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## berndf

Angelo di fuoco said:


> Not completely. "Ein kühles blondes" is a common expression.


There is association with women.


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## Nino83

berndf said:


> 1) Within IE, the masculine-feminine gender system is a Romance idiosyncrasy and is not a IE feature.


Romance, Celtic, Baltic, Indo-Ayran.


berndf said:


> 2) Romance rarely assign genders. They inherited the vast majority of gender attribution.


What I want to say is that since IE languages created the distinction between feminine and neuter, nouns denoting human males are masculine while nouns denoting human females are feminine.
Have grammatical genders little to do with sex in IE languages? I think it is not so. Gender and sex for noun denoting humans are strongly related.


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> nouns denoting human males are masculine while nouns denoting human females are feminine.


German _Weib _(_woman_), e.g. is neuter, so was OE _wif_. And in some varieties of German _Mensch _means either human or woman. If it means _human _it is masculine and if it means_ woman _it is neuter. Feminine is a late-comer in the IE gender system. The original genders where the precursors of masculine and neuter.


Nino83 said:


> Gender and sex for noun denoting humans are strongly related.


As a general rule that is true though there are stronger rules in some languages. In German, e.g., neuter is strongly related to _small _and all diminutives are neuter, even if they denote humans.

But what I mostly objected to was this statement of yours:


Nino83 said:


> A table is neither male nor female, so it is assigned, randomly, to one of these two genders.


Romance languages did inherit the gender attribution inherited words for things. The did not randomly assign them.


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## Scholiast

Greetings

A pedantic adjunct here.



Nino83 said:


> Romance, Celtic



"Romance" presumably includes Latin - including its neuter nouns?

And "Celtic" presumably includes Gaelic (_Goídelc_) - which had neuter nouns as well.

Σ


----------



## berndf

Scholiast said:


> "Romance" presumably includes Latin - including its neuter nouns?


Romance are the languages decedent from Vulgar Latin. The term does not include Classical Latin.


Scholiast said:


> And "Celtic" presumably includes Gaelic (_Goídelc_) - which had neuter nouns as well.


Also Irish lost the neuter only at the transition from Old to Middle Irish.


----------



## Nino83

berndf said:


> Romance languages did inherit the gender attribution inherited words for things.


I meant when PIE assigned genders.
I never said Romance languages assigned genders. We know they were inherited from Latin (and from PIE).
In IE languages nouns like _man, son, father, grandfather, grandson, boyfriend, uncle, lion_ are masculine while _woman, daughter, mother, grandmother, granddaughter, girlfriend, aunt, lioness_ are feminine.


Scholiast said:


> "Romance" presumably includes Latin - including its neuter nouns?
> And "Celtic" presumably includes Gaelic (_Goídelc_) - which had neuter nouns as well.


I didn't want to make an exhaustive list, but an illustrative one. Romanian, among Romance, and Scottish Gaelic, among Celtic, have neuter nouns.


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> I never said Romance languages assigned genders.


You said "A table is neither *male *nor *female*, so it is assigned, randomly, to one of *these two* genders". So you have have been talking about Romance and not IE.


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## Nino83

berndf said:


> to one of *these two* genders


Ah, ok, I see. 
Let's say "three genders".


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> Ah, ok, I see.
> Let's say "three genders".




And now, you would should substantiate why you think it was "random".


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## Nino83

berndf said:


> you would should substantiate why you think it was "random"


Because "inanimate" nouns can be masculine, feminine or neuter, without any substantial logic behind it.  
This is more accentuated in those languages that lost neuter gender (for example in Romance languages almost all neuter nouns merged with the masculine declension). For example "Tisch" (table) is masculine, "Seife" (soap) is feminine, "Buch" (book) is neuter.


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> Because "inanimate" nouns can be masculine, feminine or neuter, without any substantial logic behind it.


Why?


----------



## Nino83

berndf said:


> Why?


Why do I think there is no logic? 
Because I can't say in what a table differs from soap or from a book. 
If we follow the big/small theory, books are small but houses are big. Anyway "Haus" is neuter in German.


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## merquiades

berndf said:


> German _Weib _(_woman_), e.g. is neuter, so was OE _wif_. And in some varieties of German _Mensch _means either human or woman. If it means _human _it is masculine and if it means_ woman _it is neuter. *Feminine is a late-comer in the IE gender system*. The original genders where the precursors of masculine and neuter.
> 
> As a general rule that is true though there are stronger rules in some languages. In German, e.g., neuter is strongly related to _small _and all diminutives are neuter, even if they denote humans.
> 
> But what I mostly objected to was this statement of yours:
> 
> Romance languages did inherit the gender attribution inherited words for things. *The did not randomly assign them*.



1)  Is there a coincidence that feminine and plural use the same articles:   Die, Meine, keine and take the same adjective endings -e(n)?

2)  Romance language gender was not chosen arbitarily.  Table comes from Tabula or Mensa which were Latin first declension a-stems.


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## Nino83

merquiades said:


> Romance language gender was not chosen arbitarily


Right, but sometimes...


merquiades said:


> Table comes from Tabula


that in Italian is _il tavolo_ (masculine).


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## merquiades

Nino83 said:


> Right, but sometimes...
> 
> that in Italian is _il tavolo_ (masculine).


Yes, of course, Latin neuter declinations underwent gender reassignment, and those are the cases where the gender is different in the different languages:  La leche, o leite.... El análisis, L'analyse....

I don't know Italian history well enough to know where _il tavolo_ comes from.  _La tavola_ exists also.


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## Nino83

merquiades said:


> _La tavola_ exists also.


tavola vs tavolo (the first answer is really good)


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> Why do I think there is no logic?
> Because I can't say in what a table differs from soap or from a book.
> If we follow the big/small theory, books are small but houses are big. Anyway "Haus" is neuter in German.


It doesn't matter what logic you can see today but what logic prevailed when the attributions happened. Some of these logics still prevail, i.e. abstract nouns are still predominantly feminine. The development of the IE three gender system is best understood as a sequence of re-interpretations. These re-interpretations suggest that certain properties, like individual-collective or acting-receiving are in many cultures sex-connotated. The widely held theory that the three gender system originated from split within the inanimate gender into abstract and concrete with the abstract forming the core of what is to become the feminine gender, see table 4 on p.12 here. It should be mentioned however that Prof. Luraghi has also proposed an alternative reconstruction by which the feminine originated a split within the animate gender. 

Whichever of these theories is right, gender systems develop and they undergo re-interpretations and these reinterpretations involve associations of properties. The fact that a table has no biological sex does not mean the the gender attribution is "random".


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## Nino83

berndf said:


> The widely held theory that the three gender system originated from split within the inanimate gender into abstract and concrete with the abstract forming the core of what is to become the feminine gender, see table 4 on p.12 here. It should be mentioned however that Prof. Luraghi has also proposed an alternative reconstruction by which the feminine originated a split within the animate gender.


Interesting theory!


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## Sobakus

Red Arrow :D said:


> A common word is supposed to have either masculine or feminine characteristics. (''genderfull'') A neuter thing is supposed to have neither. (''genderless'')
> 
> My point was that no one actually associates common words with masculine or feminine traits. Mice (de muis) aren't more manly/feminine than sheep (het schaap).


I don't understand how one word class can be associated with "either masculine or feminine traits" at the same time. To me, one natural gender is defined by its opposition to another gender with neuter being defined by no discernible gender. When you combine the masculine and the feminine into one grammatical gender ("common"), the difference between them disappears. With it disappears the difference between it and neuter as both can be associated with neither natural gender. Thus, the reason you don't associate common and neuter words with any particular traits is because they both cannot be associated with any particular traits in principle. As the study shows, and as most native speakers will tell you, this is not the case in languages with sex-based gender systems.


Red Arrow :D said:


> But why would there be any phonetic simplifications if the speakers of said language keep associating certain words with manly/female/neutral things?
> First the association should disappear, then the case system can be simplified (including the loss of the grammatical genders).
> 
> Or am I missing something?! Don't be afraid to correct me.


You're basically saying that you cannot tell apart the various meanings of the Dutch suffix -en. Are verbs in plural the same as verbs in the infinitive the same as adjectives denoting material the same as nouns in plural to you? Obviously not: the grammatical concepts are different, but the means to express them is the same suffix *-en* reduced from a number of different suffixes. The same happened to genders, and at some point children listening to adults could no longer distinguish any sort of pattern according to which one word was referred to by the pronoun _he,_ another by _she_ and a third one by _it_ even though the adults still knew the pattern. Imagine learning Italian from a native English speaker who pronounces both *-o* and *-a* as shwa. Add to that different dialects of English where the same word had different gender mixing together in the same place and you'll see how maintaining the system of grammatical gender became impossible in a rather short period of time.


wtrmute said:


> My argument is that it has only incidentally to do with sex, because it was only incidentally that the ancient grammarians chose those labels to name the two active categories of nouns.  They could have picked instead _solare_ and _lunare_ (for important words in each category) or _fluviale_ and _arboreum_ (for classes of words which are usually contained in each gender), and then we'd have threads asking "why is a woman like a tree?"  It has to do with sex, but this correlation has been strengthened by an accidental relation made by the ancients.


I see nothing accidental about this terminology: the distinction between sexes is a notion underlying the whole structure of human society with really nothing coming even close in importance or clarity of division (certainly not the difference between rivers and trees). I'm certain that speakers of any language that has a sex-based grammatical gender system associate grammatical gender with sex without having to be taught grammatical terminology. It's no coincidence that after losing grammatical gender, English redistributed the pronouns to agree with biological gender and not with the noun being a tree or a river or any other grouping that may have been predominantly of, or reserved to, one grammatical gender. The whole feminine gender seems to have arisen to reflect this highly important social concept, with one of the main driving factors probably being the fact that groups of domesticated animals referred to by collective nouns in _-h₂_ just naturally happened to be comprised of females. The understanding of this fact is underlined by the very term "sex-based".


----------



## Red Arrow

berndf said:


> From Old to Middle Dutch the difference between masculine and feminine was lost in nominative as a consequence of the loss of full vowels in unstressed ending (all becoming Schwas), a phenomenon that also existed in German and English and caused a lot of distinctions to disappear. In Middle Dutch, the definite article was die for both genders in in nominative but still differed in the other cases (acc: _den/die_, dat: _den/der_, gen: _des/der_) with the loss of accusative and dative markings, all except genitive became _de_ in modern Dutch. In the modern Dutch genitive, the distinction theoretically still exists (_des_ vs._ der_) but since the singular genitive is at the verge of extinction, the masculine and feminine are for all practical purposes indistinguishable. In sum, the process of loss of markings is a combination of phonetic simplification followed by loss of case markings which further reduced the possibilities to distinguish the two. Low German is currently in a stage in between Middle and modern Dutch: It still has the the masculine accusative _-n_ as a distinguisher but in the other hand, the genitive is completely extinct in Low German and, thus, masculine and feminine are very close to being indistinguishable and the language is in a similar stage as Dutch. In both, Germanic and Romance languages, the loss of the case system was the main driving in the simplification of the morphological system. The fact that High German has still retained all tree genders is mainly due to the fact that the case system is still alive and kicking with four or the original five Germanic cases being fully productive and distinguishable.





Sobakus said:


> You're basically saying that you cannot tell apart the various meanings of the Dutch suffix -en. Are verbs in plural the same as verbs in the infinitive the same as adjectives denoting material the same as nouns in plural to you? Obviously not: the grammatical concepts are different, but the means to express them is the same suffix *-en* reduced from a number of different suffixes. The same happened to genders, and at some point children listening to adults could no longer distinguish any sort of pattern according to which one word was referred to by the pronoun _he,_ another by _she_ and a third one by _it_ even though the adults still knew the pattern. Imagine learning Italian from a native English speaker who pronounces both *-o* and *-a* as shwa. Add to that different dialects of English where the same word had different gender mixing together in the same place and you'll see how maintaining the system of grammatical gender became impossible in a rather short period of time.


You are misinterpreting what I was trying to say. The association of words with either manly or female things, or neither, was already lost long before the merger of the masculine and feminine gender started. The association is lost in Germany as well. The case system is what keeps it alive, but Germans don't actually think anymore that the moon is manly and that the sun is female.

Dutch:
-First a gender system is created because certain words are associated with manly traits, while other words are associated with female traits, while some words are associated with neither.
-Then the association get lost, but people keep using the system.
-Then, due to morphological simplifications, the case system gets lost as well as the difference between the masculine and feminine gender.

German:
-First a gender system is created because certain words are associated with manly traits, while other words are associated with female traits, while some words are associated with neither.
-Then the association get lost, but people keep using the system.


----------



## berndf

Red Arrow :D said:


> The association of words with either manly or female things, or neither, was already lost long before the merger of the masculine and feminine gender started.


I understand that this is what you are trying to say. I just think you are wrong.


----------



## Sobakus

Red Arrow :D said:


> You are misinterpreting what I was trying to say. The association of words with either manly or female things, or neither, was already lost long before the merger of the masculine and feminine gender started. The association is lost in Germany as well. The case system is what keeps it alive, but Germans don't actually think anymore that the moon is manly and that the sun is female.


Statements like this is exaggerating things quite a bit. Nobody is saying that speakers of any language think that the Moon is manlier or more feminine than some other solar body. However, as the study that includes German specifically shows, there is a clear subconscious correlation between grammatical gender and biological sex. It may manifest itself in some contexts and be hidden completely in others, but it demonstrably exists.

One example from my personal experience that testifies to this is Bagheera from the Jungle Book. In Russian, both _пантера_ and _Багира_ are feminine words (although the latter could just as well be masculine as it's a name), and so in both the Russian translation and animated films, Bagheera is a female. Imagine my surprise as I read the sentence _"Everybody knew Bagheera, and nobody dared to cross his path; for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, as bold as the wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant."_ To quote Wikipedia (disregard the nonsense about the name):


> In the animated Soviet version, _Adventures of Mowgli_, Bagheera is portrayed as a female. This may be related to the fact that the Russian word for "panther" is a feminine noun, and a name ending with 'a' is considered to be a female name in the Russian language (a male panther would have been named Bagheer). An episode shows she has three cubs, one black and two yellow with rosette patterns. Bagheera is portrayed as friendly, loyal, trustworthy, and protective, yet somewhat cunning and tricky.


You can use Google's picture search for the imagery associated with _Багира_ in Russian and then compare that to English. The only reason for this difference is grammatical gender and its association with sex, which took precedence over the fact that the character was absolutely plainly male in the original.


----------



## bardistador

Disney has another adaptation of the Jungle Book (The Jungle Book: Mowgli's Story) where Bagheera is a female, voiced by Eartha Kitt.    This is an artistic choice, not influenced by language.  There are versions of the story in which Bagheera is a leopard.  Maybe the Soviet animators perceived Bagheera as female due to the name, maybe it was just an artistic choice.  We don't know why the Disney version is female.    Males with names ending in -a are not that unheard of in Slavic - the Biblical prophet Jonah is Jona/Iona in some Slavic languages.  

I also think we have to make a distinction between animate and inanimate at this stage.  The perception of Bagheera as a female name does not prove that people perceive the sun as feminine.   It just proves that animals with feminine-sounding names will be perceived as being female in some cultures.   Animals still have genders and the name of the animal (masculine or feminine) tells us something about the biological gender of the animal.   This is not the same with inanimate objects.

That study is interesting, but I do have my doubts.  Do Germans really perceive a lake (der See) as male and a sea (die See) as female?    With the sun, I can see the association of it being associated with life, giving life and maternity, but with two bodies of water differing only by what's around them (enclosed by land or not), it's difficult to see any clues as to why one is feminine and one is masculine.


----------



## Sobakus

bardistador said:


> Do Germans really perceive a lake (der See) as male and a sea (die See) as female?


I think it's worth repeating that nobody perceives inanimate objects as males and females, this is just not serious. However, the word's grammatical gender probably places it in a certain semantic field that's shared with words denoting organisms of a particular sex as well as words typically describing them. When it comes to personification of inanimate objects, this instantly becomes apparent. In fact, there might not even be a choice most of the time, as when the language has no synonym of another gender, the speaker is simply pigeonholed into referring to die Sonne as _sie_ with all the consequences this entails as far as personification is concerned.

There's a trick where you make Sonne a personal name, in which case the pronoun starts agreeing with biological sex, but usually this is done to transfer some qualities and associations (of the Sun in this case) to an actual person and not to personify an object.


bardistador said:


> This is an artistic choice, not influenced by language. There are versions of the story in which Bagheera is a leopard.


What I'm saying is that a character referenced by the word _пантера_ is very unlikely to be a male, while a character _леопард_ is as unlikely to be a female: the word's gender thus guides, if not limits, one's artistic choice. If they are referenced by a personal name, you have more freedom grammatically but still cannot escape the immediate association. Many common animal names have male and female pairs (where the male one, when default, can occasionally be a female, but never vice versa), but even for those that don't, there is still a very clear tendency of correlation/association of perceived sex with grammatical gender that varies in strength from animal to animal.


----------



## Peterdg

Red Arrow :D said:


> Notice that all English loanwords get the article ''de'' in Dutch. (never ''het'') for example: de selfie


Maybe most of them, but not all. Het _keyboard_. Het _schedule_. Het _panel_.


----------



## Red Arrow

Peterdg said:


> Maybe most of them, but not all. Het _keyboard_. Het _schedule_. Het _panel_.


You are right.

Then why are people afraid Dutch will lose the word "het" like Afrikaans if we keep borrowing new neuter words?


----------



## Angelo di fuoco

Red Arrow :D said:


> You are misinterpreting what I was trying to say. The association of words with either manly or female things, or neither, was already lost long before the merger of the masculine and feminine gender started. The association is lost in Germany as well. The case system is what keeps it alive, but Germans don't actually think anymore that the moon is manly and that the sun is female.
> 
> Dutch:
> -First a gender system is created because certain words are associated with manly traits, while other words are associated with female traits, while some words are associated with neither.
> -Then the association get lost, but people keep using the system.
> -Then, due to morphological simplifications, the case system gets lost as well as the difference between the masculine and feminine gender.
> 
> German:
> -First a gender system is created because certain words are associated with manly traits, while other words are associated with female traits, while some words are associated with neither.
> -Then the association get lost, but people keep using the system.



I fear the cases and the genders, while strong in the (written) standard language, are losing ground as well: "ein" vs. "einen" is barely distinguished, "dem" vs. "den" too. So maybe in hundred years German may (I strongly hope it won't) lose the distinction between masculine and neuter.

As to "the male moon" and "the masculine sun", as well as "the female sea" or "the male death" in German, those distinctions are still relevant in art.
Examples:
- at school we were talking about gender roles and perceptions, and somebody came up with "Die Mondin" ("the moonness"), a story for children
- a well-known song has the lines "Seemanns Braut ist die See / Und nur ihr kann er treu sein": "Sailor's bride is the sea / And he can be faithful only to her"
- "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" ("The boy's magic horne"), a collection of folk song texts, reports "Es is ein Schnitter, heißt der Tod": "There is a reaper, called death". More recently, I saw a movie (a tragicomedy) about death: a young married mother with a terminal illness, an old, but stout and resolute widow, and the death, who is obviously male.
Because of the (opposite) gender association, I doubt a German-language writer would've written something like José Saramago would've written "Death with interruptions": a love story about a male violoncello player and death who is a woman and develops emotional and sexual attraction to this man.


----------



## berndf

Angelo di fuoco said:


> I fear the cases and the genders, while strong in the (written) standard language, are losing ground as well: "ein" vs. "einen" is barely distinguished, "dem" vs. "den" too. So maybe in hundred years German may (I strongly hope it won't) lose the distinction between masculine and neuter.


In most dialects, a masculine-feminine merger is more likely than a masculine-neuter merger. In Low German, this merger is almost complete the accusative -n in masculine adjective declension is the only distinguishing mark left. _Den-dem_ is case, not gender merger.


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## Angelo di fuoco

I'm speaking about Standard German, not about dialects, and about things I hear from friends who are school teachers. In the area where I live (Bremen & Bremen area), you don't hear Low German in the streets (they tell me there's a part of the city where you do, but I almost never go there), there are very few young native speakers. Otherwise I think I would've learned Low German long ago.
You're right about the case merger, but in the feminine declension, the difference (der-die) is yet too strong for a case merger.


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## berndf

Angelo di fuoco said:


> but in the feminine declension, the difference (der-die) is yet too strong for a case merger.


It is still the more likely merger in any variety of German. The most likely merger is the same as it occurred in many Dialects and also in Dutch where _der, die, den, dem_ merges to _de_. A merger with _das_ is extremely unlikely. The merger of _der, die, den, dem_ merges to _de_ would then also cause the loss of the dative-accusative distinction and _das_ will finally take over the neuter dative as well and we would have the same situation as in Dutch. All dialectal simplifications point in this direction. I am not award of any exception.

There is absolutely no conceivable path towards a masculine-neuter merger with a separate feminine.


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## Red Arrow

Angelo di fuoco said:


> I'm speaking about Standard German, not about dialects


Standard German can't change. It is a norm, a standard.
It only changes (all at once) when the Council for German Orthography decides to do so, and they are never going to opt for a masculine-neuter merger if many dialects are going for a masculine-feminie merger.

Dialects change over time. (not all at once) Standard German is based on them. You can't predict the future of Standard German without looking at the dialects.


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## Angelo di fuoco

Standard German can change. Norms and standards change more slowly than the language people actually use, but they change. 
They have already surrendered to dative with wegen, so they may surrender to any gender or case merger if the speaking majority insists enough.


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## merquiades

berndf said:


> It is still the more likely merger in any variety of German. The most likely merger is the same as it occurred in many Dialects and also in Dutch where _der, die, den, dem_ merges to _de_. A merger with _das_ is extremely unlikely. The merger of _der, die, den, dem_ merges to _de_ would then also cause the loss of the dative-accusative distinction and _das_ will finally take over the neuter dative as well and we would have the same situation as in Dutch. All dialectal simplifications point in this direction. I am not award of any exception.
> 
> There is absolutely no conceivable path towards a masculine-neuter merger with a separate feminine.


Was there a merger to make both feminine singular and plural become _die_?
There is room for serious merger with cases and gender.  From the learner's point of view there is overlap everywhere, adjective endings -e or -n, differentiated noun and plural endings seem swallowed up to my ears, masculine singular _der_ becomes the feminine article in dative and genitive whereas masculine/ dative differences go away in dative/ genitive, then there is the _die _which preforms two different functions completely.  Also adjectives only agree with case in gender when they precede the noun.
Compared to Slavic languages where the different genders and cases are clearly marked, German is blurry and lacking these markers.  The closest thing to a clear marker, imho, is the difference between nominative _der_ and accusative _den_, with -n added to adjectives.  Curious that this very clear useful distinction was not extended to the feminine, neuter and plural.
It would seem that modern standard German has already been simplified a lot and seems to be accelerating.  I heard recently that in Austria people don't even use the genitive at all anymore and can always be replaced by dative.

I would compare the German situation with the Old French case system. The mismatching of articles and endings was mindblogging:  _li voisins,  li voisin_ (nominative masculine singular, plural), _le voisin, les voisins_ (oblique masculine singular, plural).  However, for feminine the article was always la (singular) and (les) pluralr:  _la cité, la citéz, les citéz_ (both).  It would be hard to keep this mix straight in speech.  No wonder it died out.


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## berndf

merquiades said:


> I would compare the German situation with the Old French case system.


If you replaced "German" by "German dialects with accusative-dative merger and loss of genitive" you'd be right. But German as a whole is still far away from this situation.


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## Christo Tamarin

The gender system in German is sustained by the Neuter Singular Nominative/Accusative, in the greatest extent. Has it been shaken already?

I think the gender system in German is far away from the state of the gender system in English.


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## Scholiast

Greetings all from sunny (for once) Scotland



Christo Tamarin said:


> The gender system in German is sustained by the Neuter Singular Nominative/Accusative,



What, pray, is this supposed to mean?

It is at least an acknowledged feature of IE languages that nominative and accusative neuter forms are the same throughout (Latin, Greek, German, Russian &c.), but perhaps Christo _noster_ could elaborate?

Σ


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## merquiades

By the way, why did German lose its gender in the plural?


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## Christo Tamarin

In German, the strongest gender distinction is in Neuter Singular:

*das Mädchen, ein gutes Mädchen. 
*
In Neuter, Nominative/Accusative cannot differ, of course - there are common forms for Accusative/Nominative in Neuter.


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## Christo Tamarin

merquiades said:


> By the way, why did German lose its gender in the plural?


By the way, so did Bulgarian (and Macedonian) and Russian (and Ukrainian and Byelorussian). Polish almost did it also.


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## merquiades

Christo Tamarin said:


> In German, the strongest gender distinction is in Neuter Singular:
> 
> *das Madchen, ein gutes Madchen. *


Masculine singular is quite heavily marked too.

Der mann,  Ein guter mann
Den mann,  Einen guten mann
Des mannes,  Eines guten mannes.


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## merquiades

Christo Tamarin said:


> By the way, so did Bulgarian (and Macedonian) and Russian (and Ukrainian and Byelorussian). Polish almost did it also.


And how did they end up losing it?


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## berndf

merquiades said:


> By the way, why did German lose its gender in the plural?


Phonetic merger in the transition from OHG to MHG. The basic process was the loss of full vowels in unstressed endings that also characterized the transition from OE to ME.


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## Angelo di fuoco

merquiades said:


> And how did they end up losing it?


In Russian, the difference before the last big reform (around 1918) was the ending -ые for masculine adjectives (in nominative for both animated & inanimated, in accusative inanimated only), -ыя for feminine and neuter adjectives (again, in nominative both animated & inanimated nouns, in accusative inanimated only). By the way, -ыя is also an archaic genitive case ending for feminine singular nouns, and when it appears in this function in literature, it is still spelled this way.
There was also the feminine plural pronoun "оне" (and, possibly, "она" for neuter plural, like in Czech, but I'm not sure about that), but it also got levelled down to "они". That one is really a pity, since there was no phonetic reason for that: the stress falls on the second syllable, so the distinction is quite clear even in oral speech.
So you see that the gender distinction in Russian occured only in adjectives and 3rd person pronouns and only in two cases out of six. Getting rid of it wasn't that complicated: just a spelling reform and you got it through.


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## Red Arrow

Scholiast said:


> It is at least an acknowledged feature of IE languages that nominative and accusative neuter forms are the same throughout (Latin, Greek, German, Russian &c.), but perhaps Christo _noster_ could elaborate?


Does this mean none of the IE languages can have a 100% flexible word order?


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## Christo Tamarin

Angelo di fuoco said:


> .. By the way, -ыя is also an archaic genitive case ending for feminine singular nouns, and when it appears in this function in literature, it is still spelled this way.


You mean, e.g. a case like this: "патриарх Московский и *всея* Руси". The form *всея* is archaic and the modern form is just an abbreviation of it: *всей. *It is a similar case as "водою" => "водой" (Instrumental Singular), e.g.

These cases (всея=>всей,водою=>водой) do not harm the gender system: this was to be defined more accurately.



Angelo di fuoco said:


> There was also the feminine plural pronoun "оне" (and, possibly, "она" for neuter plural, like in Czech, but I'm not sure about that), but it also got levelled down to "они". That one is really a pity, since there was no phonetic reason for that: the stress falls on the second syllable, so the distinction is quite clear even in oral speech.


There was no *она* (ona, Neurer Plural) in the 19-th century Russian.

Are there some evidences that in the 19-th century Russian, the form *онѣ* (oně, Feminine&Neuter Plural) could be heard in speech? Probably, it could in the learned speech, but not otherwise.

By the way, in Russian, the *ѣ* (ě) sound is И/I in unstressed positions. Moreover, in Ukrainian, the *ѣ* (ě) sound is heard as И(I) even in a stressed position.  It could be so in all adjacent Slavic dialects. This is to give some explanation of the "*онѣ => они" *change.


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## Christo Tamarin

Red Arrow :D said:


> Does this mean none of the IE languages can have a 100% flexible word order?


No.

{If} both subject and object were Neuter {and} both Singular or both Plural, {then} the subject was to precede the object.


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## Sobakus

Red Arrow :D said:


> Does this mean none of the IE languages can have a 100% flexible word order?


100% flexible word order is impossible in principle – every single human language has syntax. People understand the phrase "free word order" too literally. Anyhow, there are plenty of cases when two Neuters in one sentence can be shuffled around because context and intonation serve to disambiguate the meaning (Rus. _«Móre gréjet sólnce» - "sea-Acc. warms sun-Nom.")_


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## Angelo di fuoco

Christo Tamarin said:


> You mean, e.g. a case like this: "патриарх Московский и *всея* Руси". The form *всея* is archaic and the modern form is just an abbreviation of it: *всей. *It is a similar case as "водою" => "водой" (Instrumental Singular), e.g.
> 
> These cases (всея=>всей,водою=>водой) do not harm the gender system: this was to be defined more accurately.



Yep, or a thing like "принять венец славы вечныя" ("Хованщина").
I just remembered this because their's a similar thing in Preclassic Latin: -as is both feminine plural nominative and feminine singular genitive, like in _pater familias_.



Christo Tamarin said:


> There was no *она* (ona, Neurer Plural) in the 19-th century Russian.



Perhaps earlier?



Christo Tamarin said:


> Are there some evidences that in the 19-th century Russian, the form *онѣ* (oně, Feminine&Neuter Plural) could be heard in speech? Probably, it could in the learned speech, but not otherwise.
> 
> By the way, in Russian, the *ѣ* (ě) sound is И/I in unstressed positions. Moreover, in Ukrainian, the *ѣ* (ě) sound is heard as И(I) even in a stressed position.  It could be so in all adjacent Slavic dialects. This is to give some explanation of the "*онѣ => они" *change.



I don't have any evidence about the register, but there's a rather well-known poem by Pushkin where оне is a rhyme to мне:

Не пой, красавица, при мне
Ты песен Грузии печальной!
Напоминают мне оне
Другую жизнь и берег дальный.

Pushkin is not known for clinging to archaisms or bureaucratese (especially if compared to a contemporary like Lazhechnikov, who was only seven years his senior).


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## ahvalj

lioninacoma said:


> Can you give me an example (preferably in Spanish)?
> 
> I would have thought that the only time grammatical agreement would help in the way you describe would be when there are _exactly_ two protagonists of _different_ gender that might otherwise be confused but for, say, an adjective agreeing with the gender of one.  If the protagonists are of the same gender, surely there's no benefit.


I am reading the book _Martínez J, de Vaan MAC · 2014 · Introduction to Avestan,_ and here is a curious statement I have found in the translator's note:


> [T]he availability of a more extensive number and gender agreement system in Spanish often necessitated that I restore full nominal referents in many places, again for the sake of clarity.


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## Hulalessar

Will someone kindly explain what a full nominal referent is?


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## Peterdg

Hulalessar said:


> Will someone kindly explain what a full nominal referent is?


As I understand it, he means to say that he had to mention who he was talking about in his translation while in the original Spanish text it is not there because the gender agreement made it clear.


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## ahvalj

Hulalessar said:


> Will someone kindly explain what a full nominal referent is?


Also "_what_ he was taking about" in the situations like
_lenguas … idiomas…, los que
sonido … letras…, mencionado_
The referent (i. e. the noun) can be inferred here by the gender/number of the pronoun and participle, whereas English will use the invariable _which, mentioned_. Compare the last remnants of this in English when one still can say:
_John told Mary that he_
vs.
_John told Mary that she_
— the languages without the gender distinction (like Uralic or Turkic ones) will have to invent something to convey the meaning in this construction.

P. S. In my experience, this is a typical situation with the translations from Russian into English, only Russian has one more gender and five more grammatical cases, which makes the connection of distant referents even more unequivocal. The same must be true for Latin and Ancient Greek. Overall, the more grammatical connections between parts of the sentence, the more elaborated and flexible syntax is possible. The poetry in inflexional languages is hard to translate because of this.


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## Angelo di fuoco

Spanish has two genders when it comes to nouns, but three when it comes to adjectives and pronouns: a masculine adjective used as a noun gets the definite article "lo" instead of the usual "el", while in the third person you have el, ella,ello ("this thing", "this circumstance") and éste, ésta, esto; ése, ésa, eso, aquél, aquélla, aquello (demonstrative pronouns used as nouns).
As to Latin and Ancient Greek, you are right (speaking from my limited experience with Ovid's "Heroides"), but the poets abused of this lack of ambiguity. So in Latin classes you have first get right which pieces belong together, which are their grammatical and syntactic functions and only then can you begin translating.


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## ahvalj

Angelo di fuoco said:


> As to Latin and Ancient Greek, you are right (speaking from my limited experience with Ovid's "Heroides"), but the poets abused of this lack of ambiguity. So in Latin classes you have first get right which pieces belong together, which are their grammatical and syntactic functions and only then can you begin translating.


We seem to have discussed this already. Yet, this poetic usage is based after all on the freedom of the colloquial speech (largely eliminated in the prose) — let's take two innocent Russian lines
_Так воспитаньем, слава богу, 
У нас немудрено блеснуть_
which would be a nightmare for an English student, both for the word order and the absence of an overt subject (_it_) and verb (_is_). Compare the translation:
_so, to God be thanks, it's easy, without too much fooling, 
to pass for cultured in our ranks_
(A.S.Pushkin. Eugene Onegin (tr.Ch.Johnston)).


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## Hulalessar

Peterdg said:


> As I understand it, he means to say that he had to mention who he was talking about in his translation while in the original Spanish text it is not there because the gender agreement made it clear.





ahvalj said:


> Also "_what_ he was taking about" in the situations like
> _lenguas … idiomas…, los que
> sonido … letras…, mencionado_
> The referent (i. e. the noun) can be inferred here by the gender/number of the pronoun and participle etc



Thank you for your explanations. I think I have it.


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## Hulalessar

Angelo di fuoco said:


> Spanish has two genders when it comes to nouns, but three when it comes to adjectives and pronouns: a masculine adjective used as a noun gets the definite article "lo" instead of the usual "el", while in the third person you have el, ella,ello ("this thing", "this circumstance") and éste, ésta, esto; ése, ésa, eso, aquél, aquélla, aquello (demonstrative pronouns used as nouns).



If we say that a language has grammatical gender if it has two or more classes of nouns which involve making changes in other words in the sentence associated with the noun, then Spanish only has two genders. Only nouns have gender. Adjectives do not have gender, they just (in some cases in Spanish) change their form according to the gender of the noun they qualify. _Ello_, _eso _and _aquello _do not refer to any noun in particular - they lack gender rather than being neuter gender. _Lo_ when it can be translated by _the _is also best thought of as being neither masculine nor feminine rather than neuter. To say that Spanish has a neuter gender, even if you say it is vestigial or residual, is to describe it in terms of its history rather than as it now is.



Angelo di fuoco said:


> As to Latin and Ancient Greek, you are right (speaking from my limited experience with Ovid's "Heroides"), but the poets abused of this lack of ambiguity. So in Latin classes you have first get right which pieces belong together, which are their grammatical and syntactic functions and only then can you begin translating.



I think that "abuse" is a bit too strong, though those of us who scratched our heads when translating Latin poetry may have thought in those terms.

Syntax can get fractured in English poetry. I referred above to_ Gray's Elegy_. Here are a few examples from it:

_Now fades the glimmering landscape_ (verb precedes subject)

_And all the air a solemn stillness holds_ (both subject and object precede verb and it is not clear whether the subject is _air _or _solemn stillness_)

_Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap_ (verb precedes subject)

_For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn _(indirect object precedes verb)

_Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share_ (object precedes verb)

There are also many instances where an adverb or adverbial phrase is not quite where you would expect it.

Whilst poetry is generally best avoided when discussing grammar, the point is well-made that gender does (with other features of grammar) allow the free word order found in Latin poetry. That can be expanded to say that gender (and other features of grammar) may allow something to be said succinctly in one language which in another may require more words. Where gender alone achieves it it is incidental rather than being some inherent property of gender.


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## Dib

ahvalj said:


> We seem to have discussed this already. Yet, this poetic usage is based after all on the freedom of the colloquial speech (largely eliminated in the prose) ...



This is a very interesting comment. Indeed, basing all discussions about syntax and word-order on prose may be quite a narrow view of things. In fact, I don't even believe flexible syntax necessarily needs a lot of agreement among the constituents of the sentence. It may help, but isn't necessary. In Bengali, for example, the only grammatical agreement that exists is the person (which includes honorifics) agreement of verbs with the subject, unless I am forgetting others. There is no number (apart from in pronouns with their referents), gender and case agreement. Yet, we routinely say things like this according to discourse requirements:

"bɔl ami ækṭa enechi bajar theke lal" = I have brought a red ball from the market.
Normal "prose" order is "ami bajar theke ækṭa lal bɔl enechi".
bɔl = ball
ami = I
ækṭa = one
enechi = (I) have brought
bajar theke = from market
lal = red

I am not totally sure what linguistic phenomena are going on here. But I think, "bɔl" is topic-fronted. This sentence would be appropriate when the preceding part of the discourse was about the ball (e.g. someone asking whether I have brought a ball), while "lal" being put at the end seems to signal a change of topic in the subsequent discourse to the colour. So, I am likely to add something like "Do you like it?" after this, which will most probably be understood as asking whether the colour of the ball is acceptable or not. And all this scrambling works perfectly well (and maybe even required) in natural everyday speech.


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## iezik

Angelo di fuoco said:


> Spanish has two genders when it comes to nouns, but three when it comes to adjectives and pronouns





Hulalessar said:


> If we say that a language has grammatical gender if it has two or more classes of nouns which involve making changes in other words in the sentence associated with the noun, then Spanish only has two genders. Only nouns have gender.



I'm teaching few modern languages to a computer and I need to use precise terms. Let me show how I use these terms at computer. 

In the Spanish dictionary that I prepare, nouns have two genders and adjectives and pronouns are without a defined gender. When reading a text, noun forms still have two genders (each noun as defined in dictionary), adjective forms have two one of genders (as defined by agreement) and pronoun forms have one of three genders (as defined by agreement or other features of syntax). It could be possible to define "lo" as referring to different dictionary entry than "el/la", but I prefer to treat it together. Diccionario de la lengua española also treats "lo" as neuter of "el,la". So, I understand it's up to a grammarian how to define such corner cases.

So, for the most part, typical European language a fixed number of genders that are applied for nouns, adjectives and pronouns. In some cases it's better or necessary to use different genders. The usual counting that language x has y genders hides the details.

Dutch definite article has forms of two genders, common and neuter. Dutch dictionaries assign three possible genders to nouns, so the user knows which form of personal pronoun (3rd person singular) to take. I understand that the "number of genders in Dutch" is not the same for all purposes. ANS is of the same opinion (3.3.1): from the viewpoint of assigning article to a noun, there are two genders. From the viewpoint of assigning words to domestic farm animals, there are three genders.

As already mentioned, English has marginal noun genders in the names of navy ships. E.g. wikipedia articles on American carriers ("Saratoga and her sister ship, Lexington") use pronoun "she" when referring to carriers where the ordinary English uses "it".


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## iezik

Hulalessar said:


> If we say that a language has grammatical gender if it has two or more classes of nouns which involve making changes in other words in the sentence associated with the noun


We usually count the genders by counting typical nouns. Some nouns of a language are often skipped. The Italian word "uovo" is masculine in singular and feminine "uova" in plural. So Italian divides a vast majority of nouns into two classes, but this is not the whole truth. I also prefer to regard Italian as having two genders. If anybody is interested, I can tell, how I divide all the Italian nouns in two classes.

Wikilengua (in article Género gramatical) tells us that Spanish has strictly speaking two or three genders, but the denominations género común and género ambiguo are also used. It's also possible for Spanish to use just two or three genders.


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## Peterdg

iezik said:


> ANS is of the same opinion (3.3.1): from the viewpoint of assigning article to a noun, there are two genders. From the viewpoint of assigning words to domestic farm animals, there are three genders.


The part I marked in red is a misinterpretation of what is being said in the ANS. They happen to give examples of domestic farm animals to illustrate it, but every noun in Dutch belongs to a three gender system when they have to be combined with pronouns (and some limited other word categories).

This three gender system (i.e. the difference between masculine and feminine _de-_words) is gradually disappearing in the North but it is still very alive in the South (mainly because of the dialect substrate in the South: most southern dialects use a different indefenite article for each of the genders, which makes southern speakers very aware of the grammatical gender).


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## Nino83

Peterdg said:


> This three gender system (i.e. the difference between masculine and feminine _de-_words) is gradually disappearing in the North


Hi, Peter. Which pronoun is used in the North for common gender nouns?


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## Sepia

I really wonder why everybody here seem to be talking about this subject as if it were only a historical thing. Nobody so far has given any examples of the logic or lack of logic displayed in the assignment of grammatical gender to new words. 
Why on earth do Germans say "die CD" (F) - when they would never in their wildest dreams say "die Disk"?
And why can't Danes understand that "Circus" actually should be M/F and not N - and also seem to have changed the gender of some words over past few decades?
And why has there been so different opinions in the North and the South concerning the gender of the German word "See" - that they finally had to conclude that "Die See" means an open salty water and "der See" means "lake".

What the grammar or the character of what the words describe there is obviously no logic - so I suggest: Let us stop desperately looking for a logical explanation.


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## francisgranada

Sepia said:


> ... What the grammar or the character of what the words describe there is obviously no logic - so I suggest: Let us stop desperately looking for a logical explanation.


Instead, I think that everything in the Universe is logical, including the languages (as kind of "subsystems of the Universe"). It's another question that this logic does not necessarily correspond to our (often simplified  or naive) expectations, or we do not have informations enough, or simply we do not know/understand  the logic behind.

As to the gender of nouns in various languages: it doesn't seem to be too mysterious to me. From the moment the gender became an  existing grammatical criterion (due to whatever evolution), each noun _necessarily _has to belong to some gender, at least formally (= grammatically). The result is what we have now, i.e. for example the _sun _is feminine in German but masculine in Spanish. But e.g.  _Mädchen _(girl in German) is neutral because of the ending -_chen_; the same way _kníže _("prince" in Czech) is grammatically neutral (even if a _prince _is a male); etc ...  In other words, if we knew the complete history of all the words (nouns, pronouns, etc...), I think we should be able to explain satisfactorily (and _logicaly_) their actual grammatical gender. 





> ... Let us stop desperately looking for a logical explanation.


Considering what I've written before, the present discussion may not necessarily be neither desperate nor senseless  ...


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## rbrunner

Sepia said:


> Why on earth do Germans say "die CD" (F) - when they would never in their wildest dreams say "die Disk"?



Maybe because they *do* say _die Disk_? Just check Duden.

I agree with you that the consensus that developed about the gender of some loans in German can be surprising and sometimes seems to lack "logic", but please be careful about examples...


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## Peterdg

Nino83 said:


> Hi, Peter. Which pronoun is used in the North for common gender nouns?


In the North they make every "de" word masculine. So, you can hear the following: "De koe staat in de weide. *Hij* is nog niet gemolken" (The cow is on the prairie: *he* has not been milked yet" (which to us, in the South, sounds as strange in Dutch as the English version would to English speakers.


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## Peterdg

francisgranada said:


> each noun _necessarily _has to belong to some gender


Well, not necessarily. Dutch has a lot of words that have two genders (depending on the region where it is used). Spanish also knows some multi-gender words. _el/la mar_, _el/la azúcar_. In the case of _el/la mar_, it is an emotional thing. In the case of _el/la azúcar_, it's more difficult: some consider _azúcar_ purely masculine, some consider it purely feminine, and some use it mixed: with the masculine definite article but with a femenine adjective (as if it were a feminine word starting with a stressed "a").


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## Sepia

rbrunner said:


> Maybe because they *do* say _die Disk_? Just check Duden.
> 
> I agree with you that the consensus that developed about the gender of some loans in German can be surprising and sometimes seems to lack "logic", but please be careful about examples...



OK inzwischen, ja, tun einige tatsächlich. 
Taten die das immmer? Nein.


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## Red Arrow

Peterdg said:


> In the North they make every "de" word masculine. So, you can hear the following: "De koe staat in de weide. *Hij* is nog niet gemolken" (The cow is on the prairie: *he* has not been milked yet" (which to us, in the South, sounds as strange in Dutch as the English version would to English speakers.


I am pretty sure Dutchmen do treat 'koe' as a feminine word. As far as I know, they try to use 'natural gender' as much as possible, and a cow is female by definition.


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## Peterdg

Red Arrow :D said:


> I am pretty sure Dutchmen do treat 'koe' as a feminine word.


You wish. Come and stay a while at my office: I have a colleague from Emmen: everything is masculine (even neuter words sometimes), except women.


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## Red Arrow

Wow, Dutchmen are less Americanized than I thought. In their own remarkable way 

I personally find this gender loss really interesting. Can't wait to see what happens with die/dat when I'm retired.


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## Nino83

Peterdg said:


> everything is masculine (even neuter words sometimes), except women.


So natural gender is applied only to people, isn't it? For example _jongetje_ (n.) is _hji_ while _meisje_ (n.) is _zij_, isn't it? 
While for inanimated objects and animals grammatical genderis applied, is it right?


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## Penyafort

I'm quite sure that the Sun would be seen as a Man and the Moon as a Woman by 99% of the speakers of the Romance languages. Whether this is due to the gender in grammar or to other cultural factors, I can't say.

In Spanish, the Sun is sometimes called Lorenzo (_¡Cómo pica hoy el Lorenzo!_ - Lawrence is really burning today!) and the Moon is Catalina (Catherine), probably due to an old folk song from Asturias: _El sol se llama Lorenzo y la luna, Catalina. Catalina anda de noche y Lorenzo anda de día. _(The Sun's name is Lorenzo, the Moon's name is Catalina. Catalina walks at night. Lorenzo, during the day)


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## berndf

Penyafort said:


> I'm quite sure that the Sun would be seen as a Man and the Moon as a Woman by 99% of the speakers of the Romance languages. Whether this is due to the gender in grammar or to other cultural factors, I can't say.


Studies show that grammatical gender and gender specific properties attributed to an object do interact. How precisely probably depends on the word. The classical surmise why the sun is masculine is and the mood feminine in Romance and the other way round in Germanic is because of the climate in the regions where those languages are native. In the South, the stinging heat of the day is "hard" (i.e. masculine) and the refreshing cold of the night is "soft" (i.e. feminine). In the North the biting cold of the night is "hard" and the soothing warmth of the day is "soft".


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## Nino83

berndf said:


> In the South, the stinging heat of the day is "hard" (i.e. masculine) and the refreshing cold of the night is "soft" (i.e. feminine). In the North the biting cold of the night is "hard" and the soothing warmth of the day is "soft".


In Tiwi (Northern Australia, two sex based genders) we have:
moon = japarra · kurrani · wurlini (all masculine)
sun = yiminga · warnarringa · pukwiyi · pukwiyi (all feminine)
English - Tiwi

In Northern Australia climate is very hot.


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> In Tiwi (Northern Australia, two sex based genders) we have:
> moon = japarra · kurrani · wurlini (all masculine)
> sun = yiminga · warnarringa · pukwiyi · pukwiyi (all feminine)
> English - Tiwi
> 
> In Northern Australia climate is very hot.


Tiwi assigns different properties to the genders, not hard and soft. Masculine is associated with thin, austere and small and feminine with with wide, opulent and large.


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## Nino83

berndf said:


> Tiwi assigns different properties to the genders, not hard and soft.


Interesting! Where can I find something about the properties of grammatical genders?


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## Red Arrow

berndf said:


> Studies show that grammatical gender and gender specific properties attributed to an object do interact. How precisely probably depends on the word. The classical surmise why the sun is masculine is and the mood feminine in Romance and the other way round in Germanic is because of the climate in the regions where those languages are native. In the South, the stinging heat of the day is "hard" (i.e. masculine) and the refreshing cold of the night is "soft" (i.e. feminine). In the North the biting cold of the night is "hard" and the soothing warmth of the day is "soft".


I have a hard time believing this, but it's possible, I guess.


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> Interesting! Where can I find something about the properties of grammatical genders?


In this particular case, I got it from Wikipedia.


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## iezik

Peterdg said:


> So, you can hear the following: "De koe staat in de weide. *Hij* is nog niet gemolken"



Peter, is this also present in writing? Wikipedia writes about cows "*Zij* trekt het gras met de tong". I suppose that at least formal writing styles use *zij* for feminine nouns.


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## Peterdg

Nino83 said:


> So natural gender is applied only to people, isn't it? For example _jongetje_ (n.) is _hji_ while _meisje_ (n.) is _zij_, isn't it?


 Yes.


> While for inanimated objects and animals grammatical genderis applied, is it right?


I don't quite understand what you mean here.


iezik said:


> Peter, is this also present in writing? Wikipedia writes about cows "*Zij* trekt het gras met de tong". I suppose that at least formal writing styles use *zij* for feminine nouns.


For obvious words like "koe" ("cow"), they will probably use it correctly in formal writing. For other words, like e.g. "tafel" (which is feminine) ("table" in English), it may vary: age and education level are important factors there.


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## francisgranada

berndf said:


> Studies show that grammatical gender and gender specific properties attributed to an object do interact ...


Well, this is not illogical, even somewhat probable in my opinion (perhaps due to the intrinsic indeterministic  character of the Universe we live in ...), but only to a certain  probabilistically determined/limited degree.

The Spanish masculine gender of _sol_ and the feminine gender of _luna_ can be simply explained by the fact that these words are inherited from Latin, including their gender. The "names" as _Lorenzo_ and _Catalina_ (post #151 of Penyafort) are rather consequences or independent attributes on the grammatical gender of these nouns.  Of course, this does not explain why _sol_ was masculine and _luna_ feminine in Latin, however I have a strong feeling that the gender of these Latin words is rather the consequence of the evolution/grammaticalization of the IE word/noun endings than the result of some kind of "emotional" decision of the Latin speaking people ...

P.S. A propos in the Slavic languages _moon_ is typically masculine and _sun_ is neuter ...


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## apmoy70

berndf said:


> Studies show that grammatical gender and gender specific properties attributed to an object do interact. How precisely probably depends on the word. The classical surmise why the sun is masculine is and the mood feminine in Romance and the other way round in Germanic is because of the climate in the regions where those languages are native. In the South, the stinging heat of the day is "hard" (i.e. masculine) and the refreshing cold of the night is "soft" (i.e. feminine). In the North the biting cold of the night is "hard" and the soothing warmth of the day is "soft".


Indeed, in Greek the intense mediterranean summer heat is described by the masc. *«καύσων» kaú̯sōn* > MoGr masc. *«καύσωνας»* [ˈkafsonas] (< Classical v. *«καίω» kaí̯ō* --> _to kindle, set on fire, burn_ possibly from PIE *keh₂u- _to burn_ and with possible cognate the Lith. kūlës, _firewood_) while the night cooling breeze by the fem. *«δροσία» drŏsíā* > MoGr fem. *«δροσιά»* [ðroˈs͡ça] with synizesis (< Classical fem. *«δρόσος» drósŏs* --> _dew_ probably of Pre-Greek substrate).
Also the sun is masculine *«ἥλιος» hḗliŏs* > MoGr *«ήλιος»* [ˈiʎos] (masc.) while the moon is feminine *«σελήνη» sĕlḗnē* > MoGr *«σελήνη»* [seˈlini] (fem.).


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## Hulalessar

iezik said:


> Wikilengua (in article Género gramatical) tells us that Spanish has strictly speaking two or three genders, but the denominations género común and género ambiguo are also used. It's also possible for Spanish to use just two or three genders.



As you said in the other post, it depends on how you define gender. If it is a class of nouns and not anything else, then there can only be two genders in Spanish. Oddities like a very few words being both masculine and feminine do not change that as there are still only two classes. In that respect words like _dentista_ do not really count anyway as you can argue that, just like _abogado _(m) and _abogada _(f), _dentista (m)_ and _ dentista (f) _are two different nouns - they just happen to have the same form because the masculine ends in "a". Similarly the fact that in Italian a few words change gender in the plural does not alter the fact that there are only two classes.


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## Angelo di fuoco

Hulalessar said:


> If we say that a language has grammatical gender if it has two or more classes of nouns which involve making changes in other words in the sentence associated with the noun, then Spanish only has two genders. Only nouns have gender. Adjectives do not have gender, they just (in some cases in Spanish) change their form according to the gender of the noun they qualify. _Ello_, _eso _and _aquello _do not refer to any noun in particular - they lack gender rather than being neuter gender. _Lo_ when it can be translated by _the _is also _*best thought of as being neither masculine nor feminine rather than neuter*_. To say that Spanish has a neuter gender, even if you say it is vestigial or residual, is to describe it in terms of its history rather than as it now is.



When speaking of common gender (in Swedish), which is a merger of masculine and feminine, the Latin term is "utrum" ("both") as opposed to "neutrum".
"Neuter" etymologically means "none of the two", so "neuter" IS "neither feminine nor masculine". To put it plainly, what you are affirming is: "it is best thought of as being neuter rather than neuter".


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## berndf

Angelo di fuoco said:


> When speaking of common gender (in Swedish), which is a merger of masculine and feminine, the Latin term is "utrum" ("both") as opposed to "neutrum".
> "Neuter" etymologically means "none of the two", so "neuter" IS "neither feminine nor masculine". To put it plainly, what you are affirming is: "it is best thought of as being neuter rather than neuter".


Are you familiar with the term etymological fallacy?


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## fdb

berndf said:


> The classical surmise why the sun is masculine is and the mood feminine in Romance and the other way round in Germanic is because of the climate in the regions where those languages are native. In the South, the stinging heat of the day is "hard" (i.e. masculine) and the refreshing cold of the night is "soft" (i.e. feminine). In the North the biting cold of the night is "hard" and the soothing warmth of the day is "soft".



In Arabic (which has always be spoken in very hot countries) "sun" (shams) is feminine and "moon"  (qamar) is masculine.


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## Angelo di fuoco

berndf said:


> Are you familiar with the term etymological fallacy?



Don't see why this should apply to our case.


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## berndf

Angelo di fuoco said:


> Don't see why this should apply to our case.


You committed it here:


Angelo di fuoco said:


> To put it plainly, what you are affirming is: "it is best thought of as being neuter rather than neuter".


The etymology of _neuter _is the etymology of _neuter _and the meaning of _neuter _is the meaning of _neuter_, different things.

If a word being _ungendered _or being _neuter _are different things, independently of where the word _neuter_ might come from.


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## Scholiast

Greetings everyone

Forgive me for going off at a tangent here. Clearly in a vast majority of languages nouns are classified as masculine, feminine and neuter, with the variation that some have no neuter, others classify masc. and fem. together as "common", as distinct from neuter.

But I _know_ I have read somewhere—I think in a bookshop, on the flyleaf of a book about linguistics which I now of course wish I had bought and read—that there are languages (African? Native American? Polynesian?) which as well as these have genders relating to attributes as edibility, distance or "friendliness", no doubt other qualities too. Can anyone here offer any more details, please?

Σ


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## fdb

Scholiast said:


> in a vast majority of languages nouns
> 
> Σ



...in most Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages....


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## Nino83

Scholiast said:


> Clearly in a vast majority of languages nouns are classified as masculine, feminine and neuter


Most languages have no genders and in some languages they are not based on sex, but on different levels of animacy (humans, animals, plants, abstract concepts and so on).
Two maps:
WALS Online -             Feature 30A: Number of Genders
WALS Online -             Feature 31A: Sex-based and Non-sex-based Gender Systems


fdb said:


> ...in most Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages....


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## Scholiast

Thanks Nino83, that's just what I was looking for.

Σ


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## Angelo di fuoco

berndf said:


> You committed it here:
> 
> The etymology of _neuter _is the etymology of _neuter _and the meaning of _neuter _is the meaning of _neuter_, different things.
> 
> If a word being _ungendered _or being _neuter _are different things, independently of where the word _neuter_ might come from.



For all I see, "grammatical gender" here equals to "noun class". Neuter is called "sächlich" in your native German (everything that does not have masculine or feminine traits is considered a "thing") and "средний род" (middle gender) in my native Russian (neither masculine nor feminine, just in-between). "Neuter" just means "none of the two". I don't perceive any difference between etymology and meaning in this case.


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## berndf

Angelo di fuoco said:


> I don't perceive any difference between etymology and meaning in this case.


Having no gender (=belonging to no noun class) and having _neuter _gender (=belonging to the noun class _neuter_) are different things. And that is completely independent of the etymology of the word _neuter_. And that is what @Hulalessar talked about and of which you, wrongly, said it meant the same with reference to the etymology of the word _neuter_.


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## Hulalessar

Angelo di fuoco said:


> For all I see, "grammatical gender" here equals to "noun class".



Agreed. The problem is the labelling. If masculine, feminine and neuter were referred to as classes I, II and III respectively, then instead of saying "_Lo_ when it can be translated by _the _is also best thought of as being neither masculine nor feminine rather than neuter" I would have said "_Lo_ when it can be translated by _the _is also best thought of as being neither class I nor class II rather than class III".


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## eno2

Penyafort said:


> I'm quite sure that the Sun would be seen as a Man and the Moon as a Woman by 99% of the speakers of the Romance languages. Whether this is due to the gender in grammar or to other cultural factors, I can't say.
> 
> In Spanish, the Sun is sometimes called Lorenzo (_¡Cómo pica hoy el Lorenzo!_ - Lawrence is really burning today!) and the Moon is Catalina (Catherine), probably due to an old folk song from Asturias: _El sol se llama Lorenzo y la luna, Catalina. Catalina anda de noche y Lorenzo anda de día. _(The Sun's name is Lorenzo, the Moon's name is Catalina. Catalina walks at night. Lorenzo, during the day)


Thank you for the explanation of 'La Catalina' which  I knew from the habit of a friend of mine - in Canarias-  using it, instead of 'moon'. 
De zon (el sol) en Dutch is masculine and feminine. I use it as feminine.


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## Swatters

I'm taking advantage of this thread being bumped to react to a page 2 post.



merquiades said:


> Here is a story I heard recently which can show just how important gender can be for the people speaking a language with genders. The German Volkswagen car _Der Wagen (m)_ was given the nickname _Der Käfer (m_) in German (literally Beetle) because of its shape but also this is gender appropriate for German because both of these nouns are masculine. It works. Beetle also works in English because there is no gender at all. However, there is a big problem when translating this into French. Car, _La voiture_, is feminine. In French all car brands and words describing cars, such as adjectives, must be feminine. So they say La _Volkswagen_. But beetle in French is masculine, _Le scarabée_, so cannot be applied to cars. It just doesn't sound right in this language. Therefore, the problem was solved by taking the name of another insect, _La Coccinelle_, (Ladybug) which is indeed feminine and can be applied to a car to give the correct grammatical feel. The whole cultural image became different. When the French think of this car they think of ladybugs not beetles.



This wouldn't have been the issue you imagine it would, car model names get f. agreement even if they're inspired by a masculine noun (or happen to be homophonous with one, like the VW Polo or Golf -la polo, la golf-) : une Jaguar, but un jaguar, une Enzo, une Berlingo (le berlingo), etc. If they had decided to name the Beetle "Scarabée", we'd have spoken of "la Scarabée" without a hitch.

Where this story might have more legs, is that the commercial people of VW probably choose coccinelle over scarabée because of the positive associations of this type of beetle compared to scarabs. And that's obliquely related to gender since coccinelle et scarabée are part of a pattern where similar kinds of animals get separated into two vernacular categories, the smaller and cuter one with a f. name and the more imposing or uglier one with a m. one, like la grenouille and le crapaud, la souris and le rat, la corneille and le corbeau.


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