# Gender in languages - why?



## Pivra

I would like to know the reason of the existance of genders in languages. Especially in Romance and classical Indic languages. The Pali and Sanskrit's legacy of genders still exist in Thai but is very rare (for nouns and adjectives but not particles or pronouns). In English there is almost to verb or noun changing of genders. What is the whole purpose of having them anyway??


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## germinal

Pivra said:
			
		

> I would like to know the reason of the existance of genders in languages. Especially in Romance and classical Indic languages. The Pali and Sanskrit's legacy of genders still exist in Thai but is very rare (for nouns and adjectives but not particles or pronouns). In English there is almost to verb or noun changing of genders. What is the whole purpose of having them anyway??


 
Well, as you know, the English have somehow managed to rid themselves of the silly habit of ascribing gender to everything. Now if only we could encourage everyone else to abandon this practice it would save countless hours of pain for children (and adult learners) everywhere who struggle to retain - and then retrieve and process this rather pointless information.

If there is a good reason for ascribing gender to nouns (apart from the usual sentimental attachment to a mother tongue) I too really would like to know what it is.


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## Residente Calle 13

Pivra said:
			
		

> I would like to know the reason of the existance of genders in languages. Especially in Romance and classical Indic languages. The Pali and Sanskrit's legacy of genders still exist in Thai but is very rare (for nouns and adjectives but not particles or pronouns). In English there is almost to verb or noun changing of genders. What is the whole purpose of having them anyway??


English words have gender too. It's just that there aren't as many. You know when I say "She left." or "I'm with her." that I'm talking about a female. You know when I say "I wrestled a bull." that I wrestled a male animal. You have names like "Samantha" (it's a girl). However, what we don't seem to have in English is grammatical gender. Well, not anymore. In Old English, _sēo sunne_ (the sun) was feminine and _se mōna_  (the moon) was masculine. 

Those who are natives of Romance languages notice that it's the opposite in their languages. Those assigments might have meant something at some point, for example *Luna *was a Roman godess and that might explain why it's *la luna, la lune* etc.) but if you make a list of inanimate nouns you will soon notice it's arbitrary.

Take a look at this article for more info.


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## Brioche

Residente Calle 13 said:
			
		

> English words have gender too. It's just that there aren't as many. .


 
English no longer has grammatical gender.
English pronouns/nouns refect the _*sex* _of person or animal.

Some people refer to this as "natural gender".

Gender is not a problem for native speakers. It seems totally natural to them.
There is no "reason" for gender, any more than there is a "reason" for verbs to have tenses and conjugations; or for nouns to have case; or for adjectives to agree.

Chinese has none of these features, and the Chinese have no difficulty communicating among themselves.


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## Pivra

Brioche said:
			
		

> English no longer has grammatical gender.
> English pronouns/nouns refect the _*sex* _of person or animal.
> 
> Some people refer to this as "natural gender".
> 
> Gender is not a problem for native speakers. It seems totally natural to them.
> There is no "reason" for gender, any more than there is a "reason" for verbs to have tenses and conjugations; or for nouns to have case; or for adjectives to agree.
> 
> Chinese has none of these features, and the Chinese have no difficulty communicating among themselves.


 
and how do chinese communicate??....(thais are naïve to extreme east cultures lol... seriously.. belief me.... i dont even know how do use chopsticks lol)


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## germinal

Brioche said:
			
		

> English no longer has grammatical gender.
> English pronouns/nouns refect the _*sex* _of person or animal.
> 
> Some people refer to this as "natural gender".
> 
> Gender is not a problem for native speakers. It seems totally natural to them.
> There is no "reason" for gender, any more than there is a "reason" for verbs to have tenses and conjugations; or for nouns to have case; or for adjectives to agree.
> 
> Chinese has none of these features, and the Chinese have no difficulty communicating among themselves.


 

There's a reason for everything Brioche surely?


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## TimeHP

> What is the whole purpose of having them anyway??


 
The purpose might be accuracy and clarity. And I have to admit that I like having the possibility to choose my words... 




> Chinese has none of these features, and the Chinese have no difficulty communicating among themselves.


 
But their ideograms have a sign for female nouns...
妈妈 (mother)
她 (she) 
妹妹 (sister)

Ciao


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## Cnaeius

germinal said:
			
		

> Well, as you know, the English have somehow managed to rid themselves of the silly habit of ascribing gender to everything. Now if only we could encourage everyone else to abandon this practice it would save countless hours of pain for children (and adult learners) everywhere who struggle to retain - and then retrieve and process this rather pointless information.
> 
> If there is a good reason for ascribing gender to nouns (apart from the usual sentimental attachment to a mother tongue) I too really would like to know what it is.


 
For languages that have retained inflectional capabilities (as romance ones) gender is useful because it helps to free word order within sentences, permitting more complex sentences without losing instantaneous understanding of the sentence itself. Think to the gender agreement between nouns, adjectives, participles etc..
In any case I think we cannot consider a language as a mere means of quick and efficient communication: languages are larger than we are and have long history, they have not to be by force strictly logic or simple to be learned.
Ciao


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## mansio

In German you have three genders: masculine, feminine and neutral.

Many genders seem to be arbitrary although one can find explanations when going back thousands of years in the language history.

The word "butter" derives from Greek. In German it has a masculine ending -er but the word is feminine in gender, and in French it has a feminine ending -e but the word is masculine.


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## germinal

Cnaeius said:
			
		

> For languages that have retained inflectional capabilities (as romance ones) gender is useful because it helps to free word order within sentences, permitting more complex sentences without losing instantaneous understanding of the sentence itself. Think to the gender agreement between nouns, adjectives, participles etc..
> In any case I think we cannot consider a language as a mere means of quick and efficient communication: languages are larger than we are and have long history, they have not to be by force strictly logic or simple to be learned.
> Ciao


 
That's quite a claim to say that language is larger than we are.     The historical span of (spoken) language is miniscule compared with our history, which stretches back to the first creatures on earth and written language is even younger of course.

How could the ideas contained in your first sentence be applied to the sentence itself to demonstrate their ability to permit instantaneous understanding?


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## danielfranco

I would hazard a guess that the very reason why some languages make gender distinctions more than others has been lost in the millenia of transformational history of the languages in question. I would speculate that the idiosyncrasy of each particular group of people that contributed to the origins of gender-specific languages had much to do with the development of such devices in their language...
It might very well be impossible to know why at this point in human history.


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## germinal

mansio said:
			
		

> In German you have three genders: masculine, feminine and neutral.
> 
> Many genders seem to be arbitrary although one can find explanations when going back thousands of years in the language history.
> 
> The word "butter" derives from Greek. In German it has a masculine ending -er but the word is feminine in gender, and in French it has a feminine ending -e but the word is masculine.


 

This may explain how the English kicked the whole thing into touch as we are basically a mixture of Germanic peoples who came under the domination of a French-speaking aristocracy. 

Maybe the effort to reconcile the languages prompted the jettisoning of features which tended to unnecessary complication?

An afterthought:   Although maybe the Anglo-Saxons had already started the process?     Any expert views?


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## badgrammar

Well, I'll second what danielfranco says about how gender allows you more freedom in word order.  It is hard to do so without giving an example, and I cannot think of a good one right now.  But in French, you can come across sentences where the gender agreement itself tells you to what (or to whom) the word is connected, and this allows French sentences to become quite lengthy and complicated, while maintaining a great deal of clarity and precision.

When you translate these kinds of phrases into ENglish, you are usually obligated to break them down and form seperate sentences where you re-establish what or who we are talking about.  I wish I had a good example.

FWIW, I don't think it's any use passing judgement, other than tongue-in-cheek, about why some languages have gender.  They just do.  And it's interesting.  ANd if you learn to use it/understand it correctly, you will see it has its advantages.  And disadvantages.  Why the rush to judge it as good or bad?


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## germinal

badgrammar said:
			
		

> Well, I'll second what danielfranco says about how gender allows you more freedom in word order. It is hard to do so without giving an example, and I cannot think of a good one right now. But in French, you can come across sentences where the gender agreement itself tells you to what (or to whom) the word is connected, and this allows French sentences to become quite lengthy and complicated, while maintaining a great deal of clarity and precision.
> 
> When you translate these kinds of phrases into ENglish, you are usually obligated to break them down and form seperate sentences where you re-establish what or who we are talking about. I wish I had a good example.
> 
> FWIW, I don't think it's any use passing judgement, other than tongue-in-cheek, about why some languages have gender. They just do. And it's interesting. ANd if you learn to use it/understand it correctly, you will see it has its advantages. And disadvantages. Why the rush to judge it as good or bad?


 
But they don't `just do` - there must be a reason and that, as you say, is interesting, which is why the question has been asked.   

.


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## badgrammar

By "just do", I certainly do not mean to dismiss the question of why gender exists - but rather to quash the notion that it is a positive or negative attribute to a language.  I would love to have added some interesting info about why French has maintained gender, but I have none.

However I wanted to echo Danielfranco, who points out that gender agreement allows for certain linguistic acrobatics that languages which do not have genders cannot perform.  For me, that is a hard fact.


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## TimeHP

Inuk have 32 words for _snow_...
Don't you think it's fantastic? 

Ciao


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## germinal

TimeHP said:
			
		

> Inuk have 32 words for _snow_...
> Don't you think it's fantastic?
> 
> Ciao


 
And are they all feminine?    I was thinking of snow-queens, ice-maidens - or are there any snowmen?     

.


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## Fernando

As a speaker of a language that has three genders (masculine, femenine and neutral) plus odd combinations (ambigous, epicene words...) it is hardly a problem to me. Spanish speakers commit some mistakes with extrange combinations (el agua/esta agua), but minor ones. For 90% of the words you only have to remember (by heart, it is true), the gender of the names. As an example, "sun" is masculine in Spanish and femenine in German (1). "Milk" is masculine in Portuguese and Galician and femenine in Spanish.

On my biased point of view I find far more difficult the huge number of English set phrases and the absolute lack of rules. 

(1) My knowledge of German is dangerously close to zero. So, correct me if wrong.


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## Cnaeius

germinal said:
			
		

> That's quite a claim to say that language is larger than we are. The historical span of (spoken) language is miniscule compared with our history, which stretches back to the first creatures on earth and written language is even younger of course.
> 
> How could the ideas contained in your first sentence be applied to the sentence itself to demonstrate their ability to permit instantaneous understanding?


 
 Sorry, I explain better what I meant: the history of the language with respect to the history of the man judging the language (about 80 years). 

I try an example to explain what I've said. I have to use italian, that is a romance language:

- Marco prese la collan*a* e non l’anello, in quanto donat*a*gli dalla moglie
- Marco took the necklace and not the ring, because the necklace was a gift of his wife


Thanks to gender it is possible to express the _same_ fact with _exactly _the _same_ words putting different emphasis on different words, according to word positioning:

Marco prese non l’anello ma la collana, in quanto donatagli dalla moglie
La collana e non l’anello prese Marco, in quanto donatagli …
La collana prese Marco e non il cappello, in quanto donatagli…
In quanto donatagli dalla moglie, Marco prese la collana e non l’anello..
And so on..

Some sentences sound more fluid, other sentences less fluid, but in any case they are perfectly and instantaneously understandable and usable
 
Word positioning is quite free in this example _thanks to_ gender.
Ciao


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## Vespasian

germinal said:
			
		

> This may explain how the English kicked the whole thing into touch as we are basically a mixture of Germanic peoples who came under the domination of a French-speaking aristocracy.
> 
> Maybe the effort to reconcile the languages prompted the jettisoning of features which tended to unnecessary complication?
> 
> An afterthought:   Although maybe the Anglo-Saxons had already started the process?     Any expert views?



I'm not an expert. But as far as I know the Danes settled in Britain after the Anglosaxons. The roots of their words were the same but the endings diverged enough to confuse everyone. After all it proved to be easier to nearly completely omit the endings for a better communication.


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## TimeHP

> And are they all feminine? I was thinking of snow-queens, ice-maidens - or are there any snowmen?
Click to expand...

 
No, they aren't. Sorry... 

In Italian there are also feminine and masculine proper nouns.
And we wouldn't call a girl Mario, nor call a boy Debora...
Ciao


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## germinal

Cnaeius said:
			
		

> Sorry, I explain better what I meant: the history of the language with respect to the history of the man judging the language (about 80 years).
> 
> I try an example to explain what I've said. I have to use italian, that is a romance language:
> 
> - Marco prese la collan*a* e non l’anello, in quanto donat*a*gli dalla moglie
> - Marco took the necklace and not the ring, because the necklace was a gift of his wife
> 
> 
> Thanks to gender it is possible to express the _same_ fact with _exactly _the _same_ words putting different emphasis on different words, according to word positioning:
> 
> Marco prese non l’anello ma la collana, in quanto donatagli dalla moglie
> La collana e non l’anello prese Marco, in quanto donatagli …
> La collana prese Marco e non il cappello, in quanto donatagli…
> In quanto donatagli dalla moglie, Marco prese la collana e non l’anello..
> And so on..
> 
> Some sentences sound more fluid, other sentences less fluid, but in any case they are perfectly and instantaneously understandable and usable
> 
> Word positioning is quite free in this example _thanks to_ gender.
> Ciao


 
I agree that there can be confusion in English where two nouns are used in a sentence but doesn't this advantage in Italian disappear if the nouns are the same gender and number?


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## TimeHP

> I agree that there can be confusion in English where two nouns are used in a sentence but doesn't this advantage in Italian disappear if the nouns are the same gender and number?


 
Well, accurate but not perfect... 

Ciao


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## Cnaeius

germinal said:
			
		

> I agree that there can be confusion in English where two nouns are used in a sentence but doesn't this advantage in Italian disappear if the nouns are the same gender and number?


 
Yes, of course. In fact I said that "gender helps". If the gender are the same then the number can help, if gender and number are the same only the context can help to distinguish and a smaller number of word orders is possible.
Notice that the same facts can be applied to a larger extent to Latin, that is the father of Romance languages: in Latin also cases of declensions help to free word order
Ciao


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## natasha2000

Cnaeius said:
			
		

> Sorry, I explain better what I meant: the history of the language with respect to the history of the man judging the language (about 80 years).
> 
> I try an example to explain what I've said. I have to use italian, that is a romance language:
> 
> - Marco prese la collan*a* e non l’anello, in quanto donat*a*gli dalla moglie
> - Marco took the necklace and not the ring, because the necklace was a gift of his wife
> 
> 
> Thanks to gender it is possible to express the _same_ fact with _exactly _the _same_ words putting different emphasis on different words, according to word positioning:
> 
> Marco prese non l’anello ma la collana, in quanto donatagli dalla moglie
> Marco didn't take the ring, but did the necklace....
> La collana e non l’anello prese Marco, in quanto donatagli …
> The necklece and not the ring was what Marko took.....
> La collana prese Marco e non il cappello, in quanto donatagli…
> Marco took the necklace and not the ring....
> In quanto donatagli dalla moglie, Marco prese la collana e non l’anello..
> And so on..
> As the necklace was the wedding present, Marko took it, and not the ring...
> 
> Some sentences sound more fluid, other sentences less fluid, but in any case they are perfectly and instantaneously understandable and usable
> 
> Word positioning is quite free in this example _thanks to_ gender.
> Ciao


 
I would dare to say that what makes more flexible the sentence is not the gender but cases, which do not exist neither in English, nor in Roman languages, but they do exist in Slavic languages. It means that in English and in Roman languages the subject always goes in front of the verb and object after it. As a matter of fact, I wouldn't know about other Roman languages, but this is also possible in Spanish, thanks to the preposition "a".
Example:
Peter takes Mary to school.
Where Peter is subject and Mary is object and in English sentence, if you interchange their places, then Peter will become the object and Mary the subject.
In Spanish, you can say
Pedro lleva a Maria a la escuela.
A María la lleva Pedro a la escuela.

In Serbian, which is Slavic language, we do not even need the prepositions.

Petar vodi Marij*u* u skolu.
Marij*u* vodi Petar u skolu.

Where the nominative is _Petar_, and subject is always in nominative. _Mariju _is accusative of _Marija_, and direct object is always in accusative.

I also can make a much longer sentence and put Subject and object very far from each other, and the sentence will still be very natural in Serbian.

Peter takes Mary to school by car after lunch.

Mariju ce posle rucka u skolu da odveze kolima Petar.

Therefore, I think that gender is not there to make the word order more flaxible, but form some other reasons, which I never asked myself... I simply accept it, and the only difficulty I find is when the nouns in targeting language are of different gender than in my mother tongue...
A long time ago, while I was studying German in school, I found especially illogical that a noun "girl" - Maiden which has its owh natural female gender, is, as a matter of fact NEUTRO!!! Das Maiden...
But, this is how it is in German, and one who wants to learn it, much accept it.

When learning a foreign language, it is always harder to learn something that does not exist in your mother tongue, so I guess this is why English speaking people complain about the gender and do not find the reason for its existance. I could say the same about articles, since articles do not exist in Serbian, and therefore, I really do not see the reason for them. I bet you will notice in all my posts, whether they are in Spanish or English, that the most of mistakes I make are precisely the articles.....


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## Outsider

Pivra said:
			
		

> I would like to know the reason of the existance of genders in languages. Especially in Romance and classical Indic languages. The Pali and Sanskrit's legacy of genders still exist in Thai but is very rare (for nouns and adjectives but not particles or pronouns). In English there is almost to verb or noun changing of genders. What is the whole purpose of having them anyway??


What is the purpose of having tones? Prepositions? Declensions? Vowel harmony? Aspirated consonants? SVO syntax?...

There's no purpose, it's just what makes language what they are.


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## Residente Calle 13

Outsider said:
			
		

> What is the purpose of having tones? Prepositions? Declensions? Vowel harmony? Aspirated consonants? SVO syntax?...
> 
> There's no purpose, it's just what makes language what they are.


There is a a purpose for tone, prepositions and declesions.

Tone makes up for word erosion, prepositions make up for the loss of declensions and declensions are what's there before heavy reliance and prepositions. 

Aspirated consonants are just some of the possible sounds, they are not _*needed *_anymore than nasal vowels. SVO syntax? It's an option, a parameter.

But language is not as random as you think. There is a reason some language are tonal and some *ARE* not. There is a reason why Latin didn't need as many prepositions as French, Portuguese and Spanish.


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## Outsider

germinal said:
			
		

> But they don't `just do` - there must be a reason and that, as you say, is interesting, which is why the question has been asked.


The reason is historical. Most Indo-European languages have genders because a long time ago our ancestors made Proto-Indo-European have genders.



			
				badgrammar said:
			
		

> FWIW, I don't think it's any use passing judgement, other than tongue-in-cheek, about why some languages have gender.  They just do.  And it's interesting.  ANd if you learn to use it/understand it correctly, you will see it has its advantages.  And disadvantages.  Why the rush to judge it as good or bad?


I suspect that the allergy of some English speakers to grammatical gender stems from two things: first, they don't understand it because it doesn't exist in their language, so they wish it would just go away; second, some of them think that grammatical gender is a sign of a sexist culture, so they wish it would just go away.


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## Outsider

Residente Calle 13 said:
			
		

> But language is not as random as you think. There is a reason some language are tonal and some or not. There is a reason why Latin didn't need as many prepositions as French, Portuguese and Spanish.


Then perhaps there is a reason for grammatical genders, too.


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## germinal

Outsider said:
			
		

> The reason is historical. Most Indo-European languages have genders because a long time ago our ancestors made Proto-Indo-European have genders.
> 
> I suspect that the allergy of some English speakers to grammatical gender stems from two things: first, they don't understand it because it doesn't exist in their language, so they wish it would just go away; second, some of them think that grammatical gender is a sign of a sexist culture, so they wish it would just go away.


 
Well your first point takes us back to just after the decision to adopt gender in language had been made. What we want are the factors leading up to that choice. My suspicion is that the old practice of assigning a god or goddess to inanimate objects may have played some part - but that is just my speculation and not, as far as I know, backed up by any research.

Your last point is interesting - political correctness seems to barge its way into every aspect of our lives these days, but I must say I haven't met it in this connection - at least not in England.

The second observation that the English are `allergic` to gender because it doesn't exist in our language and we wish it would just go away` is pretty harsh but, in my case at least, uncomfortably close to the truth. 

.


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## Cnaeius

natasha2000 said:
			
		

> I would dare to say that what makes more flexible the sentence is not the gender but cases, which do not exist neither in English, nor in Roman languages, but they do exist in Slavic languages. It means that in English and in Roman languages the subject always goes in front of the verb and object after it.
> ....
> Therefore, I think that gender is not there to make the word order more flaxible, but form some other reasons, which I never asked myself... I simply accept it, and the only difficulty I find is when the nouns in targeting language are of different gender than in my mother tongue...
> ...
> When learning a foreign language, it is always harder to learn something that does not exist in your mother tongue, so I guess this is why English speaking people complain about the gender and do not find the reason for its existance. I could say the same about articles, since articles do not exist in Serbian, and therefore, I really do not see the reason for them. I bet you will notice in all my posts, whether they are in Spanish or English, that the most of mistakes I make are precisely the articles.....


 

Hi Natasha,
Perhaps you have not caught the point, maybe because you do not know Italian, but if you think at Spanish you can understand because it is quite the same as Italian.
You have translated into English the sentences in Italian but you have changed some words. All the sentences I wrote in Italian have all the same words. With "all" I mean the same nouns, the same articles, the same verbs the same pronouns etc.. _Only_ the order is different
Try to translate using always the same words in English, changing word order. In English some sentences are not understandable, while in italian they are all undersandable.  Why? Because in Italian there is gender and gender agreement.
Of course, if we have also noun cases (as Latin, as I said before) the ability of changing word order is increased, especially if we have nouns with the same number and gender but different case.

Anyway these are not “purposes”, they are only facts
Ciao


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## Residente Calle 13

germinal said:
			
		

> The second observation that the English are `alergic` to gender because it doesn't exist in our language and we wish it would just go away`   is pretty harsh but, in my case at least,  uncomfortably close to the truth.



Well, honestly speaking, its a tax on the memory. A language that has noun and pronoun classes transmit a great deal of information in a single word.

_*She left *_is more succint than *The female human left* or _*Samantha Harrington left*_. There is something elegant about _*buying a cow*_. That's not grammatical gender but in Spanish you have _*el cura*_ (the priest) and *la cura* (the cure) where gender tells you the meaning of the word.

The "problem" is that alot of gender information is useless. English gets on with _priest _and _cure_ and we don't generally seem to care if a chicken is a hen or a rooster these days. 

It might be that it's there for the same reason why design bridges to support 600 kph winds when the highest winds ever recorded have been 150 kph. It might be why addresses contain city and town as well as postal codes in the US. The letter will get their if I just put the postal code but if I mess up one of the numbers in the postal code and don't put the city and state then it will not.

Linguistic overkill?


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## natasha2000

Cnaeius said:
			
		

> Hi Natasha,
> Perhaps you have not caught the point, maybe because you do not know Italian, but if you think at Spanish you can understand because it is quite the same as Italian.
> You have translated into English the sentences in Italian but you have changed some words. All the sentences I wrote in Italian have all the same words. With "all" I mean the same nouns, the same articles, the same verbs the same pronouns etc.. _Only_ the order is different
> Try to translate using always the same words in English, changing word order. In English some sentences are not understandable, while in italian they are all undersandable. Why? Because in Italian there is gender and gender agreement.
> Of course, if we have also noun cases (as Latin, as I said before) the ability of changing word order is increased, especially if we have nouns with the same number and gender but different case.
> 
> Anyway these are not “purposes”, they are only facts
> Ciao


 
I still don't see how gender can make difference... Really. Not in what you are referring. From my point of view, the only thing that really makes difference is CASE, not gender. Sorry.


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## diegodbs

> I suspect that the allergy of some English speakers to grammatical gender stems from two things: first, they don't understand it because it doesn't exist in their language, so they wish it would just go away; second, some of them think that grammatical gender is a sign of a sexist culture, so they wish it would just go away.


 
You should never judge one language considering that what your own language has or hasn't is the truth.
If I were to think that the use of phrasal verbs in English is something absurd or an "unnecessary complication", because the meaning those verb + preposition describe can be easily conveyed by a single verb, that idea would be considered absurd by English speakers.
My language is as it is, and the rest of languages are as they are. I may find it difficult to learn so many phrasal verbs, but it is their language and not mine.
If some people consider grammatical gender a sign of a sexist culture, it is their problem but not mine. We (and the rest of languages with grammatical gender) can easily understand the difference between sex and gender.


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## Outsider

It must be a pain for English speakers to learn languages with genders. But many of those of us who learn English as a second languaged develop similar allergies to phrasal verbs and articles. And collective nouns, oh my!  



			
				germinal said:
			
		

> Well your first point takes us back to just after the decision to adopt gender in language had been made. What we want are the factors leading up to that choice. My suspicion is that the old practice of assigning a god or goddess to inanimate objects may have played some part - but that is just my speculation and not, as far as I know, backed up by any research.


There is a theory that Proto-Indo-European originally had only animate and inanimate gender. More here.


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## natasha2000

diegodbs said:
			
		

> You should never judge one language considering that what your own language has or hasn't is the truth.
> If I were to think that the use of phrasal verbs in English is something absurd or an "unnecessary complication", because the meaning those verb + preposition describe can be easily conveyed by a single verb, that idea would be considered absurd by English speakers.
> My language is as it is, and the rest of languages are as they are. I may find it difficult to learn so many phrasal verbs, but it is their language and not mine.
> If some people consider grammatical gender a sign of a sexist culture, it is their problem but not mine. We (and the rest of languages with grammatical gender) can easily understand the difference between sex and gender.


 
I think you did not understand what Outsider wanted to say. As I have already said before, and then it was repeated by Outsider, when there is something in target language that does not exist in your language, it is normal that is harder to understand and therefore to learn. For me, the hard thing are articles, since they do not exist in my language. But I don't judge if they should be there or not in English or Spanish, I just try to learn when and how to use them, even though I am passing a much harder time than someone whos mother tongue has them....


----------



## Cnaeius

natasha2000 said:
			
		

> I still don't see how gender can make difference... Really. Not in what you are referring. From my point of view, the only thing that really makes difference is CASE, not gender. Sorry.


 
Try to do what I suggested, you will see that all will become clearer  .
In the examples above why all italian sentences are completely understandable and not all the English ones are (if you translate using always the _same_ words)? 
I repeat: it is sure that case helps to free word order. Supposing singular number, think at latin: 
-two nouns at the same case can be differentiated if they have different genders
-two nouns at the same gender can be differentiated if they have different cases

Anyhow, all the inflectional properties of a language concur in freeing word order: case agreement is an inflectional property, as gender agreement.
Ciao


----------



## diegodbs

natasha2000 said:
			
		

> I think you did not understand what Outsider wanted to say. As I have already said before, and then it was repeated by Outsider, when there is something in target language that does not exist in your language, it is normal that is harder to understand and therefore to learn. For me, the hard thing are articles, since they do not exist in my language. But I don't judge if they should be there or not in English or Spanish, I just try to learn when and how to use them, even though I am passing a much harder time than someone whos mother tongue has them....


Natasha, I was trying to say that *I agreed with Outsider*. Sorry if my English seemed to say that I didn't agree with him. Perhaps I should have written "one" instead of "you" in the first sentence (one should never judge....).


----------



## natasha2000

Cnaeius said:
			
		

> Try to do what I suggested, you will see that all will become clearer  .
> In the examples above why all italian sentences are completely understandable and not all the English ones are (if you translate using always the _same_ words)?
> I repeat: it is sure that case helps to free word order. Supposing singular number, think at latin:
> -two nouns at the same case can be differentiated if they have different genders
> -two nouns at the same gender can be differentiated if they have different cases
> 
> Anyhow, all the inflectional properties of a language concur in freeing word order: case agreement is an inflectional property, as gender agreement.
> Ciao


 
I think that you cannot translate word for word, and if I *translate* your sentences I will always get *nothing* if I try to translate them word for word and trying to have always the same words in the sentence. I am sure that this sentence in Italian is correct in all its versions, and I am also sure that some native English speaker would also be able to find an example of the sentence where you can interchange the place of the words, always the same words, and not loosing the original meaning... 

I just don't see any conexion between gender and greater mobility of the words within a sentence...
As you said, I do speak Spanish, and I don't see that Spanish gets more flexible sentence thanks to gender, but yes thanks to some kind of CASE which is preposition + noun, as I have alredy explained.


----------



## Outsider

germinal said:
			
		

> I agree that there can be confusion in English where two nouns are used in a sentence but doesn't this advantage in Italian disappear if the nouns are the same gender and number?


With 2 genders and 2 numbers, there's only a 25% chance that two random nouns will be of the same gender and number.


----------



## natasha2000

diegodbs said:
			
		

> Natasha, I was trying to say that *I agreed with Outsider*. Sorry if my English seemed to say that I didn't agree with him. Perhaps I should have written "one" instead of "you" in the first sentence (one should never judge....).


 
Upps... 
Sorry. I should have read it more carefully. My apologies...


----------



## Outsider

*Cnaeius*, I agree with *Natasha*.



> - Marco prese la collana e non l’anello, in quanto donatagli dalla moglie.
> - Marco took the necklace and not the ring, because it had been offered [the necklace] by his wife.


In English, the sentence is ambiguous with "it", because we don't know whether you're talking about the necklace or the ring. Gender allows you not to repeat the noun "necklace" without being ambiguous. But this has nothing to do with word order.



> Thanks to gender it is possible to express the same fact with exactly the same words putting different emphasis on different words, according to word positioning:
> 
> Marco prese non l’anello ma la collana, in quanto donatagli dalla moglie
> Marco didn't take the ring, but did the necklace....
> La collana e non l’anello prese Marco, in quanto donatagli …
> The necklece and not the ring was what Marko took.....
> La collana prese Marco e non il cappello, in quanto donatagli…
> Marco took the necklace and not the ring....
> In quanto donatagli dalla moglie, Marco prese la collana e non l’anello..
> And so on..
> As the necklace was the wedding present, Marko took it, and not the ring...


I would say the possibility of permuting the words in this sentence arises from semantic considerations. First, it's obvious that only Marco can take the ring, not the ring take Marco. As for "[Marco took] the ring and not the necklace", these are coordinate clauses, so they can be swapped.


----------



## Cnaeius

natasha2000 said:
			
		

> I think that you cannot translate word for word, and if I *translate* your sentences I will always get *nothing* if I try to translate them word for word and trying to have always the same words in the sentence. I am sure that this sentence in Italian is correct in all its versions, and I am also sure that some native English speaker would also be able to find an example of the sentence where you can interchange the place of the words, always the same words, and not loosing the original meaning...
> 
> I just don't see any conexion between gender and greater mobility of the words within a sentence...
> As you said, I do speak Spanish, and I don't see that Spanish gets more flexible sentence thanks to gender, but yes thanks to some kind of CASE which is preposition + noun, as I have alredy explained.


 
I never said of translating word by word from Italian to English. I only said of using the same words trying to convey the same meaning. I gave a translation of the first sentence and it was not word by word. 
I do not think that an English speaker can give a completely interchangable sentence using genders simply because English has not gender agreement. Perhaps it could be done for other grammatical rules (I’m skeptical about it but it could be) or using clear context, but it wouldn’t be the matter of discussion. Anyhow in the example I gave context could be useful neither for Italian nor for English

I’m very sorry you do not understand. You can trust me or not but what I’ve said it is not my thought or other, it is only a notion of linguistics. I would suggest you read all the posts of all people in this discussion. And maybe some spanish speaker will give you some examples

Anyway on the case-ageement we have similar ideas.
ciao


----------



## natasha2000

Cnaeius said:
			
		

> I never said of translating word by word from Italian to English. I only said of using the same words trying to convey the same meaning. I gave a translation of the first sentence and it was not word by word.
> 
> But if I want to work with your example but in English, I have to translate it.
> 
> I’m very sorry you do not understand. I did not say I don't understand. I said I don't see it like you do.
> You can trust me or not but what I’ve said it is not my thought or other, it is only a notion of linguistics. I consider myself the owner of enough "notion" of linguistics since languages are my profession and not my hobby...
> 
> I would suggest you read all the posts of all people in this discussion. And maybe some spanish speaker will give you some examples. I know Spanish enough to know that gender does not anything to do with mobility of the words within the sentence. As I said, I don't see it the way you see it.
> 
> Anyway on the case-ageement we have similar ideas.
> ciao


 
Well... These are my answers...


----------



## badgrammar

I am stumped to give you a French example, but you can ideed trust Cnaeius, gender , as I said before, allows you to do some linguistic acrobatics you could not do without gender, whether it be in word order, or in the syntax.  You can be very specific about what or who you are refering to without repeating yourself.  His example with the ring and necklace works perfectly in French: 

Marco a pris le collier mais pas la bague, car sa femme la lui avait offerte.

But the sentences can get a lot more complex, like you frequently find in anything written in a journalistic or literary tone.  When you translate it, you are obligated to refer back to the subject/object, and often to split sentences into different parts.


----------



## Fernando

I understand Cnaeius' point. Romanic languages allow a bigger mobility of adjectives because of the concordance in gender and number between names and adjectives. But German (which have declension, gender-conditioned) does not take advantage of that.

I would say the motivations are just historical (just the same as the silly English spelling). I would not say the origin is the recall of the pantheism. As a matter of fact, Vikings, Britons, Pictos and Anglosaxons were adoring Nature forces far after Romans had adopted Christianity.

As a matter of fact, Romanic peoples could have got rid of gender when getting rid of Latin and (for some reason) they decided not to do it. They adopted the article (another not-so-evident-useful invention) and they held the gender.


On a side note, should not your Latin name be Cneus?


----------



## Cnaeius

Outsider said:
			
		

> *Cnaeius*, I agree with *Natasha*.
> 
> In English, the sentence is ambiguous with "it", because we don't know whether you're talking about the necklace or the ring. Gender allows you not to repeat the noun "necklace" without being ambiguous. But this has nothing to do with word order. It's pronoun use.
> 
> I would say the possibility of permuting the words in this sentence arises from semantic considerations. First, it's obvious that only Marco can take the ring, not the ring take Marco. As for "[Marco took] the ring and not the necklace", these are coordinate clauses, so they can be swapped.


 
Ok I agree with you for the first part. 
The second part: I didn't swap subject and/or subordinate clause to use the properties you mention but only to change the *distance*between “collana” e “donatagli”. Putting other words between two related words can make things confused, if the related words haven’t any sign that “joins” them. In my example that “sign” is gender (female a).
The principle is the same of the declension cases: why in latin we can increase distance from related words? Because that words have signs: the case endings. And if the case is the same? But gender endings can be different. 
If it is all the same: Case, gender,number? we have necessarily to reduce distance between related words or use context
I hope I have been clearer. I realize that for not-italians can be difficult to understand that.
Ciao


----------



## Cnaeius

Fernando said:
			
		

> I understand Cnaeius' point. Romanic languages allow a bigger mobility of adjectives because of the concordance in gender and number between names and adjectives. But German (which have declension, gender-conditioned) does not take advantage of that.
> 
> I would say the motivations are just historical (just the same as the silly English spelling). I would not say the origin is the recall of the pantheism. As a matter of fact, Vikings, Britons, Pictos and Anglosaxons were adoring Nature forces far after Romans had adopted Christianity.
> 
> As a matter of fact, Romanic peoples could have got rid of gender when getting rid of Latin and (for some reason) they decided not to do it. They adopted the article (another not-so-evident-useful invention) and they held the gender.
> 
> 
> On a side note, should not your Latin name be Cneus?


 
No it is Cnaeius   !

As native spanish speaker I realize you can understand better what I've said. I speak a bit of spanish but actually I do not know whether spanish likes to use gender agreement to make "acrobatic" sentences. Italian, that is a language that tends to use subordination instead of coordination, uses it,  especially in writing


----------



## germinal

Outsider said:
			
		

> It must be a pain for English speakers to learn languages with genders. But many of those of us who learn English as a second languaged develop similar allergies to phrasal verbs and articles. And collective nouns, oh my!
> 
> There is a theory that Proto-Indo-European originally had only animate and inanimate gender. More here.


 

Thanks for that Outsider - I have added it to my favourites - very interesting explanation!


----------



## Fernando

Yes, I think all Romanic speakers tend to abuse of accrobation. Too many subordinates! 

Off topic: I would say the most typical name for Cn. Pompeius is Cnaeus or Cneus, though it is true that Cnaeius is also used.


----------



## germinal

Outsider said:
			
		

> With 2 genders and 2 numbers, there's only a 25% chance that two random nouns will be of the same gender and number.


 

Is this a mathematical or a linguistic claim?    Are you talking here about mere chance or about the actual occurance of the various forms in a language?


----------



## Cnaeius

Fernando said:
			
		

> Yes, I think all Romanic speakers tend to abuse of accrobation. Too many subordinates!
> 
> Off topic: I would say the most typical name for Cn. Pompeius is Cnaeus or Cneus, though it is true that Cnaeius is also used.


 
We are a bit complicate...I agree  

Off: Cnaeius is referred to Pompeius but in relation to a fact of my life of student


----------



## Outsider

germinal said:
			
		

> Is this a mathematical or a linguistic claim?    Are you talking here about mere chance or about the actual occurance of the various forms in a language?


It's a very crude approximation, of course, since words don't really occur at random in a conversation. But I think it's in line with what Cnaeius wrote above:



			
				Cnaeius said:
			
		

> The principle is the same of the declension cases: why in latin we can increase distance from related words? Because that words have signs: the case endings. And if the case is the same? But gender endings can be different.


In other words, gender as a mechanism to reduce the likelihood of ambiguities.


----------



## Outsider

Cnaeius said:
			
		

> We are a bit complicate...I agree


And sometimes we get lost, which can be embarassing, or annoying. I see people speaking on TV who could learn a lot from the conciseness of English.


----------



## Cnaeius

natasha2000 said:
			
		

> Well... These are my answers...


 
Natasha, perhaps I found the example to make things clearer. Let use only the singular masculine gender, so the advantages of having different genders in this sentence *disappear*--> the word order becomes more important: "bracciale" and "anello" are both singular masculine

Marco prese non il bracciale ma l'anello, in quanto donatogli dalla moglie

In italian it is clear that "donatogli" refers to anello and not to bracciale.
But if we write:

L'anello prese Marco ma non il bracciale, in quanto donatogli dalla moglie

"donatogli" refers to "bracciale" and the sentence has a completely different meaning. 
Why? because if there is not anything else, distance determines relation between words--> word order is fundamental. 
Hope it helps


----------



## natasha2000

Cnaeius said:
			
		

> Natasha, perhaps I found the example to make things clearer. Let use only the singular masculine gender, so the advantages of having different genders in this sentence *disappear*--> the word order becomes more important: "bracciale" and "anello" are both singular masculine
> 
> Marco prese non il bracciale ma l'anello, in quanto donatogli dalla moglie
> 
> In italian it is clear that "donatogli" refers to anello and not to bracciale.
> But if we write:
> 
> L'anello prese Marco ma non il bracciale, in quanto donatogli dalla moglie
> 
> "donatogli" refers to "bracciale" and the sentence has a completely different meaning.
> Why? because if there is not anything else, distance determines relation between words--> word order is fundamental.
> Hope it helps


 
You don't give up easily, don't you? 

If you put it in Spanish, I would be able to try to analyze. I don't even know what these words mean. Thanks.


----------



## danzomicrobo

I think that the one constant is that languages change over time and that change is driven be the way that people speak.

Part of that way is conscious choice and part of it is unconscious.  I think that somewhere back before writing was invented, someone saw logical groupings of things and started expressing those similarities by modifying all the words for similar groupings.  I doubt that this was conscious, as I can see with children changing word endings to make words rhyme.

People who were communicating with this person liked the novelty and logic of the changes and consciously or unconsciously adopted that system or expanded it to make it their own.  Enough people adopted the practice and it became the standard way of expressing things.

Of course, there may be other reasons, but I don't think that a committee was formed.


----------



## Residente Calle 13

I found this page to be interesting.


----------



## jokker

Brioche said:
			
		

> Chinese has none of these features, and the Chinese have no difficulty communicating among themselves.





			
				TimeHP said:
			
		

> But their ideograms have a sign for female nouns...
> 妈妈 (mother)
> 她 (she)
> 妹妹 (sister)
> 
> Ciao


I would say that what Brioche said was appropriate and correct. You can say Chinese has no gender.

Chinese had only used he (他) to refer to both male and female until about 100 years ago. Chinese doesn't have 'she' (她) originally.

媽媽 -> mama
母親 -> mother
娘   -> mother


----------



## Brioche

Residente Calle 13 said:
			
		

> I found this page to be interesting.


 
That page seems to treat Old English genders as something peculiar to Old English.

Old English genders came from the Germanic roots of English. It's not mere coincidence that stan [stone] in OE was masculine, just like Stein [stone] is in German.  Ditto for  durru [door] which was feminine in OE , just like the modern German cognate Tür.


----------



## Brioche

jokker said:
			
		

> I would say that what Brioche said was appropriate and correct. You can say Chinese has no gender.
> 
> Chinese had only used he (他) to refer to both male and female until about 100 years ago. Chinese doesn't have 'she' (她) originally.
> 
> 媽媽 -> mama
> 母親 -> mother
> 娘 -> mother


 
In Chinese characters there is a _written_ form for 'she' 她, 
and there is also a character for 'it', 它
but 'she and 'it' sound _exactly_ the same as the character for 'he' 他.

If Chinese is written in Pinyin, there is no difference. All three words are tā.


----------



## ireney

Well, this is a very interesting discussion! All I can say is that 

a) It's even more fun if you have 3 genders, 4 declensions, and a different ending for each person of a verb and 3 verb moods (modern Greek that is)

b) While spelling may have a lot to do with historical or even sentimental reasons, genders and such are either kept or discarded in an unconscious sort of way. That said, I must admit that I cannot think of a good reason for i.e (in Greek) "lighter" to be a masculine, "newspaper" a female and "telephone" a neuter.


----------



## jokker

Brioche said:
			
		

> In Chinese characters there is a _written_ form for 'she' 她,


Yes.  她, created because of westernization, exists for only 100 years. There are many (? or, some) words that don't exist originally.


> and there is also a character for 'it', 它
> but 'she and 'it' sound _exactly_ the same as the character for 'he' 他.
> 
> If Chinese is written in Pinyin, there is no difference. All three words are tā.


Exactly. As for 它, I can't say if it exists originally off the top of my head.


----------



## Cnaeius

natasha2000 said:
			
		

> You don't give up easily, don't you?
> 
> If you put it in Spanish, I would be able to try to analyze. I don't even know what these words mean. Thanks.


 
Italian is my mother tongue and so I, and we italians more or less, know very well the property we have discussed: simply because we use and take advantage of it when it is possible.  
That is why I’ve been so determined. The example in the last post (that is always the same sentence of previous posts) shows that when it is not possible because genders are the same, the advantage disappear.
Anyway I do not want to be too boring. Besides I cannot translate in spanish the implicite subordinate “in quanto donatagli”, I have necessarily to render it as explicit clause, but this nullifies the example: probably my knowledge of Spanish is not at sufficient level. But I think it is possible to find out other examples to show the same facts both in Spanish and in French, as other WR friends have said.
So, how can I say, I give up!
Ciao


----------



## ireney

Well, one can always ask "A tonal language where the change of inflection changes the meaning? Why? " I mean for tone-deaf people like me it's a torture and I have already provided enough entertainment to a net-friend by the absolutely ridiculous mistakes I make. I find that not relying to a good-old alphabet and having to remember the different tones necessary to actually avoid confusion (if not complete lack of comprehension) an unecessary complication.

(the point of this post is that each linguistic system seems normal and easy etc to the native speakers but difficult and some times "illogical" to outsiders)


----------



## natasha2000

Cnaeius,

I was thinking... Why must I keep the same words in the sentence at all? 
The question is the moblity of the word within the sentence, i.e. if I can place the object, or the subject in various places in the sentence... It is not important if I add or change a word or two in the sentence, the important thing is that I can put the subject or object in different places (i.e. to move it within the sentence).....


----------



## badgrammar

'Twas a noble battle, mon ami, I understand the long, hard battle may have gotten the best of you, with your well-thought out arguments falling upon deaf ears.  Retire secure in the knowledge that you did your best, and I know you were right all along  !  Surrender, but never capitulate, for your reasoning is most solid...



			
				Cnaeius said:
			
		

> Italian is my mother tongue and so I, and we italians more or less, know very well the property we have discussed: simply because we use and take advantage of it when it is possible.
> That is why I’ve been so determined. The example in the last post (that is always the same sentence of previous posts) shows that when it is not possible because genders are the same, the advantage disappear.
> Anyway I do not want to be too boring. Besides I cannot translate in spanish the implicite subordinate “in quanto donatagli”, I have necessarily to render it as explicit clause, but this nullifies the example: probably my knowledge of Spanish is not at sufficient level. But I think it is possible to find out other examples to show the same facts both in Spanish and in French, as other WR friends have said.
> So, how can I say, I give up!
> Ciao


----------



## diegodbs

ireney said:
			
		

> Well, one can always ask "A tonal language where the change of inflection changes the meaning? Why? " I mean for tone-deaf people like me it's a torture and I have already provided enough entertainment to a net-friend by the absolutely ridiculous mistakes I make. I find that not relying to a good-old alphabet and having to remember the different tones necessary to actually avoid confusion (if not complete lack of comprehension) an unecessary complication.
> 
> (the point of this post is that each linguistic system seems normal and easy etc to the native speakers but difficult and some times "illogical" to outsiders)


 
That's the point. Imagine click languages. Are they logical or not? It all depends on who answers the question.


----------



## natasha2000

badgrammar said:
			
		

> 'Twas a noble battle, mon ami, I understand the long, hard battle may have gotten the best of you, with your well-thought out arguments falling upon deaf ears. Retire secure in the knowledge that you did your best, and I know you were right all along  ! Surrender, but never capitulate, for your reasoning is most solid...


 
The important thing is that your ears are not deaf..... 
I don't see the reason to look down on someone whose only "guilt" is not having the same opinion on something. Thank you very much.


----------



## germinal

ireney said:
			
		

> Well, this is a very interesting discussion! All I can say is that
> 
> a) It's even more fun if you have 3 genders, 4 declensions, and a different ending for each person of a verb and 3 verb moods (modern Greek that is)
> 
> b) While spelling may have a lot to do with historical or even sentimental reasons, genders and such are either kept or discarded in an unconscious sort of way. That said, I must admit that I cannot think of a good reason for i.e (in Greek) "lighter" to be a masculine, "newspaper" a female and "telephone" a neuter.


 

Interesting point about the lighter, newspaper and telephone.    I have often wondered how gender is assigned to newly invented nouns or nouns borrowed from other languages.   

There must be a period of confusion initially before any national committee
makes a pronouncement and they must choose according to some criteria.

.


----------



## Cnaeius

natasha2000 said:
			
		

> Cnaeius,
> 
> I was thinking... Why must I keep the same words in the sentence at all?
> The question is the moblity of the word within the sentence, i.e. if I can place the object, or the subject in various places in the sentence... It is not important if I add or change a word or two in the sentence, the important thing is that I can put the subject or object in different places (i.e. to move it within the sentence).....


 
The focus is not on swapping subject-object but on changing *distance* between relates words, e.g. a noun and its participle as in the example. Changing this distance can be achieved by swapping subject and object but the focus is not necessarily on subject-object: in my first examples the focus is _only_ on the two nouns (anello e collana) and the participle (donatagli). If the words are distant and have signs relating them (morphologically: case and/or genders) they can _actually_ be related, otherwise there could be confusion. So it becomes important if I add a word or more because they could change distance between the focused words or could help giving context.
ciao


----------



## natasha2000

> Marco prese la collan*a* e non l’anello, in quanto donat*a*gli dalla moglie


 
 OK, I got it what you were trying to say. The A in donat*A*gli is feminine gender of participle which means literally, GIVEN, and it referrs to collan*A*, neckless which is also feminine.

Marco cogió la caden*A* y no el anillo, regalad*A* por su mujer.

NOTE: Spanish speakers, don't criticize my translation, since I did it as literal as possible, in order to make it more similar to italian original.

But if the two words were of the same gender, then it wouldn't be so clear which object he took. We would need more context to SUPPOSE it.

Marco cogió el collar y no el anillo, regalado por su mujer.

If he loved his wife, he probably took the necklace (collar) and if not, maybe he DID leave the gift of his wife and took the other thing - the ring (anillo).

Then, the English translation would be:
Marco took the necklace and not the ring, he was given by his wife.

I don't even have to try to change the word order, it is perfectly cofusing! 

I was focusing all the time on the necklace and the ring, and not on the participle, which I didn't even put in my first translations.... Wrong focusing, I guess.

OK... My apologies... I do understand now what you were trying to say.
Thanks for not giving up.


----------



## Cnaeius

natasha2000 said:
			
		

> OK, I got it what you were trying to say. The A in donat*A*gli is feminine gender of participle which means literally, GIVEN, and it referrs to collan*A*, neckless which is also feminine.
> 
> Marco cogió la caden*A* y no el anillo, regalad*A* por su mujer.
> 
> NOTE: Spanish speakers, don't criticize my translation, since I did it as literal as possible, in order to make it more similar to italian original.
> 
> But if the two words were of the same gender, then it wouldn't be so clear which object he took. We would need more context to SUPPOSE it.
> 
> Marco cogió el collar y no el anillo, regalado por su mujer.
> 
> If he loved his wife, he probably took the necklace (collar) and if not, maybe he DID leave the gift of his wife and took the other thing - the ring (anillo).
> 
> Then, the English translation would be:
> Marco took the necklace and not the ring, he was given by his wife.
> 
> I don't even have to try to change the word order, it is perfectly cofusing!
> OK... My apologies... I do understand now what you were trying to say.
> Thanks for not giving up.


 
Yes! 
Don't worry! I'm happy we finally agree
Ciao


----------



## diegodbs

germinal said:
			
		

> Interesting point about the lighter, newspaper and telephone. I have often wondered how gender is assigned to newly invented nouns or nouns borrowed from other languages.
> 
> There must be a period of confusion initially before any national committee
> makes a pronouncement and they must choose according to some criteria.
> 
> .


 
Not so much confusion in Spanish. It comes almost naturally the way we assign grammatical gender to foreign words.

Words ending in -o are masculine
Words ending in -a are feminime
Words ending in a consonant, masculine.

*el* láser (masc.),* la* televisión (fem.), *el* fax (masc.),* la* radiografía (fem.)
etc.

Not all Spanish words follow the simple rules given above, but we tend to use those rules for foreign words. So the first time someone needs to use a foreign word in a newspaper (for example), he will unconsciously follow that rule because it's natural to Spanish.


----------



## ireney

now I am confused (and yes, imported words ending in -a are automatically fem in Greek too)

You said that words ending in a consonant are masculine. But la television??


----------



## diegodbs

ireney said:
			
		

> now I am confused (and yes, imported words ending in -a are automatically fem in Greek too)
> 
> You said that words ending in a consonant are masculine. But la television??


 
Because almost all the words ending in -ión in Spanish are feminine.

acción, revisión, televisión, tentación, nación, ilusión, estación, reunión, etc etc.


----------



## roxcyn

ireney said:
			
		

> now I am confused (and yes, imported words ending in -a are automatically fem in Greek too)
> 
> You said that words ending in a consonant are masculine. But la television??


He was giving you a general rule, but as you see it doesn't always work:
el problema
el mapa (Comes from Greek)
el día
la mano


----------



## ireney

oh! My mistake then.
So the question still stands (bar such cases as words ending in -a etc in which morphological similarities are the ones that determine the gender)


----------



## TimeHP

I must state beforehand that _gender in languages_ it's not a matter of life and death for me. Every language has its own characteristics and I love the varieties of languages.



> Chinese had only used he (他) to refer to both male and female until about 100 years ago. Chinese doesn't have 'she' (她) originally


 
So, it seems they gave in to necessity, didn't they?  
Anyway the sign 女 is used in lots of words and it is one of the first ideograms.


*Archaic**Seal script**Traditional Modern**Simplified**Pinyin**Gloss*



人
—rénman



女—nǚwoman Ciao


----------



## Outsider

diegodbs said:
			
		

> Not so much confusion in Spanish. It comes almost naturally the way we assign grammatical gender to foreign words.
> 
> Words ending in -o are masculine
> Words ending in -a are feminime
> Words ending in a consonant, masculine.
> 
> *el* láser (masc.),* la* televisión (fem.), *el* fax (masc.),* la* radiografía (fem.)
> etc.
> 
> Not all Spanish words follow the simple rules given above, but we tend to use those rules for foreign words. So the first time someone needs to use a foreign word in a newspaper (for example), he will unconsciously follow that rule because it's natural to Spanish.


Portuguese is like Spanish, but I will add that when the word ends in a consonant its gender may depend on whether the particular consonant is itself common in the language or not. When the neologism has a 'weird' ending, or when we use foreign untranslated words in a conversation, it seems that most of us pick one particular gender by default, for all foreign nouns. For example, I've noticed that most Portuguese people treat foreign untranslated nouns like _software_, _hardware_ and _(disk) drive_ as masculine by default, whereas Brazilians seem to treat most of them as feminine by default.


----------



## badgrammar

natasha2000 said:
			
		

> The important thing is that your ears are not deaf.....
> I don't see the reason to look down on someone whose only "guilt" is not having the same opinion on something. Thank you very much.



I certainly look down on no one and on no other language.  I have stated that I know that gender in a language allows for certain precisions that you canot make in languages that do not have gender without refering directly back to the subject or object.  That you did not understand why is fine.  My post to Cnaeius was in no way directed to you.  It was a response to his noble efforts to explain how gender functions in this way, and especially his last line "I give up"!

I am sorry if you took that as some sort of personal attack, it certainly was not meant to be one.


----------



## Outsider

Badgrammar, Cnaeius also made the claim that gender agreement allows one to change word order in a sentence. This is what Natasha and I disagreed with.


----------



## diegodbs

Badgrammar, I didn't take it as a personal attack. The whole thread is about why some languages feel they need grammatical gender while others don't.


----------



## germinal

roxcyn said:
			
		

> He was giving you a general rule, but as you see it doesn't always work:
> el problema
> el mapa (Comes from Greek)
> el día
> la mano


 
See post 54 above - Sex change?    

.


----------



## natasha2000

badgrammar said:
			
		

> I certainly look down on no one and on no other language. I have stated that I know that gender in a language allows for certain precisions that you canot make in languages that do not have gender without refering directly back to the subject or object. That you did not understand why is fine. My post to Cnaeius was in no way directed to you. It was a response to his noble efforts to explain how gender functions in this way, and especially his last line "I give up"!
> 
> I am sorry if you took that as some sort of personal attack, it certainly was not meant to be one.


 
Considering that the the main discussion on thìs particular example given by Cnaeius was between me and him, him trying to explain and me trying to understand, how would you interpret your comment?



> 'Twas a noble battle, mon ami, I understand the long, hard battle may have gotten the best of you, *with your well-thought out arguments falling upon deaf ears.* Retire secure in the knowledge that you did your best, and I know you were right all along  ! Surrender, but never capitulate, for your reasoning is most solid...


 
And if the deaf ears was not me, then who it was?

I don't consider it as a personal attack, this word is a little bit too strong, but I did not find it very pleasant...


----------



## ireney

By the way, what does el mapa means? Babelfish gives me map in which case it doesn't come from Greece (anything like "chart" does, but mapa in Greek means cabbage and is also used as slang for face (kind like mug in ugly mug) or to show that something is not really good, it's dissapointing  )  Oh and it's feminine


----------



## diegodbs

ireney said:
			
		

> By the way, what does el mapa means? Babelfish gives me map in which case it doesn't come from Greece (anything like "chart" does, but mapa in Greek means cabbage and is also used as slang for face (kind like mug in ugly mug) or to show that something is not really good, it's dissapointing ) Oh and it's feminine


*mapa**.*(Del b. lat. _mappa_, toalla, plano de una finca rústica).*1.* m. Representación geográfica de la Tierra o parte de ella en una superficie plana.


----------



## Outsider

According to the dictionary of the RAE:



> *mapa.*
> (Del b. lat. _mappa_, toalla, plano de una finca rústica).


It seems that Spanish _mapa_ and Greek _mapa_ are false cognates.


----------



## natasha2000

It seems that EL MAPA comes from latin, and not Greek...

Anyway, the rule can be applied to the words that come both from Latin and Greek (old one!)
For example, the word EL PROBLEMA comes from LAtin, where it came from Greek....


----------



## ireney

but *el* is the masculine article isn't it? 

(and I think we have really derailed this conversation by now  )


----------



## jokker

TimeHP said:
			
		

> I must state beforehand that _gender in languages_ is not a matter of life and death for me. Every language has its own characteristics and I love the varieties of languages.


I agree with you. 





> So, it seems they gave in to necessity, didn't they?


I found the topic of this thread fascinating. Chinese is fascinating. Even though Chinese is my mother tongue, I have to say that there are still lot of it that I don't know. It occured to me this afternoon that 她 has been popular since about 20-25 (my guess) years ago. I remember I was astonished and felt unfamiliar with it the first time seeing people uesd 她 to refer to female. As you said, people created it for necessity of more free to choose and use the word they want to express what they say.


> Anyway the sign 女 is used in lots of words and it is one of the first ideograms.


Chinese writing forms were created roughly according to six rules/ways, two of them are ideogram and hieroglyphic. 女 is both ideogram and hieroglyphic. 

If anyone would like to learn Chinese, I sincerely suggest that do learn traditional Chinese. Traditional Chinese has been used for thousands of years and was created with certain meanings. All the books had been written in traditional Chinese for hundred and thousand years. My suggest is none of political reasons. I have to say simplified Chinese has lost the original features and meanings in traditional Chinese writing form and only exists for about 50 years.


----------



## natasha2000

ireney said:
			
		

> but *el* is the masculine article isn't it?
> 
> (and I think we have really derailed this conversation by now  )


 
I was referring to the rule that all nouns ending in A are femenine.
But, if they come from Latin or Greek, they are (usually?) masculine.
And yes, we indeeed derailed this discussion with this...


----------



## Jhorer Brishti

natasha2000 said:
			
		

> I was referring to the rule that all nouns ending in A are femenine.
> But, if they come from Latin or Greek, they are (usually?) masculine.
> And yes, we indeeed derailed this discussion with this...


 
  The great bulk of Spanish words come from Latin so I don't understand why Latin words would have their genders changed(in which case almost all Spanish nouns would be masculine)... 

   I had also heard that the only nouns that suffered a "sex change" were nouns that originally derived from Greek(based on an older Latin classification system). Take a look at this page: " http://www.orbilat.com/Languages/Sp...Noun.html#Gender_of_the_nouns_of_Greek_origin "

  Midway, there is a reference to classical latin "declination patterns" from which this simpler treatment of Greek loan words in Spanish derives from..

  Also, Natasha, in English the word is 'feminine' and not 'femenine'..


----------



## Residente Calle 13

Jhorer Brishti said:
			
		

> The great bulk of Spanish words come from Latin so I don't understand why Latin words would have their genders changed(in which case almost all Spanish nouns would be masculine)...


Well, first, since Latin had a neuter nouns and Spanish doesn't all of the neuter Latin nouns *had *to change.

Second, some just did. Today we say _*el puente*_ ('the bridge') but it used to be _*la puente*_. In some cases, the gender can go both ways. The following text is in Spanish but I think non-Spanish speakers can make out the gist of it:

muchas palabras que terminan en *a* son «masculinas».

_el  alert*a*_ (_la alerta_ es muy común)
_el  caz*a*_
_el comet*a*_
_el  dí*a*_
_el goril*a*_ (_la gorila_  es popular)
_el guardarrop*a*_
_el  insecticid*a*_
_el mañan*a*_ (sentido  metafórico)
_el map*a*_
_el  mediodí*a*_
_el nirvan*a*_
_el  planet*a*_ (_la planeta_ es popular)
_el  tranví*a*_
_el tequil*a*_
_el  vodk*a*_
_el yog*a*_

Muchas de  estas terminan en *-ma* :

_el arom*a*_
_el  clim*a*_
_el com*a*_
_el  diagram*a*_
_el dilem*a*_
_el  diplom*a*_
_el dogm*a*_
_el  enigm*a*_
_el esquem*a*_
_el  estigm*a*_
_el fantasm*a*_
_el  fonem*a*_
_el hologram*a*_
_el  lem*a*_
_el magm*a*_
_el  miasm*a*_
_el panoram*a*_
_el  pijam*a*_ (_las pillama_s en el Caribe)
_el  plasm*a*_
_el poem*a*_
_el  problem*a*_
_el program*a*_
_el  pum*a*_
_el síntom*a*_
_el  sistem*a*_
_el tem*a*_
_el  traum*a*_

Sin embargo muchas palabras que terminan en  *-ma* son «femeninas» :

_la alar*ma*_
_la  amalga*ma*_
_la cre*ma*_
_la  chus*ma*_
_la bro*ma*_
_la  fir*ma*_
_la for*ma*_
_la  ga*ma*_
_la go*ma*_
_la  lágri*ma*_
_la li*ma*_
_la  lla*ma*_
_la cal*ma*_
_la  ca*ma*_
_la palo*ma*_
_la  ra*ma*_
_la ri*ma*_
_la  esti*ma*_
_la fa*ma*_
_la  lo*ma*_
_la nor*ma*_
_la  pal*ma*_
_la si*ma*_
_la  su*ma*_
_la tra*ma*_
_la  ye*ma*_

_La  calor_ y _la color_ son consideradas rústicas.
 En  España y Argentina _la chance_, pero en muchos países americanos _el  chance_.
_La  opus_ es una cosa y _El Opus (Dei)_ otra.
_El  sauna_ en América y _la sauna_ en España
_En  el internet_, _en la internet_ y _en internet_, se dicen.
_El  interrogante_ o la _interrogante_. Las dos formas se consideran  correctas.
_Los  lentes_ en América y_ las lentes_ en España
_La  mar_ se usa en el lenguaje poético, de marineros y
 en  la meteorología. También hay frases fijas como
_en  alta mar_ y _la mar de gente_.
_El  arte_ sin embargo existe _bellas artes_ y _artes plásticas_.
_La bombilla_  en España y _el bombillo_ en América.


----------



## optimistique

To return to the point of cases and gender allowing more freedom in word order, Dutch is a language that doesn't have any cases (anymore). Still it is still very keen on changing word order to emphasize certain words. Of course the effect is that sometimes sentences in Dutch can be completely ambiguous if there is no context.

Example:

_De man doodt de beer_ (The man kills the bear/It's the man the bear kills)
_De beer doodt de ma_n (The bear kills the man/It's the bear the man kills)

Of course, the second possibilities are weird if there is no context, but you'll see that in context they'll appear all the time. 

_Er zijn gisteren twee mensen door een beer opgegeten. Niet de vrouw maar de man doodde de beer als eerste._

(Yesterday there were two people eaten by a bear. It was not the woman, but the man the bear killed first).

Notice that it was necessary to add the first sentence, otherwise it would still be unclear whether the bear was the subject or the object. You just would not know. Still we use these word order variations, since words are placed often first in Dutch when there is a special emphasis on them or when they are the topic of the sentence.
In German there is no problem doing this because of their cases. I find it really interesting to see how strongly Dutch doesn't want to give this up, while the risk of confusion is so high.




Also, about the changing of gender. Normally there is no way Native speakers would mix up gender, there is just a certain feel to the words, which makes you know that the other-gender article cannot be combined with that specific word.

I know, however about a case in Dutch, where the gender is changing, but it is because there are two same words with different gender, and different meaning. The words in question: - _het hof_ (court, I don't know how to describe the exact meaning, can be a term to refer to the royal family (the most important members)) - _de hof_ (dated word for 'garden', still common in certain expressions)

From the latter is used the 'de hof' in '_doolhof_' (labyrinth, literally: 'stray garden'). So it should be "de doolhof". Still, a lot of people (including me) are saying "het doolhof" because this word/gender combination exists, albeit with the wrong meaning, it exists. That may explain gender change within a language, also in other languages? I know examples of other words where a lot of people doubt about the right gender, which have no equivalent with another gender. It is a wierd phenomen, because normally you would NEVER confuse gender. You just don't.


----------



## test0012

Pivra said:
			
		

> and how do chinese communicate??....(thais are naïve to extreme east cultures lol... seriously.. belief me.... i dont even know how do use chopsticks lol)



In Chinese, for example, "y?nyuán" means either actor or actress, if you want to say "actor", you say "nán y?nyuán", that's "male y?nyuán", or "female y?nyuán" for actress.

Traditional Chinese language has no gender, the only he, she, it in modern written language was introduced in early 20th century, but the spoken language is absolutely gender-free (he, she, it all pronouced as "t?").


----------



## Residente Calle 13

test0012 said:
			
		

> In Chinese, for example, "y?nyuán" means either actor or actress, if you want to say "actor", you say "nán y?nyuán", that's "male y?nyuán", or "female y?nyuán" for actress.



In a strange American language called "Politically Correct" Angelina Jolie is "an actor."


----------



## Pivra

Residente Calle 13 said:
			
		

> In a strange American language called "Politically Correct" Angelina Jolie is "an actor."


 
in chinese... what if u wanna say something with more formality and there is ony one 3rd person singular pronoun.... how would i change it.... cuz "it" seems very rude if ur talking about ur emperor politicians are parents....


----------



## test0012

Pivra said:
			
		

> in chinese... what if u wanna say something with more formality and there is ony one 3rd person singular pronoun.... how would i change it.... cuz "it" seems very rude if ur talking about ur emperor politicians are parents....


He/she/it or "tā" in spoken Chinese is only a pronoun for general context. For special contexts, such as talking about the emperors, you can use "the emperor ...", there are many words to call the emperor as 3rd person, like "shèngshàng", "huángshàng", "wànsuì", and etc.


----------



## Pivra

and how about your parents or someone of a high social status than you... (im thinking of t-v  like tú and usted)


----------



## Outsider

The linguistics of gender.


----------



## daoxunchang

Vespasian said:
			
		

> I'm not an expert. But as far as I know the Danes settled in Britain after the Anglosaxons. The roots of their words were the same but the endings diverged enough to confuse everyone. After all it proved to be easier to nearly completely omit the endings for a better communication.


I think in the process of learning a language, either one's mother tongue or a foreign one, one can never learn the best part until he knows and can use the grammar of that language perfectly well. 

But as far as everyday communication is concerned, pidgins may be enough.


----------



## asm

However, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind


			
				germinal said:
			
		

> That's quite a claim to say that language is larger than we are. The historical span of (spoken) language is miniscule compared with our history, which stretches back to the first creatures on earth and written language is even younger of course.
> 
> How could the ideas contained in your first sentence be applied to the sentence itself to demonstrate their ability to permit instantaneous understanding?


----------



## roxcyn

I was reading an English Grammar book---and something was very interesting that struck me: Old English had gender (words had gender just as in Romance language today), and there was even different verb conjugations for each subject.  But it disappeared.  I thought that was very interesting to read.


----------



## diegodbs

Old English had gender, conjugations and declensions too.


----------



## vince

Spanish: most of the masculine words with feminine endings in Spanish are also masculine words with feminine endings in French. So chances are the discrepancy arose from Vulgar Latin and not some weird Spanish mutation.


Chinese: Cantonese also does not distinguish between he/she/it. The word for these is "koei" (pronounced like French "cueil" as in "accueil").

I believe Mandarin has a T-V distinction, "nin" is used for formal and "ni" is used for regular/informal. Cantonese, like English, does not have a T-V distinction (it uses "lei" for both formal and informal).

Chinese languages do not have gender, though nouns have "measure words" attached to them. The difference between measure words and gender are that measure words are usually predictable, they correspond to different types, shapes, sizes, etc of objects.


----------



## urizon9

Hi!I have never understood why nouns must have a gender. In Italian mastering the use of the article  is the greatest difficulty for me.For example there are masc.nouns with fem.ending in singular and  nouns which become fem. in plural-total mess!There are many languages which do fine without any kind of gender, but it does not make them necessarily more easy to learn of cource.Con saluti, urizon9


----------



## Honour

i also wonder why some languages use gender when naming objects. I think it is acceptable for animal kind but it makes no sense to me for the objects. How could a table be female? (la table, la mesa) In turkish it is called only _masa,_ no gender, no article! (the latter is another subject). There isn't a single point that makes sense to me about objects being fe/male.


----------



## Fernando

Turk, objects are not male or female, they are assigned (by history and use) a grammatical gender. As an example, the penis is feminine for many Spanish translations and the vagina is masculine for many Spanish translations.


----------



## Honour

Fernando, thanks for your explanation but that's the point i don't get. Why they are assigned so? Why there isn't a single gender? I wonder because belonging to a specific gender does't alter their meanings.It seems so useless to me.


----------



## Outsider

When you get confused,  think that grammatical gender is just a way to divide nouns into classes. Don't think of masculine and feminine, think of colours:

- In Turkish and English, all nouns have the same colour.
- In Spanish, some nouns are blue, and others red.
- In Latin and German, some words are blue, others red, and others green.

Now, most nouns that refer to females are red and most words that refer to males are blue, and green words normally refer to sexless notions. That's why we label the three classes of nouns as "feminine", "masculine" and "neuter".

But it is only a _label_. You should not think that being blue is the same as being a male, being red is the same as being a female, and being green is the same as being neither.


----------



## Outsider

roxcyn said:
			
		

> I was reading an English Grammar book---and something was very interesting that struck me: Old English had gender (words had gender just as in Romance language today), and there was even different verb conjugations for each subject.  But it disappeared.  I thought that was very interesting to read.


Here's a link for you.


----------



## Residente Calle 13

Turk said:
			
		

> Fernando, thanks for your explanation but that's the point i don't get. Why they are assigned so? Why there isn't a single gender? I wonder because belonging to a specific gender does't alter their meanings.It seems so useless to me.



Well, in practice, gender _*is *_useful. It just seems like a lot of work for people learning a foreign language for the reward it provides.

Let me make up a hypothetical language called Bla. In bla, the word foo means fern. What's a fern? I know what it means but everybody doesn't. If I said "it's a fern plant" that would be clearer.

Fortunately, in Bla, people say foo-pla. (pla is an ending that means "plant") After a while everybody started added -pla at the end of all words that described a plant. By extension, to all words that described wood, and finally everything thing that was made out of wood. So a boat in Bla is a triri-pla. 

That how you get a class of words. In this case, it started so that people who didn't know what a foo was to be able to guess and then it just because a class that looking from the outside is rather arbitrary. Why should a spoon in Bla be called a rek-pla? Well, because spoons in Blaland were first made out of wood. And that's how some language get classes that over time become arbitrary. There is an Austrialian language that has a "vegetable class" and airplanes are in that class because of this kind of extension.

Moreover, in Spanish and French, gender separates homonyms.

Spanish
el cura = the priest
la cura = the cure

French
le livre = the book
la livre = the pound

---

Of course, you don't _*need *_it. But apparently, we have a tendency to put things into categories. If you think about it, we just need the word person. But we all have child/adult, male/female...etc.


----------



## luis masci

Fernando said:
			
		

> Spanish speakers commit some mistakes with extrange combinations (el agua/esta agua), but minor ones.


As a matter of fact I couldn’t say it’s properly a mistake. The word “agua” is one of some few words that use the article “el” for cacophony reason but nevertheless remain its feminine condition with all other articles.
Examples:
El agua/las aguas/esta agua/esa agua /aquella agua...
El aula/las aulas/esta aula/esa aula/ aquella aula...
El arma/las armas/esta arma/aquella arma/esa arma...
El águila/las águilas/esta águila/aquella águila/esa águila...
El alma/las almas/esta alma/aquella alma/esa alma...


----------



## Residente Calle 13

luis masci said:
			
		

> As a matter of fact I couldn’t say it’s properly a mistake. The word “agua” is one of some few words that use the article “el” for cacophony reason but nevertheless remain its feminine condition with all other articles.
> Examples:
> El agua/las aguas/esta agua/esa agua /aquella agua...
> El aula/las aulas/esta aula/esa aula/ aquella aula...
> El arma/las armas/esta arma/aquella arma/esa arma...
> El águila/las águilas/esta águila/aquella águila/esa águila...
> El alma/las almas/esta alma/aquella alma/esa alma...



And there are a handful of words that are both masculine and feminine, depending on the region and sometimes the gender changes through time:

_Sauna_, _internet_, _sazón _(seasoning)and _sartén _(frying pan) seem to vary from region to region as well. And if you back far enough you will find _la puente_ (bridge) _la fin_, and _la análisis.
_
So I don't know if "nunca digas de _*este *_agua no beberé" is so much an «error» as it is a variant the dictionaries don't pick up on. Just a personal opinion.


----------



## luis masci

Residente Calle 13 said:
			
		

> So I don't know if "nunca digas de *este* agua no beberé" is so much an «error» as it is a variant the dictionaries don't pick up on. Just a personal opinion.


It’s possible you are right Residente, but as I always have heard it here is: “nunca digas de esta agua no he de beber”

*Gender in languages - why? 
*No problem with me, I’m willing to change whole articles of all Romance languages if you change in English,by the way each same sound always matches with the same written letter. 
(now you just have to ask to other 700 millions Romance speakers if they are agree too)


----------



## Pivra

Fernando said:
			
		

> Turk, objects are not male or female, they are assigned (by history and use) a grammatical gender. As an example, the penis is feminine for many Spanish translations and the vagina is masculine for many Spanish translations.


 
OH YAH... I never noticed that... la polla and el coño...and el pecho too. Why is the male part female and female part male?


----------



## Residente Calle 13

luis masci said:
			
		

> *Gender in languages - why?
> *No problem with me, I’m willing to change whole articles of all Romance languages if you change in English,by the way each same sound always matches with the same written letter.
> (now you just have to ask to other 700 millions Romance speakers if they are agree too)



I don't know how serious you are and I'm not very good a picking out tongue-in-cheek statements but there are problems with doing either one. 

In English, we have rhotic and non-rhotic accents, for one, so one sound can never correpsond to one letter unless we all speak the exact same way. Even in the US you have speakers for who "cot" and "caught" sound the same. Should we spell them the same way? --I don't say them the same way.So we can never do it as long as we speak differently. You can't do it in Spanish either unless the people who say _casa _and _caza _differently cut it out our we (Latin Americans and Southern Spaniards) start saying *casa* and *catha*. 

English had genders but they disappeared slowly over time. The English didn't have a meeting to decide to drop them and it's unlikely that they conceivably could have. Centuries of school teachers and grammarians saying that double negatives are "bad English" hasn't stopped people from saying "I don't know nothing."

I also find it very interesting that the DRAE lists "sauna" as feminine. I don't think people who say "el sauna" change to "la sauna" once they find out that's what the dictionary says. And I don't think you can get us to agree to change it and you can't change the people who say "la sauna".

People are both messy and stubborn in their speech. Isn't it fun?


----------



## Residente Calle 13

Pivra said:
			
		

> OH YAH... I never noticed that... la polla and el coño...and el pecho too. Why is the male part female and female part male?



It's not in all dialects. In mine, the main words are both masculine. In the Ecuadorian dialect, they are both feminine.


----------



## Pivra

Residente Calle 13 said:
			
		

> It's not in all dialects. In mine, the main words are both masculine. In the Ecuadorian dialect, they are both feminine.


 
 What is your dialect? In Ecuadorian Spanish how do they say those words? La verga and la concha (sorry I don't mean to be rude)?


----------



## Residente Calle 13

Pivra said:
			
		

> What is your dialect? In Ecuadorian Spanish how do they say those words? La verga and la concha (sorry I don't mean to be rude)?



My dialect is Dominican. The words are *toto *and _*guebo*_. The Ecuadorian words are _*verga *_and _*chucha*_. _*Concha *_is just something you make ceviche out of. Perfectly innocent.

I think too much is made of the gender of things. It's really arbitrary. Puerto Ricans have *chocha *while in parts of Southern Spain it's _*chocho*_. It's obviously a case of words whose gender change through space and time. I wouldn't doubt it if the Ecuadorian and Dominican words for vulva come from that same source. *Toto*, _*chocho*_, _*chocha*_, _*chucha*_...they are just so similar. The fact that they are taboo allows them to be pronounced so differently (and even change genders) more so than if it was a word one said out in the open.

Anyway, that's gender for you.


----------



## Bienvenidos

Well, the Ancient Latin word for *manliness, bravery, *and *courage* is *virtus, *and it is feminine! Why? As languages are *spoken,* they change. The Romans must have thought that *virtus* sounded better as a feminine noun, so they made it feminine.

Let me catch up on this Spanish dialect thing (mine is Venezuelan) and I'll get back to you.

*Bien*


----------



## Residente Calle 13

Bienvenidos said:
			
		

> Well, the Ancient Latin word for *manliness, bravery, *and *courage* is *virtus, *and it is feminine! Why? As languages are *spoken,* they change. The Romans must have thought that *virtus* sounded better as a feminine noun, so they made it feminine.
> 
> Let me catch up on this Spanish dialect thing (mine is Venezuelan) and I'll get back to you.
> 
> *Bien*


It's arbitrary. By the time of the Ancient Romans, gender no longer made sense for inanimates. Even for some animates, it was already kind of goofy. A sailor was *nauta *(feminine). This is because it came from Greek but anyway...it's no surprise that in Spanish we say _el problema_ and _la mano_. But the theory is that the language Latin came from had a gender system that was more rational. There were more than three genders and each noun fell into, more a less, a logical class. 

Fula, a language spoken in West Africa, has sixteen genders! And they are today arbitrary!

The problem, I think people find is not that some languages have boxes but that words from one box jump out and fall into another box over time to the point that the whole thing is a mess unless you learn the gender by heart.


----------



## Bienvenidos

Exactly, Latin definately shaped the gender system for other languages. Great example, by the way 

Latin: Manus - hand, feminine
Spanish: Mano - hand, feminine

*Bien*


----------



## se16teddy

In the Indo-European languages at least, the purpose of gender is to make it possible to use pronouns, which avoid having to repeat nouns endlessly.  Without gender, it would never be clear to what antecedent a pronoun referred.  Dividing nouns into classes, and using pronouns peculiar to each class makes pronouns possible.


----------



## Residente Calle 13

se16teddy said:
			
		

> In the Indo-European languages at least, the purpose of gender is to make it possible to use pronouns, which avoid having to repeat nouns endlessly.  Without gender, it would never be clear to what antecedent a pronoun referred.  Dividing nouns into classes, and using pronouns peculiar to each class makes pronouns possible.


Well, I guess the question is, then, how today's English makes do with gendered pronouns but other languages "need" to assign genders to every single noun?


----------



## se16teddy

I should have written: 

In the Indo-European languages at least, the purpose of gender is to make it possible to use pronouns, which avoid having to repeat nouns endlessly. Without gender, it would never be clear to what antecedent a pronoun referred. Dividing nouns into classes (OR, PARTICULARLY IN ENGLISH, DIVIDING THINGS, ANIMALS, PERSONS AND OTHER CONCEPTS INTO CLASSES), and using pronouns peculiar to each class makes pronouns possible.  

One theory I heard about the development of gender in Indo-European is that the gender of a pronoun simply indicated the declension class of the antecedent.  A few animals and persons of recognizable gender living around the home were allocated a declension class according to their gender.  This principle largely survived into Latin, and largely survives today in Russian.  For example, in Russian nouns that end in -a in the nominative singular, -u in the accusative singular etc are typically feminine; in Latin nouns that end in -a in the nominative singular and -am in the accusative are typically feminine

As the declensions of nouns became simpler, for example in the Romance languages, this distinction became less apparent; and moreover in English the link between the noun and the gender completely disappeared.  In English the gender belongs to thing / animal / person / concept. 

On a separate point: in English gender is not entirely determined by sex (and the absence of it).  Ships are usually feminine, and many speakers apply the same principle to other beloved pieces of machinery, e.g. their car.


----------



## Outsider

se16teddy said:
			
		

> I should have written:
> 
> In the Indo-European languages at least, the purpose of gender is to make it possible to use pronouns, which avoid having to repeat nouns endlessly. Without gender, it would never be clear to what antecedent a pronoun referred. Dividing nouns into classes (OR, PARTICULARLY IN ENGLISH, DIVIDING THINGS, ANIMALS, PERSONS AND OTHER CONCEPTS INTO CLASSES), and using pronouns peculiar to each class makes pronouns possible.


But languages without grammatical genders also use pronouns. For example, Finnish does. I don't doubt that splitting nouns into two or more genders allows more flexibility in the use of pronouns, but I'm not sure that it's such an important thing. Even in Spanish (or English!) you can still get pronouns with ambiguous referents. 



			
				se16teddy said:
			
		

> One theory I heard about the development of gender in Indo-European is that the gender of a pronoun simply indicated the declension class of the antecedent.  A few animals and persons of recognizable gender living around the home were allocated a declension class according to their gender.  This principle largely survived into Latin, and largely survives today in Russian.  For example, in Russian nouns that end in -a in the nominative singular, -u in the accusative singular etc are typically feminine; in Latin nouns that end in -a in the nominative singular and -am in the accusative are typically feminine
> 
> As the declensions of nouns became simpler, for example in the Romance languages, this distinction became less apparent [...]


Well, Romance languages don't usually have declensions, but gender distinctions are _very_ apparent in them. In Spanish, for example, the feminine is characterized by the ending -a, and the masculine by the ending -o.

An interesting theory about the origins of gender in Indo-European (which I may have already mentioned in this thread) is here.


----------



## vince

Chinese languages dont' have grammatical gender, yet they still have pronouns. But they do not distinguish between grammatical case either, so I = me, he = him, she = her, we = us, they = them

Cantonese: me = ngo, you = nei, she/he = koei, us = ngodei, you (pl.) = neidei, they = koeidei

Mandarin: me = wo, you (informal) = ni, you (formal) = nin, she/he = ta, us
  = women, you (pl.) = nimen, them = tamen


So you can have pronouns with neither grammatical gender nor case.


----------



## daoxunchang

I am Chinese. I think that we do not distinguish between the three pronouns he, she and it (他，她，它）may be because that we do not need the distinguishing. When you are talking about someone, it is just natural to state clearly whom you are talking about at the very beginning, and thus it is clear as the gender is concerned. I believe this is another abundance of languages that have this distinguishing. As to how we refer to people elder than us or higher than us in social position, we use titles when talking about them. For example, we rarely use "he" throughout the conversation about our fathers even if we know whom we are talking about. Even if we use "he", we will say "papa he"(爸爸他) or "my papa he"(我爸爸他). But there is an exception, that is, when we are angry of them we may call them by he/she. But in my case, I would not feel comfortable even if in this mood.
On second thought, I think we call people with lower social status also with their titles or names.


----------



## daoxunchang

When we talk to people face to face, we often call them by their names or titles too. For example, we say "那爸爸你（papa ni---papa you)怎么想的？"　or "李明你(Li Ming ni)怎么想的？"


----------



## Blackleaf

Brioche said:
			
		

> English no longer has grammatical gender.
> English pronouns/nouns refect the _*sex* _of person or animal.
> 
> Some people refer to this as "natural gender".
> 
> .


 
That's not entirely true.

English has natural gender, but it doesn't actually refer to all creatures according to their sex.  If it did, then all female snails would be "she" and all male snails would be "he."  But in English, that's not the case.  In English, ALL snails are usually referred to as "it", whether it's masculine or feminine.

In English, the natural gender does not make the gender of the noun equate with the gender of the thing that it's describing. Instead, the natural gender is related to the CLASS of the thing that it's describing.  So, in English, most animals are referred to as "it", even if the animal is female.  

So it's not true that in English everything is reflected int he sex of the creature, although it's true that English doesn't have grammatical gender.


----------



## maxiogee

Blackleaf said:
			
		

> English has natural gender, but it doesn't actually refer to all creatures according to their sex.  If it did, then all female snails would be "she" and all male snails would be "he."  But in English, that's not the case.  In English, ALL snails are usually referred to as "it", whether it's masculine or feminine.



How would the average person determine the sex of a snail? Hell, I had difficulty determining the sex of my son's rabbit some years back.




> In English, the natural gender does not make the gender of the noun equate with the gender of the thing that it's describing. Instead, the natural gender is related to the CLASS of the thing that it's describing.  So, in English, most animals are referred to as "it", even if the animal is female.



Domestic pets, domesticated animals and many birds are 'he' and 'she' are they not?


----------



## Blackleaf

diegodbs said:
			
		

> If some people consider grammatical gender a sign of a sexist culture, it is their problem but not mine. We (and the rest of languages with grammatical gender) can easily understand the difference between sex and gender.


 
Surely having NO grammatical gender is sexist.

In English, we have a few problems with having no grammatical gender.

Think of this - What if you were on a train and you discovered that someone had left their hat on a seat?  Now, you don't know who the hat belongs to.  So, when telling the person next to you that someone has forgotten their hat, how would you tell them?  Sometimes we say: "Someone has left HIS hat on the train."  But the person who left the hat could be a woman!  Other times, we might say: "Someone left HER hat on the train."  But the person who left the hat could be a man.  Mostly, though, we use "their" to avoid having to use "he" or "she".  So we say: "Someone has left THEIR hat on the train."  But even using "their" is wrong because it should be a plural word.  What we need in English is a word that means the same as "his", "her" and "their" but doesn't refer to a female person or a male person or a group of people.  In French or Spanish, this problem doesn't exist.

See what I mean?  That's one of the problems we have in English because we don't have grammatical gender.  Languages that DON'T have grammatical gender are probably the "sexist" ones.


----------



## Blackleaf

roxcyn said:
			
		

> I was reading an English Grammar book---and something was very interesting that struck me: Old English had gender (words had gender just as in Romance language today), and there was even different verb conjugations for each subject. But it disappeared. I thought that was very interesting to read.


 
Old English - 

se cwic cyning - the living king

seo cwicu cwen - the living queen.
------------------------------------------

There are a number of theories as to why English lost its gender.

I'll have to post the whole article as I can't post the link - 




From Grammatical to Natural Gender 

by Jesse Archibald-Barber 

copyright 2001 


Gender can be a complicated category of language, and language change. To help clarify the issue, it is important to distinguish two types of gender systems, one according to grammatical conventions, the other according to natural conventions. The traditional theory holds that at one time English had a grammatical gender system, but made the transition to a natural gender system “in the East Midlands of England by the early twelfth century” (Smith 130). However, recent scholarship by Hans Platzer critiques the traditional theory, revealing that the issue is much more complex. 

*Moderator Edit:*  Please see WR Rules regarding copyright rules.  No more than four sentences allowed in any post.  This is in keeping with "fair use" regulations of US copyright law.


----------



## Blackleaf

maxiogee said:
			
		

> How would the average person determine the sex of a snail? Hell, I had difficulty determining the sex of my son's rabbit some years back.


 
Isn't that one reason why, like I said, most animals in English are referred to as "it" and not their sex?

People don't call snails "he" if it's a male snail or "she" if it's a female snail. Snails are just called "it." The natural gender of English, contrary to believe, doesn't doesn't label all male things as "he" and all female things as "she".







> Domestic pets, domesticated animals and many birds are 'he' and 'she' are they not?


 
I said most animals, not all animals. But domestic animals can also be called "it."


----------



## Blackleaf

ireney said:
			
		

> Well, this is a very interesting discussion! All I can say is that
> 
> a) It's even more fun if you have 3 genders, 4 declensions, and a different ending for each person of a verb and 3 verb moods (modern Greek that is)


 
Not to English-speakers, it isn't.

We're lucky.  We can go through adolescence whether worrying whether a certain words is masculine, feminine or neuter.


----------



## Outsider

*Blackleaf*, I think what you wrote about the gender of animals is arguable. It makes sense if you assume that the classification scheme is supposed to be male/female/other, but what if it is male person / female person / other?

Then snails _should_ be referred to as "it", since they are not normally treated as people...

Although, as a matter of trivia, snails are hermaphrodite. 



			
				Blackleaf said:
			
		

> From Grammatical to Natural Gender
> 
> by Jesse Archibald-Barber
> 
> copyright 2001


That article was mentioned earlier in the thread.


----------



## karuna

I think that the grammatical gender is rooted deeply in mythology. In ancient times when people viewed all things as representations of gods and goddesses, it made sense to identify the sex of each phenomena. Nowadays in many cases it may be just an archaic attribute, still it is very useful in the language system. It is like as if language is describing interaction between masculine and feminine powers. 

Modern Latvian is largely an artificial construct of about 100 years ago when language reformers invented hundreds of new words to make possible for Latvian language to be fully used in science, art, administration etc; instead of borrowing such words from other languages. Their work was very successful and nowadays each linguist considers his or her duty to invent at least one word in the name of enriching Latvian language. Unfortunately talents are rare and attempts to introduce neologisms by administrative means are very much oppossed by people. 

The famous example is hotly debated "euro". Linguists tried to introduce _eira _that is declinable noun, however, most people chose to say and write _eiro_. The reason was that this currency was already perceived as masculine. It was not a problem to change the spelling or pronunciation but gender change was too drastic to be accepted.


----------



## estrella de mar

natasha2000 said:
			
		

> When there is something in target language that does not exist in your language, it is normal that is harder to understand and therefore to learn. For me, the hard thing are articles, since they do not exist in my language. But I don't judge if they should be there or not in English or Spanish, I just try to learn when and how to use them, even though I am passing a much harder time than someone whos mother tongue has them....


 
That's one of the things I love about learning languages - the linguistic and cultural differences. I hate the subjunctive tense   and it can sometimes be difficult to remember the gender of a word, but that's part of the interest for me, and the challenge of dominating the language.

I can also see the point of view that some people may take about a "sexist" attitude, especially in many Spanish/Latinamerican/Italian-speaking countries where there it can be perceived that a sexist attitude may exist in society, because if one is uncertain of a noun's gender, or it is plural, it returns to the masculine. (Please don't think I necessarily agree with that, but I think that perception may exist.)


----------



## Cnaeius

estrella de mar said:
			
		

> That's one of the things I love about learning languages - the linguistic and cultural differences. I hate the subjunctive tense  and it can sometimes be difficult to remember the gender of a word, but that's part of the interest for me, and the challenge of dominating the language.
> 
> I can also see the point of view that some people may take about a "sexist" attitude, especially in many Spanish/Latinamerican/Italian-speaking countries where there it can be perceived that a sexist attitude may exist in society, because if one is uncertain of a noun's gender, or it is plural, it returns to the masculine. (Please don't think I necessarily agree with that, but I think that perception may exist.)


 
It is not sexism, there is a specific linguistic reason for that. In Latin the neuter signed also the words that were considered neither masculine nor feminine. The Latin neuter in romance languages has been resolved more or less into the masculin gender because it was morphologically nearer. E.g: _bonus_ is morphologically nearer to _bonum_ than to _bona_. So in italian, as example, buono--> bonus & bonum; buona --> bona. 
Ciao


----------



## estrella de mar

Cnaeius said:
			
		

> It is not sexism, there is a specific linguistic reason for that. In Latin the neuter signed also the words that were considered neither masculine nor feminine. The Latin neuter in romance languages has been resolved more or less into the masculin gender because it was morphologically nearer. E.g: _bonus_ is morphologically nearer to _bonum_ than to _bona_. So in italian, as example, buono--> bonus & bonum; buona --> bona.
> Ciao


 
I didn't know that - that's interesting. I love knowing stuff like that about language!


----------



## Blackleaf

Outsider said:
			
		

> Then snails _should_ be referred to as "it", since they are not normally treated as people...


 
So are ants and beetles and butterflies and birds and most other animals.  It matters not what its sex is.  It's just "it" because it's an animal.


----------



## Outsider

Why do I get the feeling you've missed my point?


----------



## unefemme1

Brioche said:
			
		

> English no longer has grammatical gender.
> English pronouns/nouns refect the _*sex* _of person or animal.
> 
> Some people refer to this as "natural gender".
> 
> Gender is not a problem for native speakers. It seems totally natural to them.
> There is no "reason" for gender, any more than there is a "reason" for verbs to have tenses and conjugations; or for nouns to have case; or for adjectives to agree.
> 
> Chinese has none of these features, and the Chinese have no difficulty communicating among themselves.


 
Exactly so! For Chinese, there are some things we don't have that we do in the English language. We do have male/female words for 'he/she', but as for plurals, its non-existent. In English we would say matches, fishes or tables, but in Chinese we just use the words in their singular form. I'm sure I've explained this already elsewhere...

For nouns, in French only certain nouns require a capital letter, such as place names, names of people and other 
'important' nouns. Months of the year, days of the week don't require capital letters for some reason.


----------



## Neva

Hi, everybody. That is an interesting thread, and there is something I'd like to add to the discussion. 
For some reason I had to learn an enourmous lot of academic books on the subject, and I must say everything mentioned here about the "purpose" of assigning gender to inanimate objects is quite true. Yet, actually there are no exact theories explaining the origin of gender. But there is still one more point that is missing in this discussion thread. It is that at present the category of gender is something that kind of serves to keep the nation's culture through centuries. 
Some researchers have shown that due to the fact that each gender class is associated with certain meanings (e.g. masculine = strong, rude, hard, etc; feminine = weak, capricious, etc), grammatical gender helps fix, keep and "forward" each nation's view of the surrounding world. For instance, I once read polling data where speakers of Spanish (if I am not mistaken, I may have forgotten which language that was) were asked to explain the way they see a key (feminine in that language). They described their notion of the object as "golden, light, beautiful, small". Whereas for Russians, in whose language this object is of masculine gender, it is "heavy, metal, of hard material, etc". 
So this is one more fact we should bear in mind: gender also forms our vision of the outside world as predertermined by our native language. Doesn't it?


----------



## Neva

Hmm... There is also an idea come to my mind. Don't you think it would be interesting to create a separate thread relating to associations that speakers of different languages have with different objects? Like the pole I mentioned in the previous post. 
I guess it would be even more interesting if native speakers of English participated in the pole - sometimes (mostly in emotional contexts) English does show instances of assigning human gender to inanimate objects, which there are plenty examples of both in literature (a spoon being feminine in Tom Robbins's "Skinny Legs and All") and in everyday speech (for instance, a woodman calling a falling tree "she", etc).
If anyone is interested in the suggestion it would be wonderful to know what ideas you have as to whether different threads should be created for speakers of different languages (for them not to be influenced by descriptions of objects introduced by speakers of other languages), or for speakers of one group of languages (like Romanis or Germanic, etc), or whether one polling thread should be created for speakers of all languages, and which objects it is interesting to put on the polling list. Would anyone here be interested in it?


----------



## ceci '79

Pivra said:
			
		

> I would like to know the reason of the existance of genders in languages. Especially in Romance and classical Indic languages. The Pali and Sanskrit's legacy of genders still exist in Thai but is very rare (for nouns and adjectives but not particles or pronouns). In English there is almost to verb or noun changing of genders. What is the whole purpose of having them anyway??


 
The river Danube is feminine in German (_die Donau_). This could be due to the fact that at first is was considered to be an animistic divinity (water). Later the Celtis might have identified the river (and water in general) with the Celtic goddess of fertility, Dana. This might explain the feminine gender. Not all rivers are feminine in German.

Is the river Don feminine or masculine in Russian?


----------



## estrella de mar

Neva said:
			
		

> There are no exact theories explaining the origin of gender. But there is still one more point that is missing in this discussion thread. It is that at present the category of gender is something that kind of serves to keep the nation's culture through centuries.
> Some researchers have shown that due to the fact that each gender class is associated with certain meanings (e.g. masculine = strong, rude, hard, etc; feminine = weak, capricious, etc), *grammatical gender helps fix, keep and "forward" each nation's view of the surrounding world.* For instance, I once read polling data where speakers of Spanish (if I am not mistaken, I may have forgotten which language that was) were asked to explain the way they see a key (feminine in that language). They described their notion of the object as "golden, light, beautiful, small". Whereas for Russians, in whose language this object is of masculine gender, it is "heavy, metal, of hard material, etc".
> So this is one more fact we should bear in mind: gender also forms our vision of the outside world as predertermined by our native language. Doesn't it?


 
Hi everyone. I think that the above is very true. As I mentioned above, I think that many people see cultures such as Italian and Spanish as having quite "macho" cultures. So the Spanish language's rule of reverting any undetermined plural to the masculine plural (i.e. hermano + hermana = herman*o*s) could perhaps be seen to be "sexist". I think that it is not so much a case of sexism, although it does perhaps indicate a culture which tends to see life from a masculine viewpoint.


----------



## Neva

2 ceci '79:
both the Danube and the Don are masculine in Russian. But I know that names of rivers date back to very old times when they had some meaning which at that time had certain gender.


----------



## estrella de mar

*Regarding the genders of certain nouns, I love this explanation as to why a ship is known as "she"*​ 
 
 
*Why is a ship called a She?*
*There is always a great deal of bustle around her
There is always a gang of men about
She has a waist and stays
It takes a lot of paint to keep her good looking
It is not the initial expense that breaks you - it is the upkeep!
She can be decked out
It takes an experienced man to handle her correctly
And, without a man at the helm, she is uncontrollable
She shows her topside but hides her bottom and
When coming into port, always heads for the buoys!*​


----------



## Neva

Yeah, it's fun. Is it your own?


----------



## estrella de mar

No, I wish I was that  inventive and funny!  I first saw it on a tea-towl my mother owned and so I looked it up on the internet for you all!

Does anyone else have any explanations (funny or otherwise) for the genders of certain nouns?


----------



## Layzie

The beauty of gender is what makes spanish flow. No way I'd get rid of it!

L*a* carret*a* roj*a* 

Look how the words agree with each other! Rolls right off the tongue.


----------



## Blackleaf

They'll roll of easier without having to figure out which gender to use.


----------



## estrella de mar

Layzie said:
			
		

> The beauty of gender is what makes spanish flow. No way I'd get rid of it!
> 
> L*a* carret*a* roj*a*
> 
> Look how the words agree with each other! Rolls right off the tongue.


 
I agree! I love the way Spanish sounds when spoken!


----------



## karuna

To those who say that the gender of words is hard to remember, just think about the last person who you were introduced in casual circumstances and whose name you no longer can remember. But you can remember the sex of that person, right? In the same way while learning other languages it may require some imagination to be applied but the gender is the easiest thing to remember when learning new words.


----------



## Benjy

I can't even begin to undertand how you can compare those two situations in a meaningful way.

Yesterday I learnt a word that was feminine, only I don't remember what it was. At least I know it was feminine though!


----------



## karuna

Benjy said:
			
		

> I can't even begin to undertand how you can compare those two situations in a meaningful way.
> 
> Yesterday I learnt a word that was feminine, only I don't remember what it was. At least I know it was feminine though!



I mean, you learn a new word in another language which takes some effort by itself. To use it properly or even to substitute this word with a pronoun you need to remember not only the nominative form but also the gender, in case it is not possible to infer this aspect from the ending alone. Even if you forgot the word but remember the gender you can ask the proper question: _what was that?_ In Latvian: _kas _*tas*_ bija? _(masculine noun) or _kas *tā* bija? _(feminine noun)


----------



## ireney

Anyway, although it may sound cruel, no language was created with the the question of how easy it is for foreigners to learn it foremost in the people's minds and, for native speakers, gender is not a problem; 

However, I would appreciate it very much, thank you, if the French changed their nouns' gender to either coincide in all cases or be the opposite in all cases of their Greek counterparts (for those Greek words that are neuter could they kindly choose either the male or the female?) (You understand that it is simply _unthinkable_ for us to make any changes)


----------



## garypine

Caio tutti,

I am new to this forum. This is my first posting. I have been studying Italian for only four months. Is the first foreign language that I have tried to learn.

My question is very basic: In Italian (and other languages), why do nouns have a gender? What is the informational value? What would be lost if, for example, "La tovola" had no gender and was not a female noun and was just another noun as in English?

I am determined to learn Italian and, so far, I am throughly enjoying this wonderful langage.

Thank you advance,

garypine


----------



## Paulfromitaly

I'm not an expert about languages origins, but I think that the fact that nouns have a gender is common to each Neo-latin language.
What would be lost if  English interrogative form had no need of auxilary verbs like Italian? i.e. "hai una caramella?"
What is the informational value of auxiliary verbs?


----------



## irene.acler

garypine said:


> Ciao a tutti,
> 
> I am new to this forum. This is my first posting. I have been studying Italian for only four months. Is the first foreign language that I have tried to learn.
> 
> My question is very basic: In Italian (and other languages), why do nouns have a gender? What is the informational value? What would be lost if, for example, "La tavola" had no gender and was not a female noun and was just another noun as in English?



Well, this is not such an easy question! It's a linguistic issue, indeed.
You must know that there isn't a relationship between the noun itself and its gender. I'm talking about the signified and the signifier (De Saussure) (in Italian significato e significante):  a sign is composed of the signifier and the signified, which are concepts that cannot be considered as separate entities.
Moreover, we can say that the relationship between a sign and its extralinguistic denotative meaning is arbitrary, therefore there isn't a causal relationship between a word and the object it refers to. I'm saying this to stress the fact that there isn't a relationship between the word "tavola", just to give you an example, and the object "tavola" it refers to.
In Italian, and in many other languages, we have the gender to refer to nouns, but we cannot predict the gender a priori, it's a theorical linguistic issue.


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## Akire72

I'm glad you chose Italian, if your problem is gender. Think of German, they have female, male AND neutral!!! and there is no rule, you have to remember it by heart when you learn a new word (in Italian normally -a ending is female and -o/-e ending is male)!!! Good luck, that's not the most difficult thing of my mothertongue after all!


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## kap

Why have gender?

It adds spice to language!
It adds colour to intonation, it shapes the words on a page, feeds the poet and creates intrigue for the novelist.
It is one of the phenomena that make mankind an unfathomable beast.
Why have gender? Why on Earth not?


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## MünchnerFax

A turkish friend of mine (Turkish doesn't have genders like English) asked me once: «Well, what do Italians think is so womanly in water?» (as _water_ is feminine in Italian: _acqua_). I'm sorry I don't have the answer to this; however, I've always been wondering why English does not have genders, if this may console you...


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## duckie

Languages have gender in order to frustrate the living daylights out of any foreigner trying to learn them. This is one of the reasons English is such a lovely language to learn, with a much larger confidence factor for even the complete beginner.

Some languages even have the most absurd of all genders, such as Danish: a common gender and a neutral gender - none of which are of any explanatory use whatsoever and completely and utterly arbitrary.

It is wonderful that English happens to be the de-facto international language as it is exceedingly easy to learn compared to most other languages.


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## garypine

Grazie infinite to all who responded.

Quello (or Che?) stato di far ridere (sorry for my crude Italian but I am just learning).

What you all seem to be saying - and I embrace this to my heart - is this: To use colloquial English - and I would have no idea of how to translate this into Italain - This is Italian fella! This is the way it is. Chill out, suck it up and enjoy! Peace.

garypine


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## Hockey13

Akire72 said:


> I'm glad you chose Italian, if your problem is gender. Think of German, they have female, male AND neutral!!! and there is no rule, you have to remember it by heart when you learn a new word (in Italian normally -a ending is female and -o/-e ending is male)!!! Good luck, that's not the most difficult thing of my mothertongue after all!


 
In German, rules are usually associated with the feminine. Nouns ending in E or "-schaft" or "-ung" are almost always feminine.

Also, in German you have 16 different forms:

Nominative: Masc, fem, neut, plur
Accusative: Masc, fem, neut, plur
Dative: Masc, fem, neut, plur
Genitive: Masc, fem, neut, plur

In Italian, it is much, much easier. In English, it is even easier. However, in Finnish, it is nearly impossible.


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## duckie

I agree, German is a nightmare  It's fairly logically constructed, so if you have an analytical approach to language (I don't), you can generally go by the tables, but while actually speaking it's difficult to analyze the sentences real-time and flip in the right inflections or conjungations or whatever it's called 

I'm glad to hear Italian is easier since I'm just beginning.. it's my understanding that the temporals are hard in Italian though.


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## MünchnerFax

duckie said:


> I agree, German is a nightmare  It's fairly logically constructed, [...] but while actually speaking it's difficult to analyze the sentences real-time and flip in the right inflections or conjungations or whatever it's called



I can't agree completely... It's just a matter of practice, like every language. Of course it may be difficult at the beginning (and used to be for me, indeed); but when you have acquired a certain experience with the spoken language, you can manage to say the right case in real-time, with no need for pauses to choose the right article... And you may also dare guess a case in dubious constructions, with a relevant probability to get it right!


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## Etcetera

Akire72 said:


> I'm glad you chose Italian, if your problem is gender. Think of German, they have female, male AND neutral!!! and there is no rule, you have to remember it by heart when you learn a new word (in Italian normally -a ending is female and -o/-e ending is male)!!! Good luck, that's not the most difficult thing of my mothertongue after all!


Same in Russian, we too have three genders in our language, but in this sense it's a bit easier than German - there are certain rules and so on. 
As for the point of gender for words - I loved Kap's reply.  Frankly, when I just started to learn English, it surprised my greatly that in this language words doesn't have gender. I still wonder why. 
By the way, don't think that it's easier to study Italian for me, a native speaker of Russian. A noun which is masculine in Russian may be feminine in Italian (for example, the Russian дом and the Italian 'casa'), and vice versa. That's really confusing!


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## konungursvia

Gender originated in animism, but became purely grammatical, and survived because it allows very high-resolution and accurate constructions. It's not so different from differences in number (book/books, this/these); do you not find these helpful? What if a native of Chinese wrote and said there was no purpose to grammatical number, nor was there any need in English for verb tenses ("Yesterday I go" is clear enough by context). So gender survived as a multiplicity of noun categories, more useful for example than our "the former/ the latter" in specifying something already mentioned.


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## duckie

MünchnerFax said:


> I can't agree completely... It's just a matter of practice, like every language. Of course it may be difficult at the beginning (and used to be for me, indeed); but when you have acquired a certain experience with the spoken language, you can manage to say the right case in real-time, with no need for pauses to choose the right article... And you may also dare guess a case in dubious constructions, with a relevant probability to get it right!



I did study German for quite a long time and got to a decent level, but it never came naturally. Of course, experience with certain sentence constructions mean you can hear when it sounds right, and you can often take a qualified guess. But it never felt easy or natural for me, unlike other languages.

I'm sure if you live in Germany and speak it all the time you'll pick it up, I just found it to be a pain to learn, much more so than other languages I've toyed with.


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## duckie

konungursvia said:


> Gender originated in animism, but became purely grammatical, and survived because it allows very high-resolution and accurate constructions. It's not so different from differences in number (book/books, this/these); do you not find these helpful? What if a native of Chinese wrote and said there was no purpose to grammatical number, nor was there any need in English for verb tenses ("Yesterday I go" is clear enough by context). So gender survived as a multiplicity of noun categories, more useful for example than our "the former/ the latter" in specifying something already mentioned.



Please provide some examples of how it allows for more accurate constructions. I have grammatical genders in my native language and I don't see how they help anything in terms of accuracy compared to the grammatically gender-less English language.


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## Abu Bishr

Hi Guys

My view on the issue is that I see that people perceive things in the world through their senses, and experience feelings and emotions, and think thoughts which they would like to inform others about. In other words, they have a need to describe their perceptions, experiences and thoughts and communicate them to others. As others can't perceive their perceptions, feel their experiences, and think their thoughts, they try and find symbols (oral, written or otherwise) to describe these things using a medium (sound or print) to send these symbols through to their recipients who receive these symbols via hearing or sight, decode them and interpret them (based on their own case histories).

In short and very simplistically put, language is a symbolic representation or description of reality (as experienced by sender and recipient). So in describing a certain state of affairs using linguistic symbols, the "founders" and "coiners" of these linguistic symbols have a choice as to how much detail and distinctions they would like to include in their description. Some languages, thus, opt to include distinctions of gender and their descriptions and others opt for gender free description. "Gender" is but one type of distinction, other types are "number" or "subject versus object" for which declension or case is used.

In other words, languages have different ways of describing things. Language is a form of expression in the same way that art is a form of expression.

Disclaimer: Now I am aware of the fact that each of my abovementioned points is contentious and has been debated in past or present academic discourses: philosophy of language, cultural theory, critical theory, communication theory, hermeneutics, semiotics, structuralism, feminist and gender studies, postmodernism, poststructuralsim (esp. the latter three) and so on.

To give you an idea of just how contentious this particular view is. Consider Wittgenstein's opening statement in his famous "Tractatus". "The world is all that is the case. The world is the totality of facts", and later on he says: "a proposition (i.e. a sentence in the logical sense) is a picture of reality". Later on in life he dismissed all of these ideas in his famous "Philosophically Investigations" which, I think, was posthumously published.

Nevertheless, to view sentences as pictures depicting and describing reality still holds merit in my view, and might be closer to the more common-sense view of language.

So to bring the discussion back to the original question, I would say that *all languages are pictures of reality (or a certain perceived reality) except that they differ in the amount of detail that they express*. *Including in this detail is gender distinction, and the different ways in which it is depicted.*

I hope all of this makes sense.


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## duckie

Abu, I agree - my objection is simply that in most cases the added detail of gender does not lead to added clarity or depth in the language. It mainly tends to add complexity without contributing much (except for a perceived beauty, which will of course be subjective).


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## sarcie

duckie said:


> Please provide some examples of how it allows for more accurate constructions. I have grammatical genders in my native language and I don't see how they help anything in terms of accuracy compared to the grammatically gender-less English language.


 
I think in this case, konungursvia meant the relative "vagueness" of English constructions using "it" to refer to an object.
In German, the different forms of the articles according to both gender and function in a sentence allow you to deconstruct the sentence to pick out a very specific meaning, even in extremely convoluted constructions (which are plentiful in German!). I find that English speakers refer a lot more on context to know what an "it" refers to.

Probably a little off-topic, so apologies in advance, but just as a pick-me-up for all those German-learners out there: my German colleagues have about 5-10 "heated discussions"  a day on whether a particular word is "der, die or das" (masc/fem/neut)...


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## Abu Bishr

A problem with the picture theory of language that I presented in my previous post is that in certain languages like Arabic, gender extends beyond that which can biologically be classified as male and female. In fact, most nouns in Arabic (if not all), are classified as either masculine or feminine, and these nouns would included objects that cannot be described in terms of gender like inanimate objects for example. To signify inanimate or gender neutral objects in German, I think, a third category was coined called "neuter" to signify these objects. But even in German, I believe, these distinctions are not always consistent.

Here I think it comes down to the "founders" of the particular and their preference for two classes of nouns to signify all objects, three classes or no classes. So while Arabic only two classes (masculine and feminine) have been selected by the "founders" they were thus "forced" to use these two classes for objects which would otherwise be classified as neuter. But then again (to use my overstimulated imagination again) could it be possible that the original "founders" of Arabic somehow associated neutral objects which they classified as masculine with something from the male world, and neutral objects which they classified as feminine with something from the female world. A typical example is "earth" in Arabic as is the case in English is feminine because of nurturing and providing and caring for those who live on it as mothers would. This is only speculative of course and one will have to try and explain each noun denoting a neuter object in that fashion. Whist interesting, it is nevertheless, speculative unless clear correlations can be found between two objects, the one neutral and the other gender-specific.

Moreover, the situation in Arabic is complicated by the existence of feminine signs which by their mere addition to a noun make it feminine. This applies even in cases where the referent is a male. So while something can be feminine in form it can be masculine in meaning. By the way, classical Arabic scholars have written major works attempting to explain the "why's" of Arabic, while some of these explanations are really intersting some are clearly very speculative and sometimes even far-fetched. I have one such book, and I'll see what explanation it gives for gender distinctions and masculine and feminine names in Arabic.


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## duckie

sarcie, I agree on the function part (kasus), which does allow for some very complex sentences that are still very precise. I just don't see how gender really helps, because it's completely random what genders the words in a given sentence happen to have anyway. For instance, if we have a sentence with two nouns of two different genders, then it's helpful because the article will 'double specify' them and therefore we don't need context when we refer to them like we would in English. However, that's just a coincidence, because the nouns may as well have the same gender, in which case there's no clarity to be gained.

I'm surprised that your German (native I assume?) colleagues have that many issues with figuring out which gender is correct.. I think that only happens a few times _per year_ for me in Danish (although we only have two genders).


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## duckie

Abu,

In German (as well as other languages that use gender that I'm personally familiar with) the male/female/neutral forms have for the most part lost their relevance relative to the words they describe. For instance, in German as mentioned earlier most words that end with 'e' are feminine. In Italian, most words that end with 'a' are feminine. That doesn't really have anything to do with the meaning of the words at all. Girl in German (Mädchen) is neutral gender, while boy is masculine. In Danish there's a 'common' gender (for both masculine and feminine) and a neutral gender, but there's no relation whatsoever to the meaning of the words.

What are the feminine signs you mentioned in Arabic? I don't really know anything about Arabic, but it sounds interesting..

Edit - also, I don't think one can talk about 'founders' of a language, except for artificial ones like Esperanto. Languages evolve as a product of the people that use them, and although they can be guided to some degree, through most of history they probably haven't been.


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## BlueWolf

Genders exist mainly for historical reason.

Now I don't want to sound unpolite, but some languages (like the "so easy English") has an impossible spelling of the words, which is based on historical origins of words. That's absolutely absurd and illogical, but it survives because people don't love to change.

And changing the writing sistem is actually very easy, compared to changing the way the people talk.

As already said the gender is something absolutely normal and easy for native speakers (at least, in Romance languages), so why would they have felt the need to change it during the history? But the disappearance of neutral gender in Romance languages is an interesting example of how the genders evolve.
Neuter in Latin usually ended in the nominative singular in *-um* (while musculine in *-us* and feminine in *-a*) and in the nominative plural in *-a* (while masculine in *-i* and feminine in *-æ*). In almost all the Romance language the similarity between the ends *-um* (neuter) and *-us* (masculine) brough the natives to be used to consider neuter names as masculine ones. On the other hand, few neuter nouns used mainly in plural be felt instead as feminine (*-a* was both the neuter plural and the femine singular). The Romance languages which still preserve "neuter" nouns (that are Romanian and few Italian nouns), they are considered masculine nouns in the singular and feminine ones in the plural.

At the end, I have to say I feel uneasy when I start a chat with a new person in English, because I can never understand if they are a he or a she. In Italian on the other hand, I usually understand it fastly and without asking it, seeing how they decline the adjectives refered to themself.*

*This isn't defence to the use of genders.  But it's quite usefull in writing.


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## Abu Bishr

I admit that a diachronic study as opposed to a synchronic study of language is by made no means straight forward. You would have noticed that I have placed the word "founders" in inverted commas so as to suggest a generic rather than a specific group of people who introduce new words into a language (whether borrowed from other langages or coined) and which through convention and tacit approval and agreement get used in that language.

Take Arabic for example, where the modern standard form differs from the more classical form mostly from the point of view of vocabulary. Everyday you find new words being coined or old words being recoined for new meanings that have found their way into the Arab culture and world. These words with their respective meanings are foreign to the classical Arabs. These words include terms and expressions used in the natural, social, human sciences as well as technology, sport, entertainment, and so on. How did these words and expressions come to be used in Arabic. Of course mostly though translations where the translator or writer has to coin there and then a word for a particular meaning, and which through conventional use become accepted into Arabic. Take the word Arabic word "fabrakah" which I once heard an Arab friend of mine use to mean "fabrication", and also the now Arabic word "cansalah" to mean "to cancel". How did they make their way into Arabic. Did they just simply evolve or did others introduce them into Arabic and people accepted their use, and that is how they came to be accepted. I suppose media popularization of a word has a lot to do with it, and also the more influential the source the quicker the word might come to be accepted. Obviously, I'm putting forward some kind of hypothesis which can either be verified or falsified through research into peoples languages.

Anyhow, I admit, that it's a little more difficult to explain the language system (or "langue" in the Sausserian sense) in this way (which includes gender distinctions), and there might be no way of actually proving how certain things in language came about, and can therefore only be speculative and hypothetical. Nevertheless, my main point was only to show how gender distinction can be explained by using the "language as picture of reality" model.


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## duckie

BlueWolf, could you give an example in Italian of the declination of adjectives revealing the gender when talking about oneself?

Abu, how about the feminine sign you mentioned earlier, what is that?

I just realized this thread has been merged with an older one and much of this discussion has already taken place in the previous pages..


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## Abu Bishr

duckie said:


> Abu, how about the feminine sign you mentioned earlier, what is that?


 
There are three feminine signs in Arabic and they are all suffixes ("-ah", "aa", and "aa'") the last two are long "a" vowels with the second of them ending in a glotal stop.

E.g. 

sayyaarah (car), zawjah (wife), jameelah (fem. for beautiful), khaleefah (male caliph), Hamzah (name of man)

hamraa' (fem. for red), 'amyaa' (fem. for blind), Zakariyyaa' (Zacarias)

These are only two sets of examples as you can see, indicating feminine signs.

There is no such such thing as a masculine sign but rather the absence of the feminine sign is an indication that the word is masculine. In other words, the masculine is the unmarked form and feminine the marked form, since it that which has to be marked to *distinguish* it from the masculine such that masculine remains unmarked.

On another point (more along the lines of Bluewolf), I think that when two English speakers of opposite genders converse over the phone, a third party is not able to pick out the gender of the person on the otherside of the line unless a distinctly feminine name is used or some other contextual factor. Whereas in Arabic you just have to wait for the pronouns or adjectives or nouns that are being used to address the person on the other side. So you would never ask the question: Were you speaking to a male or female? providing that you know Arabic of course.


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## BlueWolf

duckie said:


> BlueWolf, could you give an example in Italian of the declination of adjectives revealing the gender when talking about oneself?



Well, for example:
Sono stat*o* a Roma una volta. = _I've been in Rome once._ (A "he" is speaking)
Sono stat*a* a Roma una volta. = _I've been in Rome once. _(A "she" is speaking)

As you see, this information isn't given in the English translation.


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## duckie

Abu, but aren't those just normal grammatical genders? I must be missing something..

BlueWolf, thank you, I haven't gotten that far yet and didn't know if you did it like that


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## BlueWolf

duckie said:


> BlueWolf, thank you, I haven't gotten that far yet and didn't know if you did it like that



No problem, duckie. 

However, as Abu made notice, genders cause more problems in English than in language with grammatical genders, since in English you have no clue about the sex of a third person, and when you have to choose between "he" and "she" you're just in troubles.


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## Abu Bishr

duckie said:


> Abu, but aren't those just normal grammatical genders? I must be missing something..


 
Okay, let me put it like this:

Masculine  : jameel ,    kareem,    shareef

Feminine   : jameelah, kareemah,  shareefah

The suffix in red is called a feminine sign because it distinguishes the feminine from the masculine. Notice that there is no masculine sign but rather the lack of a feminine sign is a the masculine sign. If this is something that you are already familiar with, then I don't know what is that you thought I meant by "feminine signs".


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## duckie

BlueWolf,

Well, I'm used to the English version because it's similar in Danish and it has never been a problem for me (to any real extent anyway). I do, however, agree that this is something that adds precision to language. It's just not necessary to give nouns gender to do this, one could simply limit it to people since they're the only ones that require a gender.


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## duckie

Abu, ok, I think I see what you're saying now. So you use both the 'female sign' for indicating if a noun is male or female as well as whether a name is.. but not all female names have a female sign at the end, do they? Mariam, for instance..


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## BlueWolf

duckie said:


> BlueWolf,
> 
> Well, I'm used to the English version because it's similar in Danish and it has never been a problem for me (to any real extent anyway). I do, however, agree that this is something that adds precision to language. It's just not necessary to give nouns gender to do this, one could simply limit it to people since they're the only ones that require a gender.



In spoken language maybe, but in the forum often some members choose a name that you can't understand which is their gender. So I have to write the full name instead of he or she when I speak about them, because I don't know which using.


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## duckie

That's true 

Something that's annoying me a bit with Italian so far is that it's impossible to tell who you're talking about if you say something like 'ha un professore Francese?' 'Ha un libro italiano?' It could mean do you (thou) or he or she have a French teacher/italian book, but it's not specified what is meant because you skip the marker. I suppose it's not a problem in actual use, but  I don't understand why it's done this way when it makes things more confusing..


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## BlueWolf

Well, I actually never have this problem. Italians always make the sentence clear. For example, if I'm talking of a third feminine person with someone I adress with "Lei", and if saying "Ha un libro?" you can't understand if the subject is "lei" or "Lei", I'd say "[name of the person] ha un libro?" for the former and "Lei ha un libro?" for the latter.
The informal second person singular exist in many languages (even in English once), so it means it's often felt as a necessary.


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## Abu Bishr

duckie said:


> Abu, ok, I think I see what you're saying now. So you use both the 'female sign' for indicating if a noun is male or female as well as whether a name is.. but not all female names have a female sign at the end, do they? Mariam, for instance..


 
Well, the feminine sign is used for females in the vast majority of cases, their use for males is very minimal. The feminine sign is almost always a sign indicating femininity and is therefore called as such. Moreover, in Arabic there are two references to femininity: in form and in meaning. A noun can be feminine in both form and meaning as seen in "Aishah" (a name of a female), or in form only but not in meaning which is not very common as seen in "Hamzah" (a name of a male), or in meaning only but not in form as seen in "Maryam" or "Mariam". So there you go. Nouns referring to males do not normally have the feminine sign suffixed to them, and where that is the case its incidence is really very minimal.


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## duckie

BlueWolf, I'm not sure what you refer to in your last sentence.. when using informal 'you' (second person) there's no problem. But if you have to put in the name to specify the person it becomes less elegant (in my opinion) than if you can simply say his or her and so on.. If I understand it correctly you only do that when you very specifically want to state if it's one or the other?

Example: Peter and Anna have each their own books. His books are blue. Her books are red. Would you say 'Peter's books' or use 'lei' in Italian to specify that it's his books?


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## duckie

Abu, fairly similar to other languages with male and female gender then, except you also extend it to most names..


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## Thomas F. O'Gara

I've always been intrigued by the fact that the only two language families I know of that have gender are the Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic (i.e, Semitic, for the most part). Ural-Altaic languages (Hungarian, Turkish, Finnish) do not have gender, nor do Chinese, Japanese or Thai. While these languages sometimes have pronouns that are gender specific, that is not quite the same thing as nouns having gender. The Native American languages I've worked with (Maya, Navaho, Lakota, Aymara, Quechua) have no gender either.

The paper that one writer submitted gave some theories about the origin of gender. Allow me to express an educated guess by describing a phenomenon in Bantu languages, such as Swahili. These languages group nouns together into a variey of classes - one class may be for diminuitive things, one for people, one for abstract things, etc., - the number of classificatory groups vary from language to language, and some have obviously coalesced. These nouns require their verbs to agree with them in classification.

Something like this may be the origin of gender in languages. There may have at one time in the distant past been a variety of noun classes in Indo-European languages, but as time went on they coalesced into just the three genders that we are familiar with. This may also explain why Latin retained five declensions of nouns, whereas Classical Greek dropped to only three, which were based more or less on phonetic requirements.


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## BlueWolf

duckie said:


> BlueWolf, I'm not sure what you refer to in your last sentence.. when using informal 'you' (second person) there's no problem. But if you have to put in the name to specify the person it becomes less elegant (in my opinion) than if you can simply say his or her and so on.. If I understand it correctly you only do that when you very specifically want to state if it's one or the other?
> 
> Example: Peter and Anna have each their own books. His books are blue. Her books are red. Would you say 'Peter's books' or use 'lei' in Italian to specify that it's his books?



No, you're missing my point. I was talking about that. Look at these sentences:
_Do you have a book? (formal) =  _Ha un libro?
_Does she have a book? = _Ha un libro?
In order to make them clearer (if it's needed), you can use a subject which let you understand if I'm talking about "you" or "she".

You example is about an other thing. It's about possessives.
There the problem is an other. We usually use the possessives like in English, so "his/her book". But in Italian the possissive doesn't show the gender of the owner, but of the thing owned! So in that case you have to think like if you were talking about two boys. You can't distinguish them using "his/her" because they're both males, so you'll use "Peter's book" if confusion is possible.




> The informal second person singular exist in many languages (even in English once), so it means it's often felt as a necessary.


Here I meant the informal one, sorry.


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## duckie

Blue, I don't see what point I missed? We're talking about the same thing as far as I'm concerned.. It just seems to me that the Italian way is a little confusing (at least out of context), exactly because it's omitting information.

Btw, the formal third person 'thou' exists in Danish as well, though it's not used as often as in Italian.


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## BlueWolf

(I said because your example wasn't right for what we were talking about )
I don't see why? Because formal "you" and "she" are equal? They have so different that it's very easy to distinguish them. Singular "you" and plural "you" in English are very more difficult to distinguish.


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## Outsider

More thoughts on grammatical gender.


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## konungursvia

duckie said:


> Please provide some examples of how it allows for more accurate constructions. I have grammatical genders in my native language and I don't see how they help anything in terms of accuracy compared to the grammatically gender-less English language.




 Well in the original Spanish version of Don Quixote I have at home, the back cover has a commentary on the style of a previous translation. (Estilo-m and traduccion-f). While in English we can say "in that of" it is not clear which, in the style of, or in the translation of... And we can certainly not put them together... "in that of that of Gutierrez"; but in Spanish, it is no problem to write: "en el de la de G*", meaning something like "in that of the one by", which is clumsy in English. 

 Another example: in English we can say "the former" and "the latter" to refer to things we have recently mentioned, as long as there are two and it is recent enough to remember which came last. In French, we have "celui-ci, celle-ci, celui-là, celle-là, or four possibilities for saying "this one" or "that one," which can be used together very elegantly. This is one of the many reasons mathematicians have found French to be an excellent language to write in. See what I mean?


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## duckie

konungursvia said:


> Well in the original Spanish version of Don Quixote I have at home, the back cover has a commentary on the style of a previous translation. (Estilo-m and traduccion-f). While in English we can say "in that of" it is not clear which, in the style of, or in the translation of... And we can certainly not put them together... "in that of that of Gutierrez"; but in Spanish, it is no problem to write: "en el de la de G*", meaning something like "in that of the one by", which is clumsy in English.



Sorry, I'm not following (I don't know Spanish), you will have to spell it out for me clearer than that I'm afraid.



konungursvia said:


> Another example: in English we can say "the former" and "the latter" to refer to things we have recently mentioned, as long as there are two and it is recent enough to remember which came last. In French, we have "celui-ci, celle-ci, celui-là, celle-là, or four possibilities for saying "this one" or "that one," which can be used together very elegantly. This is one of the many reasons mathematicians have found French to be an excellent language to write in. See what I mean?



Ah, but that has nothing to do with grammatical gender, does it? I completely agree that your example above helps make a language more accurate. I'm only complaining about grammatical gender in this thread 

BlueWolf, we're probably talking a bit past each other. Here's a thread that may explain more clearly what I mean: http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?p=1442151


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## BlueWolf

duckie said:


> BlueWolf, we're probably talking a bit past each other. Here's a thread that may explain more clearly what I mean: http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?p=1442151


 
Ok, however it doesn't seem to have to do with this topic, I stop myself now.


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## konungursvia

It does have to do with grammatical gender: "celle-ci" and "celui-ci" are the feminine and masculine forms of "this one here".


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## duckie

konungursvia said:


> It does have to do with grammatical gender: "celle-ci" and "celui-ci" are the feminine and masculine forms of "this one here".



Oh, I misunderstood then. Could you provide some specific examples of how it works?

edit - does it work like this: 'this (masculine) thing'; 'this (feminine) thing'; 'these (masculine) things'; 'these (feminine) things'?

If so, I don't see how it's helpful because as I mentioned earlier it's completely random if an object in a given sentence happens to belong to one grammatical gender or another.


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## Outsider

That may be an advantage in itself.


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## duckie

In my opinion it's not a very useful thing to count on (that the genders of the word referred to do in fact differ), I can't think of ever relying on it, rather I'll simply state the object referred to instead of using 'it'.


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## Outsider

But that will make your speech repetitive and monotonous. "The object... the object... the object..."


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## duckie

Given that it's a rarely used sentence construction (needing to point out one specific out of several and there being any potential confusion that needs to be clarified), not really.


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## konungursvia

Well, it is poor style to repeat nouns several times: "This text is about the idea that all men are created equal, and the text also raises the idea that the word 'men' includes women.... etc. 

 It is also confusing to use "this" and "that" and "the latter" more than once in a while. In French, however, there are twice as many ways to say "this" "that" and "the latter", and very often, you can use the gender of a noun to single it out with a feminine "this" or a masculine "this", making legal language easier to make clear in French than in English. Here is an example:

Tout membre peut proposer d'amender une proposition du Conseil lors de l'assemblée générale annuelle. Si l'amendement est rejeté par la majorité des membres, la proposition du Conseil sera décidée par l'assemblée. Mais si l'amendement réunit les suffrages d'au moins les deux tiers de l'assemblée, la proposition du Conseil sera retirée, et *celle-ci*, accompagnée de l'amendement, sera envoyée par la poste à tous les membres, qui pourront voter par retour du courrier. Le résultat sera annoncé aux membres par la même voie. Si la proposition principale du Conseil est rejetée par le vote postal et par le vote des membres réunis en assemblée générale, tout membre peut avancer une nouvelle proposition, laquelle, à condition d'être approuvée par les deux tiers des membres présents, sera envoyée par la poste aux autres membres pour leur décision.

  The use of "celle-ci" refers directly to the proposal, the "proposition" (f); if they had meant at that moment to refer instead to the council, they could have used "celui-ci" because "conseil" (m) is masculine. This would not have been an option in English; in our Shakespearean tongue we can't even use "this" at that spot without being ambiguous, and would have to make use of a repetition of nouns or a more lengthy expression. Does this help?


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## duckie

I'm not sure why you think I'm suggesting using nouns several times, I actually pointed out that the sentence constructions in question are rare..

Anyway, I can't read the French examples without a translation, and I can't think of a similar example myself at the moment (in languages with gender).. in Danish there's a this and that for both genders, but I wouldn't use them like you seem to suggest. Perhaps because the language structure is different.


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## konungursvia

Well I never intended to say gender was necessary, or provided a huge advantage, but it offers a few elegant and precise tools for being clear and concise that are lacking in English (though our language has its advantages as well).


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## Blackleaf

Abu Bishr said:


> On another point (more along the lines of Bluewolf), I think that when two English speakers of opposite genders converse over the phone, a third party is not able to pick out the gender of the person on the otherside of the line unless a distinctly feminine name is used or some other contextual factor.


 
You can tell who is male and who is female just by listening to the sound of the voice.


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## Blackleaf

MünchnerFax said:


> A turkish friend of mine (Turkish doesn't have genders like English) asked me once: «Well, what do Italians think is so womanly in water?» (as _water_ is feminine in Italian: _acqua_). I'm sorry I don't have the answer to this; however, I've always been wondering why English does not have genders, if this may console you...


 
As an native English speaker, I think the same thing. When a Frenchman sees an apple - une pomme - does he actually think of it as a woman?

When an Italian sees the Moon- la luna- do they think of it as a woman?


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## Blackleaf

There are more languages without grammatical gender than there are with grammatical gender.


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## Blackleaf

Etcetera said:


> Same in Russian, we too have three genders in our language, but in this sense it's a bit easier than German - there are certain rules and so on.
> As for the point of gender for words - I loved Kap's reply.  Frankly, when I just started to learn English, it surprised my greatly that in this language words doesn't have gender. I still wonder why.
> By the way, don't think that it's easier to study Italian for me, a native speaker of Russian. A noun which is masculine in Russian may be feminine in Italian (for example, the Russian дом and the Italian 'casa'), and vice versa. That's really confusing!


 


I read somewhere that English lost its grammatical gender because the Anglo-Saxons and the Celts needed to trade with each other.  Anglo-Saxon - Old English - had three grammatical genders, so the Anglo-Saxons got rid of them to make it easier for the Celts to learn their language.


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## duckie

konungursvia said:


> Well I never intended to say gender was necessary, or provided a huge advantage, but it offers a few elegant and precise tools for being clear and concise that are lacking in English (though our language has its advantages as well).



So far the two examples I've seen have been in Italian when trying to decipher if the person writing is male or female, and the French way of referring to something specific. I don't really understand the French system since the languages I know that have genders cannot do this (in a way that's particularly useful), and I don't speak French. I'll take your word for it though 

I guess that means other than those two specific cases there's nothing useful about grammatical gender? I can't think of anything at least, but I'm only familiar with three languages that have grammatical gender..


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## duckie

Blackleaf said:


> I read somewhere that English lost its grammatical gender because the Anglo-Saxons and the Celts needed to trade with each other. Anglo-Saxon - Old English - had three grammatical genders, so the Anglo-Saxons got rid of them to make it easier for the Celts to learn their language.



This may be true, but isn't it strange that there's so little Celtic in English? Generally English is a big sponge of a language, but not much Celtic has made its way into it as far as I know (am I wrong?)..


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## BlueWolf

Blackleaf said:


> As an native English speaker, I think the same thing. When a Frenchman sees an apple - une pomme - does he actually think of it as a woman?
> 
> When an Italian sees the Moon- la luna- do they think of it as a woman?



You have to remember the gender is grammatical, not real. Some noun refered to men are feminine and viceversa. 

Said it however, it's true in some way. In Italian the moon is actually considered feminine and so on (and in fact Greek/Roman moon divinity was a goddess). Gender influences, but I don't think an apple is female when I see it, come on. Genders are connected with nouns, not with the objects. For example, _mountain_ in Italian can be both _monte_ (masculine) or _montagna_ (feminine).


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## Etcetera

Blackleaf said:


> I read somewhere that English lost its grammatical gender because the Anglo-Saxons and the Celts needed to trade with each other.  Anglo-Saxon - Old English - had three grammatical genders, so the Anglo-Saxons got rid of them to make it easier for the Celts to learn their language.


Yes, it was some time in the Middle English period when the three genders were lost. Well, there was a strong tendency towards making the English language less comlicated and more easy to learn. 
If you find modern English difficult, just take two or three classes in Old English!


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## MarX

mansio said:


> In German you have three genders: masculine, feminine and neutral.
> 
> Many genders seem to be arbitrary although one can find explanations when going back thousands of years in the language history.
> 
> The word "butter" derives from Greek. In German it has a masculine ending -er but the word is feminine in gender, and in French it has a feminine ending -e but the word is masculine.


In southwestern Germany it's not unusual to say *der Butter*, so as a masculine word. In fact, I sometimes still slip into saying *den Butter* instead of *die Butter*. 

As for the reason of the existence of grammatical genders... Good question.. I've no idea whatsoever.


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## Einstein

Blackleaf said:


> I read somewhere that English lost its grammatical gender because the Anglo-Saxons and the Celts needed to trade with each other. Anglo-Saxon - Old English - had three grammatical genders, so the Anglo-Saxons got rid of them to make it easier for the Celts to learn their language.


More probably between Anglo-Saxons and Danes because their languages were similar and more likely to influence each other, so often the stem of the word was similar but the ending was different and tended to be ignored. But I may be wrong...

I saw this thread had been revived. I agree that it's a problem for English-speakers but not for people who are used to gender in their own language. As has been pointed out, agreement of adjectives often makes it easier to understand connections.
I think a far more questionable institution is the antiquated spelling of English! Although this creates problems for native speakers too, attempts to reform spelling are few and make slow progress.


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## palomnik

This is an interesting question to resurrect.  I don't think I was writing on this forum when it originally started.

My read on gender is that it had some beginning rather like the different noun classes in Bantu languages.  Bantu languages have varying numbers of noun classes depending on the language; in Swahili, for example, there is one class for things that are considered "lowly" or "unclean", another for human beings, another for abstract items, etc.  Each group has different prefixes and ways to form the plural.  Over time the number of such groups has obviously coalesced to varying degrees in the different member languages of the group.

I suspect that the various declensions in languages like Latin represent something similar in origin, and so do the grammatical genders in modern languages.  It is worth pointing out that by and large, gender is restricted to Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages (maybe there are others, but I'm not aware of them).


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## sokol

I should have read the whole thread before answering - so I confess at first that I haven't. 

Gender can develop through different paths:
- the simpe way: divide the world into male and female creatures, and then extend this system to non-living things;
- or alternatively, instead of attributing male or female gender to things you could create a neuter gender for those;
- or alternatively, and some say this might be even an older system then male-female-neuter in IE, look at Hittite which had:
--> Genus commune (or "Utrum") = both male and female which could have developped as casus opposed to "non-living" things (or creatures thought of as being "non-intelligent")
--> Genus neutrum = "non-living" things, creatures perceived as being "non-intelligent".

(And there might still be other possibilities.)

If you look at it like this it is easier to see any reasoning in the development of gender:
- it may have been developped to differentiate males and females;
- or it may have been developped to differentiate the living from the ones not living (or considered being non-intelligent);
- or a combination of both.

Over time of course those genus, whatever they may have been in the beginning, were grammaticalised - and thus the genus distinctions made in modern languages don't make too much sense in many cases.



MarX said:


> In southwestern Germany it's not unusual to say *der Butter*, so as a masculine word.


Indeed it is; this is also the case for Austria (where "der Butter" is dialect while it is "die Butter in standard language). But this would be a German forum topic.


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## duckie

Einstein said:


> I saw this thread had been revived. I agree that it's a problem for English-speakers but not for people who are used to gender in their own language. As has been pointed out, agreement of adjectives often makes it easier to understand connections.



I'm not sure I agree with that.. Danish has two genders (in some areas even reminiscences of three), but I don't find that helps me any when learning other languages that use genders. Especially in German genders really hold me back from being fluent because not only do I have to think of what the case happens to be, but also what the gender is for that specific word, and then remember what that results in for the given case.. to me that feels like doing advanced mathematics when all I'm doing is trying to say 'hello', basically 

It's easier in a language like Italian, but certainly makes it considerably harder to learn than it would be if there was only one gender.



Einstein said:


> I think a far more questionable institution is the antiquated spelling of English! Although this creates problems for native speakers too, attempts to reform spelling are few and make slow progress.



I guess that goes to show how differently we learn things - as much as grammar causes me all sorts of headaches, spelling comes almost effortlessly to me, and I like the quirks of English spelling very much


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## Forero

In Chinese, "one dog", "one fish", and "one pencil" (I think) use different measure words, depending on the noun class. Measure words are roughly like "cups" for some things and "pounds" for others, but are required in Chinese between a number (including "one" = "a"/"an") and a noun. If I remember correctly, there is a four-legged animal class, a flat things class, and a cylindrical things class.

Grammatical gender seems to be a similar thing but simplified to two or three classes.


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## daoxunchang

We in China, at least my generation as far as I know, do not learn Chinese the way you foreigners do. So I'm not sure whether the division of this class thing--four-legged animal class, etc. applies to every object, but I think you have a point.

Actually we have different word for each gender of many animals in Old Chinese. But I don't quite understand your last sentence saying "grammatical gender seems to be a similar thing but simplified to two or three classes". Are you still referring to the Chinese language? I don't think we have or had grammatical changes with regard to genders. If you could give me some examples to enlighten me, a very unconscious Chinese speaker, I would appreciate it very much. Thank you.


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## Brioche

daoxunchang said:


> We in China, at least my generation as far as I know, do not learn Chinese the way you foreigners do. So I'm not sure whether the division of this class thing--four-legged animal class, etc. applies to every object, but I think you have a point.
> 
> Actually we have different word for each gender of many animals in Old Chinese. But I don't quite understand your last sentence saying "grammatical gender seems to be a similar thing but simplified to two or three classes". Are you still referring to the Chinese language? I don't think we have or had grammatical changes with regard to genders. If you could give me some examples to enlighten me, a very unconscious Chinese speaker, I would appreciate it very much. Thank you.



Chinese, and several other languages, use *classifiers* when counting objects. They may also be called *measure-words*.

In Chinese you cannot say "four mountains", "six shirts" or "seven umbrellas" you say "four zuò mountain", "6 jiàn shirt" and "7 bǎ umbrella"

_zuò _, _jiàn_ and _bǎ_ are examples of _classifiers_ or _measure-words_. 

In a way they are similar to gender in that foreigners have to learn which classifiers go with which words.


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## sokol

I agree, classifieres used in languages like Chinese are quite similar to grammatical gender - which is also nothing but a classifier (even though the classification has become unlogical over time in many languages).


Brioche said:


> In Chinese you cannot say "four mountains", "six shirts" or "seven umbrellas" you say "four zuò mountain", "6 jiàn shirt" and "7 bǎ umbrella"
> 
> _zuò _, _jiàn_ and _bǎ_ are examples of _classifiers_ or _measure-words_.


I don't speak Chinese but I've read that in Chinese there are more homonyms than in "ordinary" Western languages.
The Pidgin Chinese construction of "look-see" (here in German Wiki, I'm sure the example is a well-known one) - supposedly - also is seen as a strategy to disambiguate (no need for that in English but, it is said, in Chinese from which this is translated; I can only give what Wiki says here - which is that "look-see" is a translation of "看见 kanjian" -, but I can't explain the Chinese example, naturally ).

If this is true then those classifiers would have a function - they would make communication easier as the cases when homonymous words could be misunderstood might be reduced significantly.
(And please excuse my ignorance if I'm on the wrong path here. )


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## duckie

Something I've been wondering about is that the Indo-European languages seem to all trend towards simplification of their grammatical structure. I know that Sanskrit is very complex grammatically, and similarly Latin is more complex than the modern Romance languages (that actually derive from vulgar Latin which was simpler than the literary Latin I think)..

In turn, English is grammatically much simpler than other Germanic languages, who are also being steadily simplified on their own. So we see a clear trend towards simplification, but this must mean that an enormous effort was put into creating these complicated rules of the languages in the past. What was the drive and motivation behind this, and why has it disappeared?


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## Mate

Moderator note:

Regrettably, we have to close this old, long and recently resurrected thread because it doesn't fulfil the current forum's guidelines any more.

The forum has changed, the guidelines for Cultural Discussions have changed, and it is time for this thread to retire.

Thank you all for taking part in this interesting discussion, and for your understanding.


Thread closed.


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