# Generic masculine



## Dymn

Hi,

I think all of the gendered Indo-European languages give preference to masculine forms over feminine ones in mixed groups, for example in Spanish _un profesor _and _una profesora_ are _dos profesores_, or in German _ein Lehrer_ and _eine Lehrerin_ are _zwei Lehrer_. In my opinion, this is a result of a patriarchal society in which men are supposed to be the default. English itself, though lacking grammatical gender, also has many instances where the masculine is treated as the default.

However some of the critiques to "inclusive language" I usually read is that this is just mere coincidence and it dates back to PIE, where a feminine gender sprung up detached from the animate gender, giving rise to a three-partite system common to all ancient IE languages: masculine, feminine and neuter.

Does that make sense? 

What's it like in other languages? For example Hungarian, also genderless, marks feminine with the -_nő _suffix, itself meaning "woman", so e.g. _művész _"artist", _művésznő_ "female artist", but I don't know if it's mandatory. In Chinese pronouns are pronounced both _tā_ but "he" is written 他 and "she" 她, being 他 the default one (e.g. a mixed "they" would be 他们), although I read the feminine character was invented in the 1910s. Is there any language where feminine is the default?

In short what I would like to know is whether the default character of the masculine gender in Indo-European languages is a pure coincidence without any social tinge or whether it does have to do with society being male-centered.

Thank you


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## ahvalj

I don't know about feminine being the default, but the Icelandic _þau_ "they" is a neuter form, used also for any mixed-gender group. That's of course a secondary development.

From what is known about Proto-Indo-Europeans, they represented an extreme example of a male-centric society, compare Homeric heroes, or ancient Celts or Scythians. A recent paper in “Nature” suggests that:


> the spread of the Beaker complex introduced high levels of steppe-related ancestry and was associated with the replacement of approximately 90% of Britain's gene pool within a few hundred years, continuing the east-to-west expansion that had brought steppe-related ancestry into central and northern Europe over the previous centuries.


That means that around 90% of pre-Indo-European British males were eliminated as a result of the Indo-European invasion.


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## Dymn

Thanks

How likely would you rate that masculine forms descend from an Indo-European animate gender and that feminine forms came to exist as marked forms as a separate feminine gender began to develop? Maybe the question itself doesn't make any sense and given their patriarchal character it's simply obvious that they would consider the masculine to be the default.


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## ahvalj

This question has been discussed as long as the Indo-European philology has existed, that is for some two centuries, and if you're still asking that means that there is no good answer in the air.

We should distinguish feminine forms applied specifically to denote women and the feminine as a grammatical gender. The latter is fully developed in the attested early Indo-European languages outside the Anatolian group, in the sense that every word that is not masculine and neuter is grammatically feminine, it requires feminine agreement, and this is purely a question of the language technique, which is especially clear when they do not belong to the _*o_ and _*ā/*ī/*ū_ stems — like why is _puente_ masculine and _fuente_ feminine? We can't tell that one gender is original and the other is derived: words were simply distributed between the two following some obscure principles and associations, and in the course of the history of languages they quite often moved between genders when the stem type allowed this, like in the case of _fuente_.

When we have _*o_ stems for masculines and neuters and _*ā_ for feminines, there is strictly speaking no derivation as well: could you say that _nueva_ is derived from _nuevo_? Not in Spanish, and neither in Latin. Catalan has lost the vowel in the masculine, so _nova_ may look derived, but this is secondary for a Romance language. In Icelandic, an opposite has occurred, and the masculine _nýr_ may look derived from the feminine _ný,_ but again at the Germanic level it's just historical phonetics. That may apply to the vocabulary as well: is _marinera_ grammatically derived from _marinero_? Psychologically may be, but grammatically?

We can only talk about derivation as such when there are specific markers attached to the original, masculine, stems, which is not _very_ widespread in early attested Indo-European languages. For example, _nt_-participles in many languages have a feminine form in _*-ihₐ_ (like in Lithuanian _vedanti_ “leading” (f) from _vedąs_ “leading” (m) and _vedą_ “leading” (originally n)), but that is not necessarily a common Proto-Indo-European form since it is absent in Latin, which has _calēns _(>_caliente_) for both genders and this is often regarded as archaic. Again, _calēns>caliente_ is both masculine and feminine, this form agrees with both genders depending on the grammatical needs, and while languages may tend to formalize the distinction, prior to this there is strictly speaking no “masculine as the default”, it only becomes properly masculine when a corresponding feminine form becomes formalized.

And, returning to your topic question: to get separate forms for mixed-gender cases, the language has to use something to express this meaning. Icelandic used the neuter plural: an exotic variant, but it works. What could Romance do in this situation? I can't imagine. Grammatical and lexical elements don't arise from nothing, and so much in the language remains unexpressed because of this plain absence of tools. I am afraid the feminist movement may rather lead to the opposite: to abandoning of the gender distinction where it exists, like using _it_ in English instead of _he_ and _she_.


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## symposium

I don't know if it is sensible to necessarily link grammatical and biological gender and then draw any kind of conclusions about gender roles and society constructions from the characteristics of a certain language or group of languages. Romance languages assign a gender to all things, still we Romance-language speakers don't think that objects really have a sex or gendered nature that correspond to their grammatical gender. When we say or hear "niños" we naturally assume that we might be talking about children of both sexes. There is no immediate, strict, inescapable link between grammatical and biological gender.


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## Penyafort

ahvalj said:


> like why is _puente_ masculine and _fuente_ feminine?



Funny you choose _puente _as an example because in West Iberian languages the tendency was rather to see bridges as feminine (Portuguese _a ponte_, Asturian _la ponte_, Old Spanish _la puente_).



ahvalj said:


> , returning to your topic question: to get separate forms for mixed-gender cases, the language has to use something to express this meaning. Icelandic used the neuter plural: an exotic variant, but it works. What could Romance do in this situation? I can't imagine. Grammatical and lexical elements don't arise from nothing, and so much in the language remains unexpressed because of this plain absence of tools. I am afraid the feminist movement may rather lead to the opposite: to abandoning of the gender distinction where it exists, like using _it_ in English instead of _he_ and _she_.



That is, in fact, the formal trend in Romance too, whenever possible.

I don't think it is so much about the gender of the word per se. All Romance languages have gender, yes. But even if a word like _persona _is feminine, it encompasses both men and women, no-one would think that a word like _persono _should exist.

In the same way, _profesor _and _profesora _are seen as sexually gender-marked. However, a collective singular word like _el profesorado_ is seen as inclusive of both _profesores _and _profesoras_, even if the word is masculine. Which is why there is a higher tendency now to use these collective nouns, regardless of their grammar gender, specially because it is a much more elegant form than repeating 'X-os and X-as' all the time. They are indeed recommended whenever the collective noun exists and is not too rare.

I've generally come to think of it as linked to the adjectival endings. Which is why my ears still hurt when I hear a word such as _jueza, _because adjectives ending in -z are invariable (no _feliza_, no _precoza_...). The other way round too, I can't stand the word _modisto _that some people use for male dressmakers, because adjectives ending in -ista are always a-ending for both men and women. (So I guess I'm more conservative regarding this usage than the Real Academia, which accepts them)


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## Rocko!

Dymn said:


> How likely would you rate that *masculine forms descend from an Indo-European animate gender and that feminine forms came to exist as marked forms* as a separate feminine gender began to develop



*From the book of Proto Utian Grammar and Dictionary by Catherine Callaghan. Page 197.*


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## Dymn

Wow thanks for the extensive answer, @ahvalj  



Rocko! said:


> *From the book of Proto Utian Grammar and Dictionary by Catherine Callaghan. Page 197.*


You've left me on tenterhooks! Do Iroquoian or other languages spoken by matriarchal peoples exhibit any "feminine as the default" characteristic then?


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## ahvalj

Penyafort said:


> In the same way, _profesor _and _profesora _are seen as sexually gender-marked. However, a collective singular word like _el profesorado_ is seen as inclusive of both _profesores _and _profesoras_, even if the word is masculine. Which is why there is a higher tendency now to use these collective nouns, regardless of their grammar gender, specially because it is a much more elegant form than repeating 'X-os and X-as' all the time. They are indeed recommended whenever the collective noun exists and is not too rare.
> 
> I've generally come to think of it as linked to the adjectival endings. Which is why my ears still hurt when I hear a word such as _jueza, _because adjectives ending in -z are invariable (no _feliza_, no _precoza_...). The other way round too, I can't stand the word _modisto _that some people use for male dressmakers, because adjectives ending in -ista are always a-ending for both men and women. (So I guess I'm more conservative regarding this usage than the Real Academia, which accepts them)


Why can't Spanish just use articles then: _el modista / la modista, el juez / la juez?_

Concerning _profesora _and the likes: it's an interesting development of the living language. Latin actually had the type _-tor : -trīx, -sor : -strīx,_ so we'd properly expect _**profestriz_ (como _emperatriz_), _**posestriz_ (<_possestrīx_), _**defenstriz_ (<_dēfēnstrīx_), but it apparently appeared too non-Romance even for latinizers.

Concerning _juez:_ in Russian the opposite has happened: _судья/sudʲja_ “juez” looks rather feminine, though Russian can't just change the ending, so the word remains grammatically uter (that is, used for both males and females: by the way, the vast majority of judges in Russia are women, don't know why).

I suspect the collective nouns aren't the answer since the feminist movement will object the masculine gender of _profesorado:_ that's the inevitable next step.
[That system with groups of people upset at everything and everyone is a vicious circle, since there can't be a satisfactory solution at the end: we just have to learn not to be so touchy and vulnerable. Some group of people doesn't like or respect another one? — OK, that's just part of life, let a hundred flowers bloom, including those not to my taste].​


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## Dymn

ahvalj said:


> I suspect the collective nouns aren't the answer since the feminist movement will object the masculine gender of _profesorado:_ that's the inevitable next step.


But the masculine gender of _profesorado_ is arbitrary, unlike the gender of _profesores/profesor _which refers first and foremost to a male teacher_._


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## ahvalj

Dymn said:


> But the masculine gender of _profesorado_ is arbitrary, unlike the gender of _profesores/profesor _which refers first and foremost to a male teacher_._


Collective nouns may be an elegant solution if a language allows to form them at any occasion, as almost part of the grammar. But what to do with the vast majority of cases where this is unavailable? Like in _ellos y ellas_? _Nuestros y nuestras_? On the other hand, it's a matter of habit. Russian has an inherited word _люди/lʲudʲi_ that corresponds to the English Newspeak _men and women,_ and for an outsider this English expression looks annoying and silly (especially when automatically translated word after word into Russian, which sometimes happens), but modern English speakers apparently are used to it. So, perhaps, Spanish speakers of the coming millennia may eventually deal with the automatic _diputados y diputadas_? — I have written it as an example of a dreadful perspective, but Google tells that it is widespread already: 467 000 occurrences, 137 000 for _ministros y ministras,_ and 3 730 000 for _alumnos y alumnas_. So, apparently the future is here.


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## Dymn

It's mostly politic-ese, you don't hear that so often in natural speech. That -_ado_ suffix is also used to avoid the generic masculine but only in a very limited set of words. I don't know what the future has in store. In more ideological contexts, you have this "_e_" thing but this is still considered very ridiculous. Some "inclusive language" guidelines have all kinds of proposals to avoid "sexist language". I think only some short and all-purpose solution could take root.


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## merquiades

Dymn said:


> this "_e_" thing


  If some people are really saying *elles, *nosotres, *vosotres, *alumnes, *ministres, *diputades, that indeed is ridulous, almost surreal.  These people might also object to the subject pronoun: yo


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## ahvalj

By the way, some may say that this binary male : female opposition is supremacist and sexist and suppressing those 46 other genders.


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## Dymn

merquiades said:


> If some people are really saying *elles, *nosotres, *vosotres, *alumnes, *ministres, *diputades, that indeed is ridulous, almost surreal.


I've never heard this in real life, only written. What I've heard in real life (in Catalan) is the "generic feminine" (it was a girl who used it and most of the group was female).



merquiades said:


> These people might also object to the subject pronoun: yo


They don't.


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## ahvalj

It would be interesting to trace how old is this system with _diputados y diputadas_. I recall it to have been quite widespread in the first decades in the USSR, in the 1920–1940's, when the address _ciudadanos y ciudadanas_ was standard in the official announcements (for example this is the Russian text by Vyacheslav Molotov announcing on June 22, 1941 the attack by Germany: it starts with _¡Ciudadanos y ciudadanas de la Unión Soviética!_).


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## pollohispanizado

Dymn said:


> I've never heard this in real life, only written.


I've heard it used; never fully, but few times when addressing a group, usually as an afterthought because it's a new and not very widespread idea ("Gracias a todos, todas, todes"). People tend to not be sure why it's used (some say to include gender nonbinary people, others so that there is a neutral common gender with which to address groups or to not have to assume the gender of a person). I admit that I don't find it to be the most elegant, but I do agree with the objective(s).


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## Penyafort

ahvalj said:


> Why can't Spanish just use articles then: _el modista / la modista, el juez / la juez?_



Indeed. Those are the forms I use, actually. Although there are contexts in which the article isn't used and then it may be more ambiguous.

It is funny how the Romance languages see 'feminism' in the fact of having all professions with the two genders, while in English many see it rather on the opposite, that is, on eradicating endings like -ess and making everything one-gendered. I guess it is strongly connected to the fact that a language has generalized gender difference while the other does not, but it'd be interesting to see if it applies to all languages with genders, which in Europe are a majority.



ahvalj said:


> _profesora _and the likes: it's an interesting development of the living language. Latin actually had the type _-tor : -trīx, -sor : -strīx,_ so we'd properly expect _**profestriz_ (como _emperatriz_), _**posestriz_ (<_possestrīx_), _**defenstriz_ (<_dēfēnstrīx_), but it apparently appeared too non-Romance even for latinizers.



Romance languages tend to generalize things or use analogies. Yet, for -tor/trix, those pairs which preserve the difference maintain it quite well (saying _actora _or _emperadora _would be seen as uneducated). The ending -striz is certainly not too appealing, I must admit. 



ahvalj said:


> _juez:_ in Russian the opposite has happened: _судья/sudʲja_ “juez” looks rather feminine, though Russian can't just change the ending, so the word remains grammatically uter (that is, used for both males and females: by the way, the vast majority of judges in Russia are women, don't know why).



Reminds me of the words coming from Greek and ending in -a (astronauta, poeta...). With the difference that in Russian you cannot use articles to make the difference.



ahvalj said:


> I suspect the collective nouns aren't the answer since the feminist movement will object the masculine gender of _profesorado:_ that's the inevitable next step.



Well, I can tell you -because I have to do it sometimes- that those kind of collective nouns are strongly recommended in formal writing with regard to letters, reports, etc. They are not used on a daily basis in informal speech, that for sure.

But the meaning of el profesorado is really associated to a collective group, so the gender of the word is simply seen as a grammar gender there, in my opinion. I mean, just as one doesn't think of tables as women just because they're feminine. There are feminine collective nouns too. In something as historically male as the military world, you have groups of soldiers called _la tropa, la milicia, la hueste, la legión..._



pollohispanizado said:


> I've heard it used; never fully, but few times when addressing a group, usually as an afterthought because it's a new and not very widespread idea ("Gracias a todos, todas, todes"). People tend to not be sure why it's used (some say to include gender nonbinary people, others so that there is a neutral common gender with which to address groups or to not have to assume the gender of a person). I admit that I don't find it to be the most elegant, but I do agree with the objective(s).



In Catalan, between the two options_ Gràcies a tothom_ and _Gràcies a tots i totes_, I always choose the first one, which encompasses both. The equivalent in Spanish would probably be _Gracias a todo el mundo._

However, I think that addressing both in a vocative/greeting is fine. After all, many languages have the double greeting _Damas y caballeros/Señoras y señores_, _Ladies and Gentlemen, Mesdames et messieurs_... The problem comes if you then repeat the same thing later like fifty times in the same speech.


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## pollohispanizado

Penyafort said:


> In Catalan, between the two options_ Gràcies a tothom_ and _Gràcies a tots i totes_, I always choose the first one, which encompasses both. The equivalent in Spanish would probably be _Gracias a todo el mundo._
> 
> However, I think that addressing both in a vocative/greeting is fine. After all, many languages have the double greeting _Damas y caballeros/Señoras y señores_, _Ladies and Gentlemen, Mesdames et messieurs_... The problem comes if you then repeat the same thing later like fifty times in the same speech.



I don't mind it. I just don't like the arguement put forth by (mostly male) "linguistic purists" who say that the language currently represents everyone, and if you don't feel that way, it's your own fault. I'm a male person, but I still feel that the generic masculine is exclusive, regardless of how many times people say that it isn't. Not to mention that women/non binary people --the people who are told that they are included in the generic -_o_ ending-- say they feel left out. It's rather annoying that people get so defensive, especially when one doesn't do anything more radical than say _Hola a todas y todos_, as if saying a word twice is going to make a huge deal and end the language as we know it.


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## ahvalj

If somebody if interested in the linguistic aspects of the rise of the feminine in Proto-Indo-European, I've found a relatively recent book: Ledo-Lemos FJ · 2003 · “Femininum genus∶ a study on the origins of the Indo-European feminine grammatical gender”.


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## Hulalessar

A while ago I read a book about the Indo-Europeans. At the very start the author said that the only thing we know for certain about the Indo-Europeans is that they spoke Indo-European. It needs to be remembered that Proto-Indo-European is a hypothetical reconstruction based on what we have. We do not know if what we have is enough to have produced a reconstruction reasonably like any language which was actually spoken. If we cannot be certain what the language was like and know nothing for certain about the people who spoke it, I do not see how we can answer questions about how or why grammatical gender arose or the degree to which masculine and feminine were respectively associated with things male and female.


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## Circunflejo

merquiades said:


> If some people are really saying *elles, *nosotres, *vosotres, *alumnes, *ministres, *diputades, that indeed is ridulous, almost surreal.


There's some people like that. Search on YouTube todes programa. Just to quote an example.


ahvalj said:


> It would be interesting to trace how old is this system with _diputados y diputadas_.


A quick search showed the oldest references of diputados y diputadas in Spanish to be from late 19th Century (1878, 1898 and 1899). The one from 1898 has diputadas between quotation marks and the one from 1899 in Italics. On the other hand, ciudadanos y ciudadanas can be tracked back till 18th century (1722, the oldest) and there are many examples of use already in 19th century. In both cases, there could be older uses because I just made a quick search.


Dymn said:


> What I've heard in real life (in Catalan) is the "generic feminine" (it was a girl who used it and most of the group was female).


I've heard that generic feminine in Catalan, on TV, to a (male) spokesman of the CUP. In Spanish, I had professors at university that used it.


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## ahvalj

Hulalessar said:


> A while ago I read a book about the Indo-Europeans. At the very start the author said that the only thing we know for certain about the Indo-Europeans is that they spoke Indo-European. It needs to be remembered that Proto-Indo-European is a hypothetical reconstruction based on what we have. We do not know if what we have is enough to have produced a reconstruction reasonably like any language which was actually spoken. If we cannot be certain what the language was like and know nothing for certain about the people who spoke it, I do not see how we can answer questions about how or why grammatical gender arose or the degree to which masculine and feminine were respectively associated with things male and female.


But that's most probably the opinion of an author not involved in the Indo-European linguistics. If you open books and papers written by linguists working in this field, issued between 1820 and 2020, you'll find them to be full of most detailed paradigms and discussing minute nuances of the reconstructed proto-language. I personally think many aspects can be reconstructed pretty securely: at least they explain the outcomes and don't face serious counterexamples. Many, not all of course.

I've thought that the linguistic evidence we possess (or think we possess) is pretty socially neutral in the sense that it shows us a language evolving from a system of a common gender with only occasional special characterization of female subjects in grammar or vocabulary (like e. g. feminine variants for three and four formed in a particular way and preserved in Old Irish and Old Indic). It is more or less the same as in the languages like Finnish (a rare suffix _-tar_ exotically extracted from the borrowed Indo-European word daughter) or Estonian (a rare suffix _-nna_ of Germanic provenance) or Hungarian (compounds with the second word woman), yet the Uralic (except perhaps Hungarian) social behavior, very conventional and quiet, is very different from what is usually reconstructed or attested for Indo-Europeans of various epochs.


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## Hulalessar

ahvalj said:


> But that's most probably the opinion of an author not involved in the Indo-European linguistics. If you open books and papers written by linguists working in this field, issued between 1820 and 2020, you'll find them to be full of most detailed paradigms and discussing minute nuances of the reconstructed proto-language. I personally think many aspects can be reconstructed pretty securely: at least they explain the outcomes and don't face serious counterexamples. Many, not all of course.
> 
> I've thought that the linguistic evidence we possess (or think we possess) is pretty socially neutral in the sense that it shows us a language evolving from a system of a common gender with only occasional special characterization of female subjects in grammar or vocabulary (like e. g. feminine variants for three and four formed in a particular way and preserved in Old Irish and Old Indic). It is more or less the same as in the languages like Finnish (a rare suffix _-tar_ exotically extracted from the borrowed Indo-European word daughter) or Estonian (a rare suffix _-nna_ of Germanic provenance) or Hungarian (compounds with the second word woman), yet the Uralic (except perhaps Hungarian) social behavior, very conventional and quiet, is very different from what is usually reconstructed or attested for Indo-Europeans of various epochs.



Between 1820 and 2020 Hittite popped and caused a rethink. 

PIE may be a sustainable hypothesis based on what we know, but we cannot be certain that it did not have features which were not carried forward to any known Indo-European language. If you were to apply the method used to reconstruct PIE to all modern Romance languages there is no way you would come up with the synthetic Latin passive. The method sometimes produces choices and the choice made may be unconsciously affected by the result you want or expect. We cannot be sure if a feature found in only one branch is an innovation or something preserved which the other branches have lost.

No social science exsists in a bubble. The disciplnes overlap. Disciplines get more complex as they develop and today polymaths tend to be a bit thin on the ground. If you are asking questions of the "who spoke what where and when?" type you need to bring in linguistics, history, anthropology, archaeology and genetics. It is unwise to draw conclusions based solely on looking at a language, _a fortiori _when the language is a hypothetical reconstruction. We only need to remember that at one, time based on the apparent lack of any Celtic influence in English, it was widely believed that the Germanic invaders either drove the Celtic-speaking peoples into what is now Wales and the western extremities of what is now England or killed all those who stayed behind. Recent research in other disciplines has questioned if that is what happened. It emphasises that if in pre-history people A move into an area inhabited by people B and later only one language was spoken in the area we cannot be certain if it was the language of people A or B.


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## Dib

Dymn said:


> Is there any language where feminine is the default?



*EDIT: Made some mistakes originally. Now corrected by striking through the wrong statements and adding some details in italics.*

In Gujarati (the native language of Mahatma Gandhi as well as the current Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi), human female plural nouns (also honorific plurals _(also_ referring to a single woman) take neuter plural agreement in the predicate, as do mixed male/female groups. But male-only groups _(and honorific plurals)_ take masculine plural agreement. Thus synchronically, in Gujarati, male/female mixed groups are treated the same way as _honorific _female-only groups. Male-only groups have a different grammar. This is the closest, I know of a language where feminine is the grammatical default. But Gujarati-internally, it is actually an extension of neuter being the default gender, e.g. "someone has come" uses a neuter singular predicate.


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## ahvalj

Hulalessar said:


> Between 1820 and 2020 Hittite popped and caused a rethink.
> 
> PIE may be a sustainable hypothesis based on what we know, but we cannot be certain that it did not have features which were not carried forward to any known Indo-European language. If you were to apply the method used to reconstruct PIE to all modern Romance languages there is no way you would come up with the synthetic Latin passive. The method sometimes produces choices and the choice made may be unconsciously affected by the result you want or expect. We cannot be sure if a feature found in only one branch is an innovation or something preserved which the other branches have lost.



Hittite has indeed caused a rethink, but after a century of trials and errors the current fashion is that Anatolian split the earliest and the 19th-century Proto-Indo-European (+laryngeals) emerged after that split as a series of common innovations in the remaining core, so that linguists got at their disposal two strata of the proto-language (it's like Wulfila's Gothic vs. Middle Age Germanic: they are languages of two different evolutionary steps). In particular, what has become the most widespread feminine marker (the suffix _*-ehₐ-_), exists in Anatolian as well (and is even continued in the Luwian _wānā-_ “woman” < _*gʷen-hₐ-_) but it is just an ordinary suffix there, without any gender specialization and of course with no application in grammatical agreement.

I like the example with the Latin passive infect and often cite it myself. That's true, but as in any science we deal with the available evidence and try to adjust the overall picture to the new material if it appears (the problem with historical linguistics is that the vast majority of material is lost forever, so the current picture may turn out to be close to what is potentially achievable and this discipline will simply freeze in an almost-current shape). Perhaps nobody hopes to be able to speak Proto-Indo-European, but as a medium explaining the attested daughter lineages this reconstruction looks pretty solid: if we only have Romance data, the Latin infect and passive perfect are enough (though we of course will introduce reflexive verbs into that Proto-Romance, which we know would be a mistake).



Hulalessar said:


> No social science exsists in a bubble. The disciplnes overlap. Disciplines get more complex as they develop and today polymaths tend to be a bit thin on the ground. If you are asking questions of the "who spoke what where and when?" type you need to bring in linguistics, history, anthropology, archaeology and genetics. It is unwise to draw conclusions based solely on looking at a language, _a fortiori _when the language is a hypothetical reconstruction. We only need to remember that at one, time based on the apparent lack of any Celtic influence in English, it was widely believed that the Germanic invaders either drove the Celtic-speaking peoples into what is now Wales and the western extremities of what is now England or killed all those who stayed behind. Recent research in other disciplines has questioned if that is what happened. It emphasises that if in pre-history people A move into an area inhabited by people B and later only one language was spoken in the area we cannot be certain if it was the language of people A or B.


But this intersection of disciplines has always been a strength of Indo-European studies (after all, the Second World war arose as an attempt of a practical implementation of these discoveries). Speaking of genetics, it does indeed show a much greater Celtic continuity in modern Britain, but the picture seems to be reversed in the 3rd millennium, when — as I have cited above — the replacement of approximately 90% of Britain's gene pool within a few hundred years is recently suggested to have taken place. So, at least genetics seems to have a great potential in clarifying what archeology and linguistics so far could not.

P. S. Concerning the lack of Celtic influence: similar things happen quite often. For example, north-eastern Germany has lots of Slavic toponyms but hardly any influence in the language itself.


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## Dymn

Dib said:


> Male-only groups have a different grammar. This is the closest, I know of a language where feminine is the grammatical default. But Gujarati-internally, it is actually an extension of neuter being the default gender, e.g. "someone has come" uses a neuter singular predicate.


Thank you Dib. So if I understood correctly, it's *human *feminine plural nouns that take neuter predicates, while non-human feminine plural nouns still take feminine predicates. And attributively all nouns keep their original gender. Why do you think this happened?

Also, what about nouns themselves? Does the word for "scientists" take three different forms (masculine, neuter, feminine)?


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## Dib

Dymn said:


> Thank you Dib. So if I understood correctly, it's *human *feminine plural nouns that take neuter predicates, while non-human feminine plural nouns still take feminine predicates. And attributively all nouns keep their original gender.



Hi Dymn, I made some mistakes in that comment. Sorry, my Gujarati knowledge is sketchy, and the sources I had were not super-clear. I have investigated a bit further. It seems:

1) The neuter plural agreement is triggered not by being a *human *female group, but by being *honorific *feminine. I do not know if Gujarati allows applying honorific agreement to non-human referents, but it must be at least uncommon, if it is similar to other modern IA languages. Gujarati signals higher level of honour by changing the agreement to plural (as do many other languages of the area), whether the referent is actually singular or plural: in case of males, masculine plural; in case of females neuter plural.

2) The agreement is same in attributive and predicative positions. Not just predicative.

3) In case of human groups, they take neuter plural agreement to emphasize that it is of mixed gender (or feminine honorific). Masculine _seems _to be the default when the gender is not emphasized.

I have edited my original post to reflect this. It seems, I oversold Gujarati here. It has some merger of feminine and mixed groups in some very specific conditions. Otherwise, nothing really out of the ordinary.



> Why do you think this happened?



I am not really familiar with the evolution of Gujarati. But in feminine, singular and plural have the same agreement markers (-i) and moreover, in the 3rd person, verbs lack number agreement. So, the change in honor-level cannot be signaled simply by changing number agreement in case of feminines. Then the question is why use neuter, rather than masculine? I do not know the answer, but if I were to speculate, I'd say:

1) Neuters do not (usually?) have honorifics. So, that "slot" was up for grabs - so to say.

2) I have seen a theory that Hindi/Punjabi feminine plural ending -ā̃  derives from old IA neuter plural -āni. Note that Hindi/Punjabi have lost neuter as a separate category, and has merged it mostly to the masculine. So, this theory does appear a bit suspect to me, that a feminine ending derives from the old neuter. Be that as it may, if it were indeed correct, then it probably signifies that at some older period, there was some amount of confusion between neuter and feminine plural. So, Gujarati neuter plural agreement marker -ā̃ may also have gone through this phase. However, without having familiarity with the older forms of the language, I cannot actually judge it.

3) There may be some facilitation through a Dravidian substrate. In most central Indian tribal Dravidian languages (as also in Proto-Dravidian as reconstructed by Krishnamurti), human females and non-humans take the same agreement in both singular and plural. Human males require a different agreement pattern. However, a mixed group is typically treated as a male group - from what I could gather ("The Dravidian Languages" - Krishnamurti, pp. 205-217").



> Also, what about nouns themselves? Does the word for "scientists" take three different forms (masculine, neuter, feminine)?



Gujarati, at least sometimes, have separate masculine, neuter and feminine forms for animate nouns, the neuter expressing unspecified gender, e.g. chokrũ (child) vs. chokri (girl) and chokro (boy). But this neuter for unspecified gender in animate nouns is mostly available for animals, not humans. Otherwise, human nouns may or may not have separate masculine/feminine forms. When there are no separate forms, it seems to me that the grammar for unspecified referents is assumed according to social stereotypes (i.e. nurses famale, doctors male, you know what I mean). I checked news sites for the English loanword "doctor", and in unspecified cases, it invariably takes masculine agreement, even in plural, where women doctors are very likely or even certain to be involved.


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## Penyafort

Circunflejo said:


> I've heard that generic feminine in Catalan, on TV, to a (male) spokesman of the CUP. In Spanish, I had professors at university that used it.



I also use it often if the group I'm addressing to is overwhelmingly female. I don't think it's a political thing there, just something natural.


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## Dymn

I recently thought of a single example of feminine-generic in a language: the generic word for "grandparents" in Portuguese is _avós_ (_avó_ being grandmother, _avô _grandfather). But this is due to pure and simple vowel euphony and it's just an exception to the otherwise masculine-generic grammar of the language.



Dib said:


> 3) In case of human groups, they take neuter plural agreement to emphasize that it is of mixed gender (or feminine honorific). Masculine _seems _to be the default when the gender is not emphasized.
> 
> I have edited my original post to reflect this. It seems, I oversold Gujarati here. It has some merger of feminine and mixed groups in some very specific conditions. Otherwise, nothing really out of the ordinary.


I see. I don't think we can say Gujarati prefers feminine over the masculine either



Dib said:


> 3) There may be some facilitation through a Dravidian substrate. In most central Indian tribal Dravidian languages (as also in Proto-Dravidian as reconstructed by Krishnamurti), *human females and non-humans take the same agreement in both singular and plural. Human males require a different agreement pattern.* However, a mixed group is typically treated as a male group - from what I could gather ("The Dravidian Languages" - Krishnamurti, pp. 205-217").


That may be regarded as even more humiliating, actually  



Penyafort said:


> I also use it often if the group I'm addressing to is overwhelmingly female. I don't think it's a political thing there, just something natural.


I think it makes sense if the nature of the addressees is somehow inherently female, for example in a feminist organization. It's more common to say "_les feministes_" rather than "_els feministes_", even if it includes male feminists anyway. But otherwise I would find it weird if male participants are visible and the speaker is aware of them. Maybe this is starting to fade (?) but when people speak/spoke with the feminine plural, pointing out there's a man in the group was a natural thing to say "hey, I exist!" and the speaker would at that point correct himself/herself/themself (does themself exist?) without any political undertone to it.


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