# Quercus etc.:  why feminine?



## Cenzontle

_Quercus alba_, _Ulmus americana_, etc.—
Juniperus, Pinus, Prunus, Fraxinus, Ulmus, and Quercus 
Is there a well-documented theory about why these masculine-looking _-us _names of trees are of feminine gender?
(And I'm not ready to accept that the gender of "arbor" has anything to do with it.)


----------



## fdb

quercus and ulmus belong to the 4th declension (genitive in -us), which encompasses nouns of all three genders, like the -u stems in other IE languages.


----------



## Scholiast

salvete!



> quercus and ulmus belong to the 4th declension (genitive in -us)


fdb is having you on (look at the date). Both _quercus_ and _ulmus_ are second declension - as are almost all trees (_pinus_ [pine], _ornus _[ash], _fagus_ [beech], _platanus_ [plane], _damelus_ [grenadilla]).

They are however, as Cenzontle says, all feminine, a curiosity which was pointed out to me when I was a schoolboy, and which has puzzled me ever since - so I too would welcome an explanation of this oddity.

Σ


----------



## fdb

In my dictionary:

quercus –ūs f.
pinus –ūs or –i f.
prunus –i f
fraxinus –i f.
ulmus –i f.


----------



## Cenzontle

Thanks for your replies, fdb and Scholiast.
My pocket dictionary (Traupman 1966) agrees with yours, fdb, right down to the alternation for "pinus".
I hadn't thought of the 4th declension.
I've already accepted the anomaly of "la mano" in Romance languages, preserved as feminine perhaps due to its high frequency.
If "quercus", firmly in the 4th declension, set the example for other trees to follow by analogy,...
but I don't want to let you experts off the hook so easily:  it's not a satisfying explanation.

ornus -i f.
fagus -i f.
platanus –ūs or –i f.
damelus ???
...says my dictionary.


----------



## CapnPrep

Cenzontle said:


> (And I'm not ready to accept that the gender of "arbor" has anything to do with it.)


Why is that? Obviously it could not be a complete explanation, since there are countless other semantic categories of words whose genders do not match that of the corresponding generic noun, and because there are always exceptions to proposed natural gender classes (e.g. _acer_ "maple tree" is neuter). But deciding a priori that the gender of the common noun has _nothing_ to do with it seems hasty to me. I am ready to accept that whatever determined the feminine gender of _arbor_ (which is itself somewhat unexpected) could also have something to do with the feminine gender of almost all tree names. For example, trees bear fruit, give of themselves to provide for others, etc. This could lead to the concept of "tree" becoming associated conventionally with the the feminine, although I doubt one could hope to find any documentation of the emergence of this association, if indeed it happened within Latin and not long before. After all, tree names in Greek are also overwhelmingly feminine (although the generic noun δένδρον is not).


----------



## Scholiast

salvete omnes

My apologies to fdb, in my #3 I was too hasty about _quercus_ - though I did consult L&S online, and mis-read what I saw there (where it appears it is like _pinus_, of variable 2nd/4th decl.).

To Cenzontle: if between them two such luminaries as fdb and CapnPrep cannot point us to the desiderated "well-documented theory" to explain this feature, it is likely to be open season for others. CapnPrep's looks promising (but German _Baum_ is masculine),  and trees have other properties and uses than the bearing of fruit (hardness, combustibility, colour &c.) which may all influence their genderisation.

_damelus_ was my lame April 1st joke. Grenadilla is an African hardwood tree unknown to Latin until Linnaean taxonomy got its hands on it, and called it _Dalbergia melanoxylon_.

Σ


----------



## wtrmute

Please do not take this the wrong way, but it is very Anglophone to demand an explanation for why given nouns have the genders they do.

In a sense, it's unfortunate that the ancients decided to apply to nominal genders the labels of biological sex: millennia of misunderstandings ensued.  In the end, there's no better explanation that words that are semantically related _tend_ to fall on the same gender, but it's otherwise a completely arbitrary assignment.  It _so happens_ that trees are generally feminine in Latin, fruits are generally neuter, and stone can be any of the three (_r__ūpēs_ vs _saxum _vs _lāpis_).  Ultimately, gender isn't a property of _things_, but of_ words_, so looking at a concrete object for an explanation of a grammatical accident is a fruitless endeavour.


----------



## CapnPrep

wtrmute said:


> Ultimately, gender isn't a property of _things_, but of_ words_, so looking at a concrete object for an explanation of a grammatical accident is a fruitless endeavour.


This is true in the general case, if one considers the entire (nominal) lexicon of a language with grammatical gender. But when there are semantically coherent subparts of the lexicon where gender is observed not to be arbitrarily assigned (and where it may even go against inflectional class preferences, as in Cenzontle's 2nd declension examples), there is something to be explained, and not just for demanding Anglophones.  And in fact, you gave the basic explanation — "words that are semantically related _tend_ to fall on the same gender" — and attempting to enrich this explanation in specific cases is a legitimate endeavor, I think.


----------



## Scholiast

salvete omnes!



> attempting to enrich this explanation in specific cases is a legitimate endeavor, I think.


 CapnPrep is surely right about this, not least because in languages (some native American tongues for example) where grammatical gender may be related to concepts such as edibility or distance or size as well as biological sex there are readily accessible explanations for the patterns, so there is a _prima facie_ case for supposing such patterns to have a rational explanation in sex-related gendered languages too.

Σ


----------



## Giorgio Spizzi

Hullo, everyone.

Interesting. Especially for a native speaker of Italian, where the _fruit tree_ is usually masculine but the _fruit_ itself is—though with some exceptions—feminine.

GS


----------



## Scholiast

salvete commilitones!


> ...where the _fruit tree_ is usually masculine


(Giorgio noster, #11)
The plot thickens: Italian has _quercia_ (f.), but _ulmo_, _faggio_ (and _castagnio_, _cedro_ &c.) masculine, despite their feminine gender in _ulmus_ and _fagus_.
Is there a philological theory governing this?

Σ


----------



## wtrmute

CapnPrep said:


> This is true in the general case, if one considers the entire (nominal) lexicon of a language with grammatical gender. But when there are semantically coherent subparts of the lexicon where gender is observed not to be arbitrarily assigned (and where it may even go against inflectional class preferences, as in Cenzontle's 2nd declension examples), there is something to be explained, and not just for demanding Anglophones.  And in fact, you gave the basic explanation — "words that are semantically related _tend_ to fall on the same gender" — and attempting to enrich this explanation in specific cases is a legitimate endeavor, I think.



I didn't mean to imply that your question was illegitimate in any sense; if you'll allow me to repeat that tired old maxim of education, there are no stupid questions.  That being said, our brains are finely tuned machines made for figuring out patterns in sets of data, and not uncommonly we find patterns where there are actually none.

My own view is that the confluence of gender is simply the power of analogy at work.  Let us assume first, for the sake of argument, that in a very remote protolanguage the assignment of genders was done arbitrarily.  It is not necessarily the case that all trees would be evenly distributed among the genders, and even if those were, the set of most commonly-used tree names also need not be evenly distributed.  In these cases, one of the genders may, over time, be recognised as the one which has "the most" tree names in it, and thus be seen as the "natural" grammatical gender for trees.  With more time, the exceptions may start to migrate from the other genders, or fall into disuse and be replaced by another name in the "natural" gender, reinforcing the pattern.  And then, people are free to retroactively explain why the "natural" gender was chosen, and not the others.

I'm not saying that this explanation is necessarily the correct one, but I still think it's fairly likely.



Scholiast said:


> salvete omnes!
> 
> CapnPrep is surely right about this, not least because in languages (some native American tongues for example) where grammatical gender may be related to concepts such as edibility or distance or size as well as biological sex there are readily accessible explanations for the patterns, so there is a _prima facie_ case for supposing such patterns to have a rational explanation in sex-related gendered languages too.
> 
> Σ



That's also a big point that I failed to make, apparently: I do not think that IE languages necessarily have sex-related genders (I will not make any claim either for or against this in Afroasiatic languages like Hebrew or Coptic).  It may very well be that the same process I posited for trees may have happened for women.  Remember that the IE three-gender classification evolved from an earlier one with an animate/inanimate distinction, still visible in Hittite and Luwite.  In any case, the fault may lie with the ancient grammarians which ended up naming the genders using a sexual metaphor — the Latin genders could have just as much been named _cibarius_, _arboreus_ and _fructualis_.  That is not to say that the sexual metaphor isn't apt, but maybe the labels cause them to sometimes be given undue weight.


----------



## CapnPrep

Scholiast said:


> The plot thickens: Italian has _quercia_ (f.), but _ulmo_, _faggio_ (and _castagnio_, _cedro_ &c.) masculine, despite their feminine gender in _ulmus_ and _fagus_.
> Is there a philological theory governing this?


It is not unexpected for these nouns to either realign their gender according to their inherited morphological shape, or for them to switch inflectional classes to match their inherited gender (but perhaps more can be said here after consideration of a fuller set of examples). It takes a very special noun like _mano_ to remain feminine over the centuries while retaining the overwhelmingly masculine _-o_.


----------

