Not sure if that whole post was a joke, but German didn’t pick up gender. Gender is a generally thought to be remnant from the I/E parent language, still extant in both German and Romance languages.
Man, that totally has me in stitches. I shall have to look up more of Twain’s essays.
Well, partly a joke. I was under the impression that German absorbed gender (at least in its modern form) from contact with Latin.
OK. But just to be clear-- it didn’t.
How gender developed in pre-proto-Indo-European is interesting. The original division of noun classes was between animate (things that move) and inanimate (things that are static). Hittite, the first language to split from Indo-European, still had only these two noun classes. Later a third class developed for collectivities. At some time before proto-Indo-European split into the rest of its daughter languages (except for Hittite), these noun classes became what we now think of as “gender”-- animate nouns became masculine, inanimate nouns became neuter, and collective nouns became feminine.
For example, there were two proto-Indo-European words for fire: *egnis (m.) and *paewr or *puwer (n.). The former referred to flames that move (as in a forest fire) and the latter to embers that sit still (as in a hearth). From *egnis came Latin ignis, Sanskrit agnih, Lithuanian ugnis, and Russian ogon’–all masculine gender. From *paewr came Greek pyr, German Feuer, and Old English fyr–all neuter gender. In Czech pýr means ‘ember’.
Meanwhile the feminine gender developed from the neuter plural form (e.g. in Latin both end with -a). It became known as feminine because somehow nouns denoting females were given this form.
AFAIK the constructs and grammar are Germanic, otherwise French would be a joke to us.
There’s more to language than words, and there’s certainly more to it than word origins.
PS I’m of the position that the French-English meat product talk is apocryphal horseshit. Anyone with 1 year of French knows a cow is une vache (bull-taureau, cattle-betail) and a pig is un cochon, that le porc and le boeuf actually refer to the meats. Unfortunately I don’t have an Old French dictionary handy.
All you need is a Modern French dictionary to see that this criticism misses the point, because the words mean the animals too.
porc - pig; hog; pork.
boeuf - ‘beef; head of beef; steer; ox’. As a classical music fan, this word always makes me think of Le Boeuf sur le toit by Darius Milhaud - it doesn’t mean the beef on the roof, it means the ox on the roof. In fact, I found no word for ox other than boeuf.
(I’m vegetarian, I don’t have un chien in this.)
That’s an interesting point except I’m fairly certain that ‘pork’ and ‘beef’ etc. came into English prior to Modern French.
A lot of French words entered English after the Normans took over in 1066. According to Wikipedia, Old French spans the time from around 1000 to 1300.
Of course, the borrowing must have happened in the 12th century if not earlier, but if you trace the etymology back to Latin porcus and bos, respectively, they mean the animals. In the Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology we find OF buef, boef means ‘beef, ox’, and was in English “Probably before 1300.” And OF porc “About 1300” came “directly from Latin porcus pig, tame swine.” Recall the famous line from an epistle of Horace where he called himself “Epicuri de grege porcum.”