I was wondering why many other languages assign sexes to nouns? For example in Spanish, “chair” is female (la silla).
First of all, welcome to the SDMB!
I found the following on an interesting page about constructing your own artificial language:
[quote]
People ask, what is gender for? Gender is remarkably persistent: it’s persisted in the Indo-European, Semitic, and Bantu language families for at least five thousand years. It must be doing something useful.
A few possibilities:[ul][li]It helps tie adjectives and nouns together, reducing the functional load on word order and adding useful clues for parsing. [/li][li]It gives language (in John Lawler’s terms) another dimension to seep into. In French, for instance, there are many words that vary only in gender: port/porte, fil/file, grain/graine, point/pointe, sort/sorte, etc. Changing gender must have once been an easy way to create a subtle variation on a word. [/li][li]It allows indefinite references to give someone’s sex. [/li][li]It offers some of the advantages of obviative pronouns (see below): one may have two or more third person pronouns at work at the same time, referring to different things. [/li][li]It can support free word order without case marking, as in the Swahili example above.[/ul][/li][/quote]
IANALinguist, so I don’t know whether these ideas have merit or whether there are any competing theories.
This has been asked before and I have a vague recollection that it was derived from Latin declensions. And I think the word is “gender” rather than “sex”. I have never seen a chair with sex. 
In Spanish, when the noun is feminine, the augmentative will mostly be masculine and often become a different word on its own.
silla/sillón, puerta/portón, mesa/mesón, etc
My favorite example of a Spanish word that changes meaning with a change of gender:
La papa = the potato
El papa = the pope
When I was studying french and spanish, I always wondered why english DIDNT have male and female(until I went to England).
G’day
Actually (as Sailor hints) words have a grammatical property called ‘gender’, which is different from and must not be confused with the biological property ‘sex’. ‘Masculine’, ‘feminine’, and ‘neuter’ are genders, 'male, ‘female’, and ‘sexless’ are sexes: not the same thing in any way.
In the Indo-European languages there is a weak tendency for male referents to have masculine words and for female things to have feminine words, and for words to occur in masculine/feminine cognate pairs with male/female referents. It was this that cause the Stoic grammarians in the 1st century either side of the time of Christ to assign names suggesting sex to the genders. English is mercifully almost free of genders. The only remaining trace is in the personal pronouns, where gender corresponds pretty closely to sex (except that ships are construed as feminine). It is this situation that causes native English speakers such a lot of trouble with gendered languages.
In non-Indo-European languages there are sometimes no genders and sometimes many more than three, and the sorting principle that assigns words to genders often has absolutely no connection with the sex of the referents. For instance, some Native American languages have an ‘animate’ gender and an ‘inanimate’ gender, with words roughly sorted on whether the referent is an animal or not. In such languages, all personal names are the same gender (animate).
Try Googling “gender +word -transgender”.
Regards,
Agback
Der = The for masculine nouns
Die = The for feminine nouns
Das = The for “Neuter” nouns
In this case, though, wouldn’t it be El papá?
The accent is what makes the difference. Similarly, mama = breast, while mamá = mama (as in mother).
Bob
Mark Twain on “The Awful German Language” (public domain, of course)
nope. “papá” means “daddy” while “papa” is “pope” (and potato in South America but not in Spain)
In Spanish the slang for penis is feminine while the slang for the female part is masculine. Also, the word for “person”, “persona” is feminine so one can be talking about a man using feminine adjectives.
Most nouns ending in -a are feminine and ending in -o masculine but there are exceptions: idiota, espia, camarada, which use the same form in both genders.
hey also how do u decide if it’s male or female? i mean who deicded that a door is feminE?
hey also how do u decide if it’s male or female? i mean who deicded that a door is feminE?
Too much connection is being made between the gender of the word and what it is referring too, I think.
Don’t forget Dravidian languages, which have masculine, feminine, and neuter.
The distribution of these among referents is a bit different from IE, however.
In Dravidian languages like Tamil, only humans and deities can take masculine or feminine gender, and then of course it’s always men and gods who are grammatically masculine, and women and goddesses who are grammatically feminine.
All other nouns—animals, plants, inanimate things— are grammatically neuter.
Only masculine and feminine nouns for humans and deities take the accusative case ending when they are the direct object of a verb. Neuter nouns when direct objects are in the nominative or unmarked case.
English used to have gender (Old English, I mean), but it was dropped over time. The best explanation I’ve seen was that you had a couple of closely related linguistic groups in English, whose roots were identifyable, but became confusing because of differences in gender endings. So the endings were dropped, and gender followed.
I will concede the awful-ness. Even cars are gender neutal (das Auto). A couple of points about male / female noun assignments. I don’t know if this is a regional thing or not, but when referring to a person, my Bavarian family use der for men or die for females in front of the name of the person they’re discussing. Example: Der Johann is running late as opposed to Johann’s running late.
Couple of hijacks:
I understand Scandanavian (Swede / Finn / Norwegian) nouns have somewhere between 9 and 14 ways of saying the.
Also…I wonder,
In languages with male/fem/other type nouns, who gets to decide the gender of new nouns. I could almost imagine this language commitee locked away in some stuffy university arguing over the gender of the fax machine.
And while I’m on the subject of new nouns / words,
In East Asia, when new words are introduced, who gets to design the written character for the word? And how is it introduced to the public. Are there announcements made on the news? Kinda like, in other news tonight, the dept. of language & culture today released the written form of the word sitcom…please not its correct design on the screen behind me.
If the words are coined from other elements within the language, it’s usually obvious what gender the new word has. If borrowed from another language, the gender is borrowed along with it. When borrowed from a language that has no gender, such as English, there’s usually a default gender. For French, the default is masculine and for German, I think it’s neuter.
Eventually, a language committee does put its official stamp on borrowings or rules that they shouldn’t be used.
I have my own little theory no what things are what gender in german. These rules apply only to original German words though, not borrowed ones, how ever long ago they might have been borrowed.
Of course there are other rules that supercede mine: words that end in -in and -ung for example, will always be feminine, -rich always masculine, etc.
Masculine: everything that is hard, immovable, strong, large. Also animals that have manly attributes.
Feminine: everything that is soft, poisonous, weak, treacherous, that provides shelter, nourishes. Also animals that have feminine attributes.
Neuter: everything that does not apply above, and things that are little.
Thus:
Hund (dog) is masculine and Katze (cat) is feminine, because dogs were used for hunting, guarding and sometimes war (manly things), while cats are shy and disloyal (female attributes in old times).
Spinne (spider), Schlange (snake), Biene (bee), Wespe (wasp), Kröte (toad) are feminine, because they are/can be venomous. Skorpion is masculine, because the word is borrowed.
Schild (shield), Speer (spear), Degen (dagger), Helm (helmet), Säbel (sabre), Harnisch (breastplate) and Spieß (pike) are masculine, because they are instruments of war, which is a manly affair. Muskete (musket), Lanze (lance), Bogen (bow), Hellebarde (halberd) and Pike (pike) are feminine, because the words are borrowed. Note the difference between der Schild (shield; clearly something manly) and das Schild (sign plate; clearly neither manly nor feminine); even Germans confuse them.
Höhle (cavern), Decke (blanket, ceiling), Burg (castle) are feminine, because they protect and shelter.
Wolke (cloud) and Wolle (wool) are soft and thus feminine.
Quelle (well), Wiese (meadow), Milch (milk), Herde (herd) are feminine, because they nourish or are sources of nourishment.
Baum (tree), Berg (mountain), Fluss (river), Fels (rock), Stein (stone), Himmel (sky), Boden (floor), Herd (Hearth) are masculine, because they are hard, large and/or immovable.
Body parts are more difficult. I can offer no explanation for them. Perhaps they were associated with different deities, assuming their respective gender.