# Female and Male Nouns **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 28, 2003, 8:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/female-and-male-nouns/178106 "2003-05-28T20:33:55Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![jbuell](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c37758/32.png) [@jbuell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jbuell)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2003, 8:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/female-and-male-nouns/178106/1 "2003-05-28T20:33:55Z")
I was wondering why many other languages assign sexes to nouns? For example in Spanish, “chair” is female (la silla). ---
**Author:** ![RedNaxela](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/ad7895/32.png) [@RedNaxela](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RedNaxela)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2003, 9:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/female-and-male-nouns/178106/2 "2003-05-28T21:15:43Z")
First of all, welcome to the SDMB! I found the following on an interesting [page](http://www.zompist.com/kitgram.html#gender) 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. ---
**Author:** ![sailor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a587f6/32.png) [@sailor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sailor)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2003, 9:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/female-and-male-nouns/178106/3 "2003-05-28T21:22:55Z")
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. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![sailor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a587f6/32.png) [@sailor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sailor)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2003, 9:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/female-and-male-nouns/178106/4 "2003-05-28T21:33:12Z")
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 ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2003, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/female-and-male-nouns/178106/5 "2003-05-28T22:03:23Z")
My favorite example of a Spanish word that changes meaning with a change of gender: La papa = the potato El papa = the pope ---
**Author:** ![Susanann](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/7ab992/32.png) [@Susanann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Susanann)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2003, 10:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/female-and-male-nouns/178106/6 "2003-05-28T22:08:48Z")
When I was studying french and spanish, I always wondered why english DIDNT have male and female(until I went to England). ---
**Author:** ![Agback](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/977dab/32.png) [@Agback](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Agback)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2003, 10:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/female-and-male-nouns/178106/7 "2003-05-28T22:28:02Z")
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 ---
**Author:** ![JohnBckWLD](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/d6d6ee/32.png) [@JohnBckWLD](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnBckWLD)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2003, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/female-and-male-nouns/178106/8 "2003-05-28T22:31:13Z")
Der = The for masculine nouns Die = The for feminine nouns Das = The for “Neuter” nouns ---
**Author:** ![urban1a](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/e47c2d/32.png) [@urban1a](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/urban1a)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2003, 10:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/female-and-male-nouns/178106/9 "2003-05-28T22:59:51Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Colibri \* > \*\*My favorite example of a Spanish word that changes meaning with a change of gender: > > La papa = the potato > > El papa = the pope \*\* In this case, though, wouldn’t it be El pap **á**? The accent is what makes the difference. Similarly, mama = breast, while mam **á** = mama (as in mother). Bob ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2003, 11:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/female-and-male-nouns/178106/10 "2003-05-28T23:11:44Z")
Mark Twain on “The Awful German Language” (public domain, of course) > [@](#): > > Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print – I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books: > > **Gretchen.** > > Wilhelm, where is the turnip? > > **Wilhelm.** > > She has gone to the kitchen. > > **Gretchen.** > > Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden? > > **Wilhelm.** > > It has gone to the opera. > > To continue with the German genders: a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female – tomcats included, of course; a person’s mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and not according to the sex of the individual who wears it – for in Germany all the women either male heads or sexless ones; a person’s nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience haven’t any sex at all. The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay. > > Now, by the above dissection, the reader will see that in Germany a man may think he is a man, but when he comes to look into the matter closely, he is bound to have his doubts; he finds that in sober truth he is a most ridiculous mixture; and if he ends by trying to comfort himself with the thought that he can at least depend on a third of this mess as being manly and masculine, the humiliating second thought will quickly remind him that in this respect he is no better off than any woman or cow in the land. > > In the German it is true that by some oversight of the inventor of the language, a Woman is a female; but a Wife (Weib) is not – which is unfortunate. A Wife, here, has no sex; she is neuter; so, according to the grammar, a fish is he, his scales are she, but a fishwife is neither. To describe a wife as sexless may be called under-description; that is bad enough, but over-description is surely worse. A German speaks of an Englishman as the Engländer; to change the sex, he adds inn, and that stands for Englishwoman – Engländerinn. That seems descriptive enough, but still it is not exact enough for a German; so he precedes the word with that article which indicates that the creature to follow is feminine, and writes it down thus: “die Engländerinn,” – which means “the she-Englishwoman.” I consider that that person is over-described. > > Well, after the student has learned the sex of a great number of nouns, he is still in a difficulty, because he finds it impossible to persuade his tongue to refer to things as “he” and “she,” and “him” and “her,” which it has been always accustomed to refer to it as “it.” When he even frames a German sentence in his mind, with the hims and hers in the right places, and then works up his courage to the utterance-point, it is no use – the moment he begins to speak his tongue flies the track and all those labored males and females come out as “its.” And even when he is reading German to himself, he always calls those things “it,” where as he ought to read in this way: ---
**Author:** ![sailor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a587f6/32.png) [@sailor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sailor)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2003, 11:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/female-and-male-nouns/178106/11 "2003-05-28T23:15:17Z")
nope. “papá” means “daddy” while “papa” is “pope” (and potato in South America but not in Spain) ---
**Author:** ![sailor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a587f6/32.png) [@sailor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sailor)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2003, 11:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/female-and-male-nouns/178106/12 "2003-05-28T23:25:59Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![lizztigger](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/b9bd4f/32.png) [@lizztigger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lizztigger)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2003, 11:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/female-and-male-nouns/178106/13 "2003-05-28T23:29:07Z")
hey also how do u decide if it’s male or female? i mean who deicded that a door is feminE? ---
**Author:** ![lizztigger](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/b9bd4f/32.png) [@lizztigger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lizztigger)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2003, 11:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/female-and-male-nouns/178106/14 "2003-05-28T23:29:07Z")
hey also how do u decide if it’s male or female? i mean who deicded that a door is feminE? ---
**Author:** ![BlueMit11](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7feea3/32.png) [@BlueMit11](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BlueMit11)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2003, 12:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/female-and-male-nouns/178106/15 "2003-05-29T00:00:14Z")
Too much connection is being made between the gender of the word and what it is referring too, I think. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2003, 12:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/female-and-male-nouns/178106/16 "2003-05-29T00:13:45Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2003, 2:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/female-and-male-nouns/178106/17 "2003-05-29T02:00:40Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Susanann \* > \*\*When I was studying french and spanish, I always wondered why english DIDNT have male and female(until I went to England). \*\* 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. ---
**Author:** ![JohnBckWLD](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/d6d6ee/32.png) [@JohnBckWLD](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnBckWLD)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2003, 3:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/female-and-male-nouns/178106/18 "2003-05-29T03:22:42Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Exapno Mapcase \* > \*\*Mark Twain on “The Awful German Language” (public domain, of course) \*\* 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. ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2003, 6:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/female-and-male-nouns/178106/19 "2003-05-29T06:28:56Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by JohnBckWLD \* > 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. 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. ---
**Author:** ![Apollon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e47774/32.png) [@Apollon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Apollon)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2003, 11:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/female-and-male-nouns/178106/20 "2003-05-29T11:29:21Z")
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. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/female-and-male-nouns/178106.md?page=2)