Grammatical Gender

[septimus]

Linguist Dixon proposes that languages follow a cycle like
analytic (isolational) –> agglutinative (concatenated) –> synthetic (inflective) –> simplifying eventually back to analytic
Am I correct that languages where single uninflected words stand on their own (aka isolational or analytic morphology) do not usually have gender? Thai is very isolational and lacks gender, even in basic pronouns. English is tending to isolational, with gender disappearing.

@iljitsch

It seems like languages like English and Dutch (to a lesser degree) have lost a lot of grammatical complexity that a language like German has retained.

What I wonder about is where all that complexity came from in the first place. Did people who lived before we started writing things down really use this complex grammar so very consistently? That seems hard to believe.

This question was never answered in the thread. If inflected languages tend to simplify and eventually become isolational with gender disappearing; then, since languages originated several tens of thousands of years ago, why haven’t all traces of gender disappeared? Presumably there is some mechanism where gender can be added back in to an isolational language.

Thai has noun classifiers. Are they ever considered to play a role similar to gender markers? Thai has dozens of classifiers but most are archaic: could the commonest remaining classifiers (inanimate, animate, human, vehicular, etc.) develop into “gender” markers? (Or, perhaps more to the point, would that development be plausible in an ancient pre-literate society?)

[dougie_monty]

@RivkahChaya

Hard. It’s even harder to explain to someone whose language depends on context to pluralize words how to pluralize compound nouns. I babysat for a Chinese family-- the parents came here as adults-- and they could never get “chocolate chip cookies” right. It was always “chocolate chips cookie,” which I understood the thinking behind. Deaf people have a hard time with both plurals and prepositions, because American Sign Language handles them both very differently.

I’m curious : Is there an emphatic particle in ASL, an equivalent of stressing a word in speech or underlining/bold it in writing?

[zimaane]

French is not isolational, but it has lost a lot of its inflections since developing from Latin - for example, the verbs endings for first, second and third person singular - but the gender system has not changed much at all.