# languages with gender; I just don't get it. **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 30, 2002, 9:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-with-gender-i-just-dont-get-it/106442 "2002-04-30T09:48:12Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2002, 4:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-with-gender-i-just-dont-get-it/106442/21 "2002-04-30T16:11:32Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Thudlow Boink \* > \*\*So far, nobody’s really said anything to shed any light on the OP’s question, which is something I’ve always wondered about too. Where did this whole practice of assigning gender to nouns (other than people and animals that were obviously male or female) get started, and why? In the Old Days, did people really think of inanimate objects (and even abstract concepts) as being masculine or feminine? \*\* **Lamia** makes a good point. Gender doesn’t necessarily mean sex. It comes from the French word meaning “kind” and ultimately from the Latin, _genus_. I know certainly languages (no references handy) have more than three genders, so the masculine/feminine/neute nomenclature doesn’t quite work. Other ways of classification can include animate/inanimate, male/female, concrete/abstract, etc… As to why? I’m not sure. In Polish, which just has three genders, it just seems to sound better. Most nouns ending in -e or -o are neuter, -a are feminine, the rest usually masculine. When adjectives agree with them in the nominative, I find the sound quite pleasing, almost a rhyme… But when you extend it to the other declentions and the such, simple sound harmony breaks down, and is not a satisfying explanation. And it fails to explain the same phenomenon in other languages. Also, why do the Romance languages tend to distinguish between two genders, while the Germanic and Slavic languages take three? ---
**Author:** ![zev\_steinhardt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/97f17d/32.png) [@zev\_steinhardt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/zev_steinhardt)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2002, 4:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-with-gender-i-just-dont-get-it/106442/22 "2002-04-30T16:12:45Z")
I’m afraid I can’t answer the OP, but I can tell you that the practice is fairly old as Hebrew is a gendered language as well. There is no neuter in Hebrew. Zev Steinhardt ---
**Author:** ![JRDelirious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jrdelirious/32/9531_2.png) [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2002, 4:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-with-gender-i-just-dont-get-it/106442/23 "2002-04-30T16:29:39Z")
"Nouns have genders; people and other living things have sexes. It’s just that some professors noticed that saying ‘sex’ made the students giggle, so instead now they say ‘gender politics’ and ‘gender issues’ to mean things having to do with being male or female. " – myself on “gender”, in another forum some 7 years back. This MAY have indeed something to do with the Romance languages. From my old grammar classes, I vaguely recall that in depiction of poetic meter, there was a classification of verses or rhymes as “masculine” or “feminine” based on certain meter/rhyme combinations. The question would be whether proto-Indoeuropean and proto-Germanic called _their_ genders by pseudo-sexual terms, or if the use of “masculine” and “feminine” is a transposition of Latin grammar upon other Western Languages. So **Thudlow** it may be that it was the other way around – that in the beginning, there were “uline”,“inine”, and 'neither" words (and maybe even some others we lost), the distinction NOT referring to things being of the male and female sexes, but to some classification that made sense to the early language-users brain; that as languages evolved it became convention that living beings of the female sex would be referred to in the inine gender and those of the male sex in the uline; and that as societies and languages evolved, force of habit of hearing females being inine and males being uline resulted in eventually the minds of the people coming to see inine things as “feminine”=womanly and uline things as “masculine”=manly . (did I just make sense?) As **javaman** points out, “gender” means _genus_, a classification. In Spanish, _“género”_ means “gender”, genus (as in biology), genre (as in literature), and just “kind or type” in general. Were history different, who knows, maybe we would instead of M/F/N have “Up”, “Down”, and “Strange” gender (and particle physicists would be talking of masculine and feminine flavors of quarks) **javaman** , Spanish does still nominally have the “neuter” gender (él-ella-ello = he-she-it ) though as an actual written/spoken form it tends to only shows up in impersonal/abstract or pronominal object forms . To this day in Puerto Rico we’re still discussing if it’s “la internet” or “el internet”. However “el Web” is gaining popularity even though the Spanish word for web is feminine. ---
**Author:** ![eunoia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eunoia/32/97_2.png) [@eunoia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eunoia)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2002, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-with-gender-i-just-dont-get-it/106442/24 "2002-04-30T16:52:02Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Popup \* > \*\* > [nitpick] > le peche is not ‘a fish’ but rather ‘fishing’. Your point is still valid though. > [/nitpick] \*\* Nope. Both pêches, “fishing” and “peach” are feminine in French. ---
**Author:** ![syncrolecyne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f08c70/32.png) [@syncrolecyne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/syncrolecyne)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2002, 5:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-with-gender-i-just-dont-get-it/106442/25 "2002-04-30T17:47:05Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by JRDelirious \* > \*\* > > **javaman** , Spanish does still nominally have the “neuter” gender (él-ella-ello = he-she-it ) though as an actual written/spoken form it tends to only shows up in impersonal/abstract or pronominal object forms . > > \*\* Is lo (as in _lo bueno, lo malo, lo feo_ a Spanish “neuter” article? One thing I have always wondered is why words ending in -ma are usually masculine in Spanish (their cognates are too). El idioma, el programa, el problema, el sistema and el tema . Not all -ma words are like this (la paloma), but most are. ---
**Author:** ![David\_Simmons](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/9de053/32.png) [@David\_Simmons](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/David_Simmons)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2002, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-with-gender-i-just-dont-get-it/106442/26 "2002-04-30T17:58:01Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Mangetout \* > \*\*I still have a smattering of French and German from my schooldays, but the thing that’s always puzzled me is _why do these languages have genders for everything?_ - Now I’m sure that English, with it’s lack of gender, seems just as odd to the French and Germans, but _what is the purpose of it?_ - is there any advantage at all to describing a table as feminine? - it’s just a table, after all. > > I know this comes across like one of those ‘why isn’t everbody else normal, just like me?’ questions, but it’s not; I realise that my perspective carries bias - I’m trying to put it right. \*\* For a good laugh read Mark Twain’s essay on the “awful” German language. You think that’s bad? Russian uses 3 genders (masc, fem, neut), 6 noun cases, and of course two numbers. An adjective has to agree with its noun in number, gender and case so there are 72 possible adjective forms. And most of the commonly used adjectives are irregular! Fortunately English has only vestiges of this utter nonsense, and most of us misuse what little does remain. I’m also told by a native Russian speaker that the many Russians develop a coughing spell or swallow the adjective ending in a lot of situations. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2002, 7:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-with-gender-i-just-dont-get-it/106442/27 "2002-04-30T19:51:34Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by David Simmons \* > \*\* > > For a good laugh read Mark Twain’s essay on the “awful” German language. > > You think that’s bad? Russian uses 3 genders (masc, fem, neut), 6 noun cases, and of course two numbers. An adjective has to agree with its noun in number, gender and case so there are 72 possible adjective forms. And most of the commonly used adjectives are irregular! > > Fortunately English has only vestiges of this utter nonsense, and most of us misuse what little does remain. I’m also told by a native Russian speaker that the many Russians develop a coughing spell or swallow the adjective ending in a lot of situations. \*\* English may have only vestiges of this nonsense, as you call it, but I think it lost something far greater: the capacity to form new words out of native elements. Since we’ve lost that, higher abstract though is almost always expressed in Romance-origin words, and this reinforces the separation between everyday life and intellectual pursuits. How much more accessible would the best of our culture be to everyone, if it could be expressed without recourse to polysyllabic Romance-language terminology? For example, I remember reading an art-catalog article entitled, _Visually Haptic Space: Robert Irwin and Larry Bell_. I had to look up _haptic_\* just to understand the title, and I’ve got two degrees and six years of postsecondary education under my belt. \*And of course I’ve forgotten what it means. ---
**Author:** ![Manduck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/manduck/32/256_2.png) [@Manduck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Manduck)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2002, 8:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-with-gender-i-just-dont-get-it/106442/28 "2002-04-30T20:14:50Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by istara \* > \*\*“Beard” is feminine in French (_la barbe_). I’ve always wondered about that one… \*\* That’s because it sits on your face 😃 ---
**Author:** ![femtosecond](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/f08c70/32.png) [@femtosecond](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/femtosecond)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2002, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-with-gender-i-just-dont-get-it/106442/29 "2002-04-30T20:24:33Z")
As for the reason why people started using genders, I would approach it from the information theory side. The amount of information our languages had to carry increased. The more words you cram into a code space, the more likely you are to confuse them. To decrease the probability of “huh?” we had to add redundancy. It can be added by inflating the word length or by adding redundant codes in front of the words. Genders may be a way of avoiding longer words in order to achieve a certain level of error-correction. Grouping words together and adding their ‘group-names’ in front of them may even fit the human mind better. ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2002, 9:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-with-gender-i-just-dont-get-it/106442/30 "2002-04-30T21:03:48Z")
Someone above said that Greek has no articles. That’s wrong. Greek certainly did. In fact, articles were one of the eight parts of speech in Greek. Classical Latin had no articles, but they developed fairly early in Vulgar Latin. That’s why the articles in French, Spanish and Italian are so similar. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2002, 9:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-with-gender-i-just-dont-get-it/106442/31 "2002-04-30T21:18:19Z")
Can somebody confirm or deny what my father told me - that in italian, a single egg is one gender(I forget which), but eggs plural are the opposite gender? ---
**Author:** ![BobT](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/8e8cbc/32.png) [@BobT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BobT)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2002, 9:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-with-gender-i-just-dont-get-it/106442/32 "2002-04-30T21:29:13Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by cuate \* > \*\* > > Is lo (as in _lo bueno, lo malo, lo feo_ a Spanish “neuter” article? > > One thing I have always wondered is why words ending in -ma are usually masculine in Spanish (their cognates are too). El idioma, el programa, el problema, el sistema and el tema . Not all -ma words are like this (la paloma), but most are. \*\* I think “lo” solely existed to confuse people like me when they were learning Spanish. It’s not neuter. There is no neuter in Spanish. It’s just “lo”. The indirect pronouns are where I always got marked off. As I understood, Spanish words that were of Greek origin that ended in “-ma” were masculine. And a few words that were masculine or feminine took the article of the opposite gender for the purposes of being able to pronounce them such as “el arte”. The word “dia” (day) is masculine also. ---
**Author:** ![KarlGrenze](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/dbc845/32.png) [@KarlGrenze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KarlGrenze)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2002, 9:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-with-gender-i-just-dont-get-it/106442/33 "2002-04-30T21:32:14Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by cuate \* > \*\* > > Is lo (as in _lo bueno, lo malo, lo feo_ a Spanish “neuter” article? > > One thing I have always wondered is why words ending in -ma are usually masculine in Spanish (their cognates are too). El idioma, el programa, el problema, el sistema and el tema . Not all -ma words are like this (la paloma), but most are. \*\* Yes, _lo_ is a neutral article. Most Spanish words ending in -ción are also femenine. ---
**Author:** ![BobT](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/8e8cbc/32.png) [@BobT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BobT)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2002, 9:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-with-gender-i-just-dont-get-it/106442/34 "2002-04-30T21:41:41Z")
Like I said, “lo” existed solely to screw me up. My bigger Spanish dictionary states that it is a neutral article, but it is a masculine pronoun. But there is still no neuter gender in Spanish. But then again, qué sé? ---
**Author:** ![Opus1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/858c86/32.png) [@Opus1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Opus1)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2002, 1:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-with-gender-i-just-dont-get-it/106442/35 "2002-05-01T01:11:18Z")
Spanish words ending in -ma come from Greek, which is why most are masculine. This still doesn’t quite explain it to me, but it’s helped me remember it. ---
**Author:** ![Markxxx](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5daacb/32.png) [@Markxxx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Markxxx)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2002, 1:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-with-gender-i-just-dont-get-it/106442/36 "2002-05-01T01:15:01Z")
English still assigns gender to things. Cars – She drives like a beauty. The Mississippi River – Old Man River etc. Cow is feminine but describes the animal as a whole. “Look at those two cows.” We don’t (usually) say “Look at the cow and bull.” It just has died out. Question re: German. I know certain nouns are neutral just by having a certain ending. I believe it is Das Machen (a girl) so is the pronoun it? ---
**Author:** ![Palve](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/a698b9/32.png) [@Palve](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Palve)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2002, 1:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-with-gender-i-just-dont-get-it/106442/37 "2002-05-01T01:32:56Z")
[Mark Rosenfelder](http://www.zompist.com/kitgram.html#gender) on gender: > [@](#): > > Note that gender need not be simply masculine/feminine. Swahili, for instance, has eight gender classes, none of them masculine/feminine: one is for animals, one for human beings, one for abstract nouns, one forms diminutives, etc. > > I daresay not many conlangs have grammatical gender. (Verdurian has it, because it’s intended to be naturalistic.) 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: > > - It helps tie adjectives and nouns together, reducing the functional load on word order and adding useful clues for parsing. > - 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. > - It allows indefinite references to give someone’s sex. > - 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. > - It can support free word order without case marking, as in the Swahili example above. ---
**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 1, 2002, 1:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-with-gender-i-just-dont-get-it/106442/38 "2002-05-01T01:33:04Z")
German for ‘maiden’ is _das Mädchen_. Greek words ending in -[symbol]ma[/symbol] are neuter. When Romance languages lost the neuter, all Latin and Greek neuters were folded into the masculine. Italian for ‘egg’ is one example of this: Latin _ovum_ (neuter) \> Italian _uovo_ (masculine). It went funny in the plural, though: Latin _ova_ (still neuter) \> Italian _uova_ (feminine)\> Must have been the final -_a_ that made Italians treat it as feminine. It’s anomalous, though, because other Italian masculine nouns from Latin neuters just take the Italian masculine plural. E.g. _dato_ ‘datum’, pl. _dati_ ‘data’. I wonder why ‘eggs’ is the one exception. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2002, 1:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-with-gender-i-just-dont-get-it/106442/39 "2002-05-01T01:33:35Z")
No one seems to have touched on the original question. Many languages are free word order, unlike English (and, I think Chinese) which has relatively rigid word order. The ree word order languages all seem to classify nouns into a number of “kinds”, called genders, even though they have no necessary connection to sex and what this usually allows is that the gender and case of words can be used to disambiguate the sentence. So the subject needn’t come first; it is just the noun in the nominative case. And adjectives don’t have to precede (or follow) the noun they modify, since they agree in gender, number, and case, and, unless there are two nouns in the same gender, number, and case there can be no confusion. Actually, the original Indo-European had three numbers, singular, dual, and plural. The reason that the word for “we” in German is “wir”, but in certain German dialects is “mir” is that one of them was dual and the other plural (I forget which was which). There was no necessary connection between gender and sex. There are several words in German for women and girls (die Frau, der Weib, das Maedchen) and they have different genders. IE was presumably very free word order. Latin was too, but less so. For one thing, some of the forms started to coincide. I think nominative and accusative case were often identical and that is true in German today. But German is not that free word order even though it has gender, number, and case (and, in addition, adjectives are declined for definiteness), so I presume that all this classification is left over. Still you can begin a sentence with anything including the object, just so the next item is the verb. Nonetheless, it would seem that much of this is vestigial and will eventually go the way of the wings on a dodo. I understand that the Baltic languages (Latvian, Lithuanian) still have the original 7 IE cases (nom, gen, dat, acc, abl. loc, voc) and presumably a full suite of inflections. I would assume they still have free word order, but I don’t know this. I once questioned a Chinese student closely about his native language. One thing he mentioned was that you cannot tell the sex of a Chinese from his/her name. But I asked him how you would say “I will come tomorrow” and he answered that you would say the Chinese equivalent of “I come tomorrow”. I asked him a couple more like that and finally asked about “I will come sometime in the indefinite future” and he replied “I come sometime in the indefinite future”. The point is that they can express as much as they want–or as little. We have no good way of saying “his/her” as I did above except with in the idiotic way I did. In Chinese you don’t have to specify sex, although I am sure you can if you want to. Highly inflected languages force you to be more specific. ---
**Author:** ![system](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/original/2X/e/e489c3b7d8fce19c4b355dd4fc3f88cc39c34b87.png) [@system](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/system)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2002, 1:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-with-gender-i-just-dont-get-it/106442/40 "2002-05-01T01:59:10Z")
Trivia note only: > [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Jomo Mojo \* > For example, Arabic ‘_araq_ ‘liquor’ (m.) \> Greek _raki_ (n.) Araq actually means sweat, although it is used euphamistically as the name for a certain kind of (truly nasty) liquor which the Shamis and Turks (utterly inexplicably) like to drink.(\*) (\*: I attest that a raki headache is … awful.) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-with-gender-i-just-dont-get-it/106442.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-with-gender-i-just-dont-get-it/106442.md?page=3)