Just an idle question from a conversation I had earlier today:
For those languages that have gendered nouns, what gender does “internet” or its equivalent take?
I realize that the answer will probably vary, so I guess this is almost a poll.
In Spanish the “internet” is masculine: “El Internet”.
It’s masculine in French too, but it isn’t usually used with a definite article (it’s just “Internet,” not “l’Internet”).
Like “Tinternet”, then?
Hopes that one whooshes a lot of people 
ahhh…the old gender-in-language problem…
Lots of English speakers who don’t know any other languages just can’t figure out the whole business of gender. They always wonder “how can inanimate objects be sexy?”
so here’s how I 'splain it :
Forget about maculine/feminine categories. Just get used to the idea that words are are divided into different categories based on how they are spelled. The cateqories are pretty much meaningless.
So, some words are categorized as, say, “blue” and other words are , say “red”. In French, for example, words that end in the letter E are “blue”. Now, a lot of the words that have feminine connotations are also blue, and happen to end in E. But MOST of the words that are blue are inanimate and have no gender.
Other words are “red”. And …(surprise)… lots of words that have masculine meanings are also "Red. But MOST of the red words are inanimate.
So most native speakers don’t think of the “sexiness” of their words–they just use the rules of grammar. A “blue” noun, uses a “Blue” adjective,( so you add and extra E in this example) A “Red” noun uses a “red” adjective, so you dont add the letter E.
In most languages, a new word like 'internet; will be assigned a gender–but not in accordance to the meaning of the word. It’s just goes according to the rules of spelling in that language.
It’s all just a matter of grammar— not meaning, or gender.
So, gee whiz, … sexy words turn out to be dull and boring.
In German it’s neuter, perhaps because the word for net, Netz is neuter, too (but that’s hard to tell.)
<hijack>
OK, but what’s the point of that?
I mean, what does it contribute to the language?
Obviously, it’s not required for communication; English (and other languages) do quite well without it.
Coming from an English-only background, the whole idea of 'matching “blue” nouns to “blue” adjectives just seems pointless, as does the whole idea of calling some subset of nouns “blue”. What purpose does it serve?
</hijack>
What’s that got to do with the OP, though? jsgoddess wasn’t asking “how can you assign a gender to words for ‘internet’ when the internet is an inanimate object without any sex?” She simply wanted to know “what’s the gender of the various words for ‘internet’ in languages that have grammatical gender?”
Since she already noted that “the answer will probably vary”, I think it’s a safe bet that she realizes that grammatical gender doesn’t depend on some attribution of innate “maleness” or “femaleness” to inanimate objects.
Well, language is perhaps not so much about rational “purpose” as about history and accident. French, for example, has gendered common nouns mostly because its ancestor Latin had gendered common nouns. It happened to keep the masculine and feminine genders and drop the neuter gender, while English happened to keep the neuter gender of its Germanic ancestor and drop the masculine and feminine genders (for common nouns, that is).
But if you really want an example of “purpose”, I suppose it might be easier to keep pronouns for inanimate objects straight in languages where words for such objects have grammatical gender.
No, as I said, just an idle question. I suppose I could have asked which gender neologisms tend to be assigned in languages that have gendered nouns, but I am specifically interested in “internet.”
Obviously, Chappachula has an agenda that frequently requires such explanations, and s/he took this opportunity to get on the soapbox and lay it out there. It wasn’t the OP’s question, but it was close enough to evoke this rap. However, I’d recommend that s/he modify that little explanation (usefulness aside) to connect the masculine with the blue and the feminine with the red. This is because of our convention of associating blue with male and pink/red with female. It would make the explanation just a bit more parallel in structure and might make it easier for (some) people to understand. Nome sane? xo, C.
In Polish, it’s inanimate masculine. Polish technically has five genders: Person-masculine, animate-masculine, inanimate-masculine, neuter, and feminine. Words that end in a consonant are generally masculine (and then whether they break down to human, animate, or inanimate determines the further subdivision), words that end in -e or -o are generally neuter, and words that end in -a are generally feminine.
I originally learned that the Spanish word for internet was “la red” (feminine), but I don’t know where, if anywhere, that usage exists. With all the new English words that just get directly transposed to Spanish with a pronunciation change, it doesn’t surprise me at all that simply calling it “el internet” is more common.
It’s feminine in Welsh (rhwngrwyd), but that’s because “net” (rhwyd) is feminine, itself borrowed from Latin neuter rete, retis “net.”
In Hebrew, “Internet” is masculine, although the more commonly used “net” (reshet) is feminine.
Russian Интернет - masculine
In Czech it is masculine. I was wondering, though, if this theory is correct for most languages: Aren’t foreign words that are imported into a language mostly masculine solely because most languages revert to masculine in their colloquial form?
-Tcat
Borrowed words in French seem to be exclusively masculine - I’m not sure if this is an absolute rule, but I can’t think of any feminine examples. Everything from ‘le net’ to ‘le farniente’ including desperate pseudo-gerunds like ‘le footing’ seem to follow this rule.
If there are any feminine borrowed words or neologisms, it would be interesting to see what the mechanism was in achieving that.
Does this mean that all nouns become masculine in Czech casual speech ? I’ve never come across this phenomenon (I’m a Latin languages guy).
Doesn’t Spanish use “el” for nouns beginning with a vowel, regardless of gender - e.g. el agua? Or is that only for nouns starting with an “a”?
Just nouns starting with “a” (or “ha”) when the first syllable is stressed. So “el agua” or “el alma” but “la alfombra”.
That’s a reasonable question and it has an answer. One of the many divides among languages is whether they have fixed or free word order or something in between. Free word order languages (Latin comes close) allow one to make all sorts of subtle gradations of emphasis. So they say; I don’t speak any such language. Anyway, assume it is true. Then suppose an adjective gets separated from its noun. One way of keeping track is that the adjective agrees with the noun in gender, number, and case. Yes, two nouns in the sentence could have the same gender, number, and case but it is unlikely.
In Japanese they apparently have around 20 different classes of nouns. There is one class for humans, another for mammals, a third for birds, and one for fish. But squirrels are in the bird class (so maybe it should be the tree-dwellers) and similarly, the sea mammals are classified as fish. The remaining classes, as far as I am informed, are basically shapes: stick-shapes, broad flat things, so on.
What I am curious about is why the “genders” (the word only means kinds) got mixed up with sexes. In German, for example, various words that describe women (die Frau, der Weib, das Maedchen) are any of the genders.
I have heard that one reason that in many Indo-European languages the plural in all three genders resemble the feminine singular is that the feminine gender came late and was originally devoted to abstract nouns that had been conjugated as plurals. I have no idea what evidence there is for this.