Not necessarily. In the Slavic languages, it’s pretty much dependent on the sound of the word. If Internet was Interneta, I’m sure it’d be feminine in Czech and Polish. If you’re playing by the numbers, of course most neologisms will be masculine in Polish, because most words don’t end in -a, -e, or -o.
I actually can’t think of a reason the adjective would stray too far from the noun. For example, Polish has very flexible word order, but you wouldn’t throw the adjective anywhere other than before or after the noun, and I’m unfamiliar with any language that would–perhaps I could be shown to be wrong. And it’s quite easy to have two nouns in the same gender, number, and case: The dog and cat ran away. (Dog, cat, all nominative case, animate-masculine, singular). I saw the dog and the cat (same as above, accusative case).
I can’t attest to whether this is true or not (and, just as a point of reference, nouns are “declined” and verbs are “conjugated” - terminology that began with ancient Roman grammarians.)
But reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European suggest that it had two genders, animate and inanimate, and that the distinction between masculine and feminine that’s found in many of the languages in the family arose later. My recollection is that feminine forms are indeed historically newer than masculine ones.
It is actually a rather curious thing that in most of the Indo-European languages (and some Afro-Asiatic languages as well; Arabic and Hebrew, at least, have grammatical genders that correspond to particular sexes, or so I’m told) noun classes or genders became associated with particular sexes of human beings. It’s really a weird thing when you think about it. And it has sort of odd results at times - for instance, as with the strange results in Spanish with the newly-developed feminine forms of professions previously limited to men (particularly an interesting phenomenon when you contrast it with our English tendency to get rid of feminine-gendered profession terms.)
Interneta in most slavic languages would be internet in its genitive case, still masculine.
The other week I was teaching a segment on gender discourse and happened to look up the etymology and history of the word ‘gender’ in English. The sense of the word roughly meaning ‘sex’ came about, as opposed to older more general meaning of “kind” or sort (and sometimes by extension sex, as in “the female gender” ie “the fair sex”) only in the 1960s according to the OED. Hence, the connection with sex is far more recent and the connection with grammar is far older. Stick that in your pipe.
Yes, but not if the nominative was “the Interneta,” which was my point.
To further expound, “the Interneta” would be “internety” in the Polish genetive, if “Interneta” was the nominitive.
Or let me use an example that actually came up in conversation two days ago with my mom. I had to use the word “masa” (as in the lime-slaked corn you make tamales and tortillas from) in Polish. Since “masa” doesn’t exist in Polish, and I wanted to use that precise foreign word, I conjugated it as a feminine noun. Sure, “masa” could be the genetive of the masculine “mas,” but “mas” is not what I’m talking about. The nominitive singular is “masa.” So, I would say “dodaj wodę do masy” (“add water to the masa”). And “masa” would conjugate into “masy” in the feminine genetive.
:smack: Decline, not conjugate.
Not according to the Real Academia Española :
“Amb.” relate to ambigious, i.e., its gender it’s not decided. As per Spanish Wiki:
You can write, for now, “La Internet” and “El Internet” and both are correct.
Weird. I don’t think I’ve ever actually heard “la internet”. Is it a regionalism, or have I not been paying attention? (Or is the RAE just off-base, as they are sometimes?)
In Arabic it’s either الإنترنت al-intirnit (masculine) or الشبكة al-shabakah (literally, ‘the net’: feminine).
In Hebrew, האינטרנט ha-internet is masculine; הרשת ha-reshet (literally, ’ the net’) is feminine. A Kabbalist might note with interest that the word רשת reshet is made of the last three letters in the alphabet, the Hebrew analogue of XYZ.
I’ve actually have heard “la internet”, but not as much as “el internet.” I don’t think it’s regionalism, at least not according to RAE’s. It’s one of those adopted English words that have not made the gender transition in Spanish.
As far as RAEl, well, it may be off-base or may not, but, unlike Webster, it’s for most the last word on what is correct and proper Spanish.
I’ve also seen “la red” (“the net”, literally) used in various Spanish-language text.
Neuter in Norwegian as well.
Is there an official process for determining the gender of new words that enter the vocabulary? Is there some committee of academics in some university somewhere who has the final say in this?
For example, in French: how did the “official” designation of the gender of the word “Internet” come into play? Government mandate? The word of some respected linguist?
French, at least as spoken in France, does indeed have an official organization (Académie française) that determines proper usage. They publish the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, which is the official dictionary of French (in France). The last full edition was completed in 1935, but the first two volumes of the latest edition have been released.
I think I know what phenomenon you’re talking about, but it’s not really like grammatical gender.
What happens is that in Japanese, when you reference a number of objects (like how in English we might say “Three bananas,” “Five oranges” or “Ten thousand maniacs”) you can’t just say, for example, “eight computers” but rather you must say “eight units of computer.” But the problem for people trying to learn Japanese is that there are (not just around twenty, but) dozens of words for “unit,” depending on classifications like the ones you mentioned. (“Flat things,” “stick-like things,” “bundled things,” “cups,” “people,” and so on.)
Of course we do this in English sometimes as well: “Three sheets of paper” and so on. But in Japanese you do this (very nearly almost) every time you reference a number of objects. It can be intimidating for non-native speakers.
My wife once tried to buy stamps at the post office. She said in broken japanese something that amounts to “stamps… two… please” The person at the counter responded with “nimai?” Which means roughly “two sheets?” (Two stamps, though, not two sheets of stamps.) My wife didn’t understand “nimai,” and simply repeated, “Two.”* The other repeated again, “nimai?” This went back and forth a few times.
I don’t know if the counterperson was being purposefully obtuse or whether she genuinely couldn’t understand what my wife meant by “stamps… two… please.” But my point is just to illustrate that awkwardness can result from the failure to employ the usage I’m describing.
Sorry, that was kind of an aside, but hopefully not completely uninteresting.
-FrL-
*By the way something else that confounds some learners of Japanese is the fact that there are two numbering systems in Japanese. When you talk about the numbers one through ten by themselves, without using them to count something, then you employ these words: hitotsu, futatsu, mitsu, yotsu, itsutsu, mutsu, nanatsu, yattsu, kokonotsu, to. But the numbers for one through ten when you’re using them as “counters” are ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, kyu, ju. Beyond the number ten, you always just use numbers constructed from the latter system: there is no way to say a number greater than ten in the former system. And to make things just a little more confusing, the words for four and seven in the former system “yotsu” and “nanatsu” are sometimes imported over into the “counter” system so that, for example, people say “yojin” and “nanajin” for “four people” and “seven people” respectively, rather than *shijin or *shichijin. The circumstances under which “yo” and “nana” are appropriate instead of “shi” or “shichi” are not formulable: they are just a set of exceptions you have to learn by rote. Frustrating.
This actually is frequently considered at least akin to grammatical gender (also called “noun classes”). East Asian languages tend to share this characteristic; Chinese uses “measure words” as well, specifically when nouns are used with numbers or demonstratives (i.e. ‘this’ and ‘that’). An auxiliary noun has to be used in those circumstances that concords with the main noun’s class, so that, for instance, you have yi4 zhang1 zhao4pian4 (“one sheet photograph”, roughly) but yi4 ben3 shu4 (“one volume book”).
Of course, there’s no concord with adjectives (as in, say, Spanish or French) or with the verb (as with Bantu languages, which tend to have five to tend genders, none of which correspond to a person’s sex). Languages with noun classifiers like Chinese or Japanese tend to have dozens of them, and it’s probably more common to analyze this as something different from grammatical gender, but the two phenomena are at least fairly similar.
In Portuguese it’s girly girly: a internet