I don’t know much about foreign languages, having only taken Spanish in school, but it seems that every language other than English that I’ve come across has gendered nouns. How is it that English managed to escape without them? What sort of linguistic evolution led to that?
(WAG follows)
England was more greatly influenced by Nordic languages than Romantic ones. (I don’t think Nordic languages are gender-specific.)
Whatever the reason, I’m glad that we don’t have to specify genders. Why is a chair female and a road male? Silly.
Of course, we could have gone the Russian route and dropped the “the” all together.
Here’s my WAG. English is the mongrel offspring of the Saxon and Norman languages; basically German and French. Both these languages use gendered nouns, however, the genders of nouns don’t always match. Best compromise for the mutt: Get rid of them all together.
German sure is. 3 years of it in high school and college and I still can’t keep the genders straight.
Ursa, you’re right. I spent 3 years in Deustchland and should’ve remembered that.
I need to add, though, that German is the least attractive language to hear spoken. To me, it always sounded like someone was trying to gargle with peanut butter.
Esperanto has no genders on its nouns, but that was a deliberate design choice.
Thank god.
“Rigardu, kaj vi ekvidos.” -Magnus
Damn Drain, for a moment there I was about to use the best pick up line that I learned over the break on you…
If your right leg is Thanksgiving and your left leg is Christmas, can I visit you between the holidays?
“People must think it must be fun to be a super genuis,
But they don’t realize how hard it is
to put up with all the idiots in the world.”
– Calvin and Hobbes
(__)
/
Nepali does not have gender specific nouns, but one must change the endings of pronouns in the case of posession to reflect the person being described (gee, can you guess that I’m not a linguist?) There are no–what do you call them—never mind. What I’m trying to say is that there is no word for “a” or “the”. These are implied by context, so you don’t run into the “die”, “der”, and “das” like in German. However, if you want to say “my sister”, “my” gets a femine ending. My father = mero bua; my mother = meri ama.
“I should not take bribes and Minister Bal Bahadur KC should not do so either. But if clerks take a bribe of Rs 50-60 after a hard day’s work, it is not an issue.” ----Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, Current Prime Minister of Nepal
I can’t really answer the question but I note that Old English did have gendered nouns. It also had more complicated noun cases, pronouns, etc. I’d guess the elimination of gender was just part of the overall simplification of these grammar structures that occurred when OE became ME. No idea how or why though.
PS to Lucky:
The word you’re looking for is articles.
American sign language is VERY gender specific.
Though I’ve taken only one semester of it, it seems safe to state that Mandarin Chinese does not as a rule assign genders to nouns. European languages are but a few of the hundreds or thousands of languages spoken in the world, and I suspect there are many examples of languages which use genderless nouns, worldwide. Additionally, in Mandarin, even personal pronouns are in part genderless. “He” and “she” are written differently, but both are represented by the same spoken word.
Not to mention that there are 3 genders, not just 2; masculine, feminine and neuter.
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” - Anne Frank
Ruadh,
Thanks! Are they indefinate articles or just articles?
a = indefinite
an = indefinite
the = definite
Drain: I am also no linguist, but I spend enough time on a language related mailing list, and I just emailed out your question to them, If I get a reply from them, before you get one here, i’ll post it.
Anyway, lots of other languages dont have them (Philippine languages), and some have many.
Swahili, for instance,has half a dozen gender classes, none ofthem masculine/feminine: one is for animals, one for human beings, one for abstract nouns, one forms diminutives, etc.
So, aren’t you glad schools don’t require you to learn the Swahili language in school? 
It’s worth the risk of burning, to have a second chance…
Since Doobious mentioned the animal problem, I’m reminded that this is also a factor in Nepali. There are 4 levels of pronouns in Nepal which are used depending on the social status of the person one is talking to or about. The lowest is used for animals and people of the lowest caste (actually, they have no caste, but I won’t get into that). It can also be used to chew out a servant or child with whom one is particularly angry. The middle case is used with one’s friends who are of about the same age, or a rickshaw driver or anyone who is not entitled to any special deference. The high form is used for one’s elders or others deserving of respect, and then there is the honorific form, used to address royalty (I haven’t had a chance to use that one yet ;)).
Of course, the verb endings change depending on the pronoun one uses.
“I should not take bribes and Minister Bal Bahadur KC should not do so either. But if clerks take a bribe of Rs 50-60 after a hard day’s work, it is not an issue.” ----Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, Current Prime Minister of Nepal
Drain, here are two replies.
The first is from a student of Linguistics:
The second from somone who took a course Old English, and had this explained by his teacher (he’s an English Major BTW ):
And, Lucky mentioned levels of genders on pronouns in Nepali:
Wow, quite versatile the pronouns are. Heh, I guess you really have to be careful how you speak in Nepalese. Anyway, one thing I liked about learning Tagalog was the nouns really have no cases, or gender at all (one thing I always seem to forget in spanish, the correct gender). Hell, the plural isn’t even marked on the noun (You use a pluralizing particle).
Though, the tricky spots are the verbs (the verbal system is complex), and there are no articles, but there are subject / non subject markers. There are also lots of affixes that change the meaning of nouns too, that make it difficult.
It’s worth the risk of burning, to have a second chance…
Let’s see. Here goes. English has gendered nouns. All nouns in English are either masculine, feminine, or neuter. Determiners and adjectives do not have gender in English, however, so you only have to worry about the gender of the pronoun that replaces the noun.
Example: A boy and a girl saw a four-leaf clover. HE reached for IT, but SHE was faster. The boy is masculine, the girl is feminine, the clover is neuter.
What makes people think that English nouns do not have gender is that 1) our system is logical: nouns with male sexual characteristics are masculine, those with female characteristics are feminine, and those with no sexual characteristics are neuter, and 2) you don’t have to worry about making determiners and adjectives agree with nouns like you do in most European languages.
As an aside, when linguists are being snooty, they don’t say “gender”, they say “noun class”. Many languages divide their nouns into classes using criteria unrelated to sexual characteristics. For example, IIRC, Hopi has six or seven noun classes into which objects are grouped based on their shape and solidity (e.g. one group might be “broad, flat, thin” objects, like a board or a leaf. Do not quote me on this.) Each noun class has a different ending, and all words in the same clause have to agree with the noun. I await correction from someone who really knows something about Hopi.
Uh, Handy, the ASL I learned did not have gender specific nouns – not even for people. There are no masculine or feminine articles or adjectives or ‘endings’. In fact, the pronouns aren’t even gendered.
E.g., if I was signing about Mary (a woman), I would finger spell her name (or use her proper sign) and then ‘place’ her in some space around me. Then, when I referred to her, I would just point to the space I placed her. The pronounical pointing is not engendered.
Now certainly, Mary may have a unique proper sign such as a finger spelled ‘M’ running down my chin (The Woman whose Name Begins with M), but that is not really a feminine noun. If Mary was a doctor, I could just as easily assign her the proper name of a doctor using the M hand (The Doctor whose Name Begins with M).
Peace.
Lawrence: Some American English words that really ought to be neuter are, in fact, gendered. Boats, for example. Invariably they are “she”. Granted, an unusual case, but it stands.
Justin