Just now, while contemplating a language wherein hats are “masculine” and bells are “feminine” despite undeniable structural similarities***, I find myself wondering if anyone (surely) has explored this business of gendering nouns in its earliest proto-linguistic roots. Or if anyone here has perhaps a good guess – how did it get started? Was it an extension of animism; i.e., all things are persons and therefore are gendered? Does the classification system tie in with historical sexist stereotypes in a significant way? If so, what does it mean that arrows are “feminine?”
[Mods, sorry if I’m in the wrong forum; it was a tough call.]
***If you want to get technical about it, bells have a central dangling appendage and hats do not. What’s up with that?
I am not a linguist but I offer this just as a theory.
I think it’s possible that in some cases, words were given a particular gender because of the way they sound. For example, the king is el rey in Spanish. That seems appropriate. Now move ahead to WWII and the invention of radar. It’s a new word and it doesn’t have an obvious gender. So is it el radar or la radar? I feel that Spanish speakers might feel that el radar sounds more normal because they’re accustomed to hearing el rey.
First, get out of your head that grammatical gender had anything to do with biological sex. Gender is the grouping of words into categories based on how they transform into different cases.
For an incorrect example that will give you the right idea: consider man/men, child/children, ox/oxen vs boy/boys, dog/dogs, pig/pigs. Two different ways to indicate number of things, so let’s call those groups “genders”.
That is all gender began as.
Some bells do not have a clapper on the inside, but a striker on the outside. This is especially true for very large bells, for which swinging them is impractical.
The bit about “gender” being unrelated to sex might be clearer with other examples of gender systems, since in most Indo-European languages, it happens that it’s at least correlated to sex. But there are other languages where the genders are, roughly, “tall” and “short”, or “animate” and “inanimate”. I say “roughly”, of course, because there are things like sparrows (despite being small) being in the “tall” gender, because they’re up in the air, or wind (despite being unliving) being “animate”, because it moves. And I’m sure that those languages have bizarre exceptions, for reasons which doubtless made sense at the time, but which are now lost.
I think the problem comes in when people assume that “gender” means the same thing in linguistics as it does in common English…i.e., that THIS thing is either anatomically male or female or neither. It’s just a category that doesn’t necessarily mean anything in the “real world”. A German “girl” is neuter. A German “turnip” is feminine.
The linked paper is quite short. It shows some experiments, and looks at various Indo-European languages, and examines some of the assumptions behind gendering. It doesn’t go back to language beginnings, but the ideas would be similar.
The link to the paper I gave doesn’t work for me here, but it does work on the StackExchange page. Here’s a different link that works.
Not sure how it works in Spanish, but in French the overwhelming majority of new, technical words or loanwords become masculine sort of by default unless they end in sounds that are typical of feminine nouns (-a, -ana, -e etc…). So it’s “un radar”, “un avion”, “un ordinateur”, “un parking”, “le funk”, “le business” etc… but “une piña colada”.
The only counter-example I can think of is “la soul” (as in soul music) - why is this particular music genre deemed feminine when rock 'n roll, gospel, hip-hop and rap, funk, disco, metal, blues, swing, classical, baroque etc. are all masculine ? Search me.
That being said, trying to divine any kind of coherence or logical consistency in gendered nouns is courting madness in any language. “Why is this word feminine/masculine ? That makes no sense !” is a staple of stale stand-up comedy shows in every country that I know of that uses gendered nouns. It certainly isn’t coherent across languages - I know German tripped me up to no end back in high school because those stupid Germans use the wrong genres for damn near everything. Why the hell would a wall be feminine ? Wait, the Sun is feminine too ?! OMG they’re hobbits !
To be fair to German, nouns that have the diminutive suffix “chen” are all neuter - so “girl” (maedchen) but so is “little man” “little struggle” “little flower” etc.
Genders in languages are just one type of noun (and pronoun) categories in languages. There are many types of noun categories in languages. Here are some of them:
Languages with absolutely no noun categories. There isn’t even any separate words meaning “he” and “she” and “it” in the language. There are words for “man” and “woman” if you really need to distinguish between them, but ordinarily you don’t in talking about someone.
Languages with separate pronouns for “he” and “she” and “it” and maybe separate words for “they” if you want to distinguish between male and female groups, but there’s no cases where nouns need to be distinguished as male and female.
Languages where it is necessary to distinguish each noun as being masculine or feminine.
Languages where it is necessary to distinguish each noun as being masculine or feminine or neuter.
Languages where the noun categories are not masculine, feminine, and neuter; rather, the categories are animate and inanimate.
Languages which split up the noun categories in other ways, using ideas like shape, rationality, mass/countable, and other weird things.
And there are combinations of those six ways of doing categories. Perhaps it used to be common for languages to have many categories. Gradually over the past few thousand years these divisions between the categories have been breaking down. The division between masculine and feminine are the last ones to go generally:
I think you are taking it a step too far. It’s true that many words which have no sexual identity have genders. But I find hard to believe that the system of word genders did not originate in sexual identity. It wasn’t an arbitrary system which just happened to divide things up as feminine or masculine. I’m sure word genders began with words like man, woman, girl, boy, etc and then spread to other words.
“I find it hard to believe” is not a very strong argument. Perhaps it helps if you think of the word “gender” as meaning “genre” (which is etymologically the same word, anyway) rather than a polite way of saying “sex.”
If you live in a society with strongly divided gender roles, and you have two main categories of something, it might seem natural to divide them into “masculine” and “feminine” even if neither one is terribly either. They might just as easily have called their noun categories “one” and “two.”
That’s kind of my point. If you live in a society with strongly divided gender roles and your language has genders which it describes as “masculine” and “feminine” it’s not a random coincidence.
When these nouns were first genderized, no one called then masculine or feminine nouns. They just spoke them as they learned them. The Neolithic had a shocking dearth of linguists!
Stop me if I’m wrong; but now that I think about it, in Spanish, the language I was first contemplating, the articles attached to nouns are gendered, but the pronouns are not, not even for people. Whereas in English, articles are neutral but we do use gendered pronouns for people. Interesting.
It seems like the only broad binary category that we have for nouns in English is “proper” nouns and not. It is also interesting to think about whence the need arises to divide nouns into such groups, especially in the case of things like “tall” and “short.”
Kobal2: Perhaps soul music is classified as feminine because the word for soul was already feminine (even though the English word is used to denote the music) – I know it is in Spanish.
Exapno Mapcase: That’s just what I was looking for, thank you.
My two sense: Always got me to thinking why a word may be masculine in one language and feminine in another. So I imagine it all began with cultural opinion. And, why is it the English uses “the” and “a/an” for all nouns. No gender in English except for a few words, waiter waitress, etc
Again, gender in language is just one type of noun category. It appears that languages have evolved over the past few thousand years to slowly reduce the number of categories in each language. It’s common for languages in the later stages of that evolution to have just two categories which are referred to as masculine and feminine:
It’s not clear what you mean here. Spanish pronouns have gender in the third person (bit not in first or second), just like in English (although English lacks it in the third person plural).
“Little man” and “little woman” are Männchen and Weibchen, respectively; Weib, the root of the latter, is neuter oddly enough. Perhaps strangest of all to non-native speakers is the fact that Männchen and Weibchen are used to denote male and female animals, even for those that are anything but little, like African elephants and blue whales.
Thai language, like many East Asian languages, lacks grammatical genders — though it has a classifier system. Are the two systems mutually exclusive? Does the gender vs classifier dichotomy correlate with synthetic vs analytic grammar?
My impression is that young Thais regard many of the classifier words as obsolescent curiosities, similar to English’s gaggle of geese or pride of lions.
There were no opinions or decisions involved. Language is a natural aspect of human behavior, and as has already been pointed out, there was a significant lack of grammarians and linguists in prehistoric times.