# Origins of gendered nouns **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 5, 2018, 11:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/origins-of-gendered-nouns/813635 "2018-05-05T11:39:55Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 4
**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 14, 2018, 12:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/origins-of-gendered-nouns/813635/61 "2018-05-14T12:07:51Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > Johanna writes: > > \> . . . Indo-European and Semitic are the only families that assign so-called masculine and feminine to objects. . . > > To nitpick, Semitic isn’t a family. It’s one branch of the Afroasiatic language family, and some non-Semitic languages within the Afroasiatic family assign so-called masculine and feminine to objects. And before someone nitpicks what I wrote, I’ve noticed that sometimes it’s spelled “Afroasiatic” and sometimes it’s spelled “Afro-Asiatic”: > > [List of languages by type of grammatical genders - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_grammatical_genders) :smack: I… _meant_… Afro-Asiatic, of course. One shared feature that you can find all over every branch of Afro-Asiatic, a very old and very diverse family, is the feminine gender marker _t_. Usually suffixed -t, often prefixed -t, and in Berber even circumfixed t-…-t (like Tamazight, the language of the Amazigh peoples). ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [May 14, 2018, 12:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/origins-of-gendered-nouns/813635/62 "2018-05-14T12:28:33Z")
Johanna, feel free to nitpick me when I make a similar mistake. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [May 14, 2018, 12:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/origins-of-gendered-nouns/813635/63 "2018-05-14T12:57:04Z")
> [@hibernicus](#): > > Actually, reading more carefully, the OED tends (somewhat ambiguously) to support your view that the modern use of “gender” for sex is recent. > > Under the heading “gender” we have: > 3. Sex. Now only jocular. > [This is where we see the early examples from the 14th to 19th centuries.] > > b. In modern (esp. feminist) use, a euphemism for the sex of a human being, often intended to emphasize the social and cultural, as opposed to the biological, distinctions between the sexes. > [Here, the earliest example is from Alex Comfort’s _Sex in Society_ (1963), referring to both gender and sex: “The gender role learned by the age of two years is for most individuals almost irreversible, even if it runs counter to the physical sex of the subject.”] Hm… I’m wondering if the first one would be the case of using “gender” as equivalent to “type” or “manner”. If that were so, one could ask “what gender of people visits here?” and refer to differences in sex, or social class, or whatever; any of the ways in which people can be classified. Thanks for the check, btw. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [May 14, 2018, 1:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/origins-of-gendered-nouns/813635/64 "2018-05-14T13:22:34Z")
One could say that. But to thoroughly confuse things, the Frenchier spelling “genre” is also used in English, possibly with different shades of meaning, even though it is etymologically the same word. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [May 14, 2018, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/origins-of-gendered-nouns/813635/65 "2018-05-14T20:51:46Z")
Is the Afro-Asiatic feminine -t related to the English suffix -ette? ---
**Author:** ![rat\_avatar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rat_avatar/32/255_2.png) [@rat\_avatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rat_avatar)\ **Post date:** [May 14, 2018, 9:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/origins-of-gendered-nouns/813635/66 "2018-05-14T21:50:12Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Is the Afro-Asiatic feminine -t related to the English suffix -ette? Recent and pending genetic studies on PIE origins will probably change this, but the linguistic community has generally dismissed the idea. Eurasiatic and Afroasiatic are generally accepted as the immediate precursors of Semitic languages, and may be the same for Indo-European languages but this is not generally accepted today. The field changing rapidly but most of the new options still hypothetic. A non-trivial amount of the field is ignoring linguistic, archaeological, and genetic data whenever it does not fit with their previous theories today. This will probably change in the near future but the safe answer right now is: We don’t know. ---
**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 16, 2018, 10:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/origins-of-gendered-nouns/813635/67 "2018-05-16T22:07:46Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Is the Afro-Asiatic feminine -t related to the English suffix -ette? That’s a good question! I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand. Let’s track down the origin of the diminutive -_ette_ suffix. In French, it’s the feminine form of the masculine diminutive -_et_. That traces back to Late Latin -_[ittus](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ittus#Latin)_ (which I’ve never heard of before, honestly). That comes from Proto-Italic _-tos ("creating verbal adjectives from verb stems), from Proto-Indo-European -[tós](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/-t%C3%B3s)_ (“creates verbal adjectives from verb stems”). This is the ancestor of past participle endings like English -_ed_, Persian -_deh_ (e.g. _kardeh_ ‘made’), Latin -_tus_, which is also familiar in Spanish form as -_ado_, e.g. “desperado,” or Italian -_ato_, e.g. “staccato.” Or just the -t in words like “fact” or “fait accompli.” So how does that have anything to do with either diminutives or femininity? I’ve been developing theories on metalinguistic sound symbolism of the phoneme /t/ that might account for all of these, but it’s nowhere near ready to publish. Needs a lot more work. But I suspect there might be something to it. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/origins-of-gendered-nouns/813635.md?page=3)