It seems to me there are three separate questions here:
How and why did it come about that nouns in many languages are sorted into different categories (whether by gender or some other criterion, as per Chronos’s examples)?
How and why did it come about that some languages do this sorting by gender (as opposed to some other basis), when many of the things that nouns refer to have no inherent male or female identity?
How and why did specific nouns get assigned their specific genders?
Swahiliand other Bantu languages can have more than a dozen noun classes, which can include people, natural forces, animals, tools, and other things.
The impossible-to-answer question is, why did certain categories “make sense” to the Proto-Wabantu but completely differently to Proto-Indo-Europeans and Proto-Semites? And if complicated noun classification has been on the way out for a few thousand years, why did they develop in the first place, and what brought them out of fashion?
it may be that in Indo-European/Semitic that noun categories happened to merge until relatively few were left, and those few happened to include ones that could be identified as masculine, feminine and neuter.
as I understand it, languages that are almost always learned by children tend to accumulate embellishments like noun classes if undisturbed for long enough - but things like noun classes/grammatical gender tend to be shed when the language is learned by enough adults that the adults who have only partially learned the language become a significant percentage of the total speaking population - and in recent human history, migration, invasion, and enslavement have put many languages into that situation.
Re: your #2: I don’t know how many times it has to be repeated in this thread but grammatical gender is a term of art, and is not tied to sexual gender. This was addressed in the 2nd reply in this thread, and repeated a few times after that. Linguists came in after the fact and called certain noun categories “masculine” and “feminine”. They could have called them blue" and “red” and people here would be asking why certain nouns were associated with certain colors.
To look at another example, in English we have “strong” and “weak” verbs in terms of how verbs form their past tenses. Run is a strong verb, with the past tense as “ran”. Walk is a weak verb with the past tense as “walked.” Strong/Week or Irregular/Regular. The verbs themselves do not donate strength or weakness. It’s just a term used to classify the verbs. This is actually a common trait of Germanic languages. But it’s useful to see why we shouldn’t get hung up on masculine/feminine.
Here’s another example that might clarify:
Gun rights are a conservative issue in the US and universal health care is a liberal issue. Call them Republican and Democratic issues. Now call them red and blue issues. Why are they called red and blue issues? Is it because guns are associated with blood, which is red and healthcare is associated with Blue Cross and Blue Shield? I mean there must be something inherently “red” about guns and inherently “blue” about universal healthcare, right? Why else would they be called red and blue issues?
Yes, but why did they call them “masculine” and “feminine”?
My suggestion was that this was a fairly obvious metaphorical way to divide things into two. Look at Latin: Masculine, Feminine, and Neuter, which literally means “neither of the two.” The reason it’s called that in German or Irish is because the first German and Irish grammarians cut their teeth on Latin grammars, which of course owe a debt to Greek grammars. So it’s not necessarily that this is a metaphor that occurred independently dozens of times.
Somebody’s pulling somebody’s leg here. In languages with male/female gender, obviously male root-nouns (father, brother, son) have male grammatical gender; obviously female root-nouns have female gender. Comparison with “weak” and “strong” as applied by some to verbs is absurd. The gender of German’s Fräulein and Mädchen may seem peculiar but these are not exceptions: they aren’t root-words.
This pdf paper might be interesting. Not only does it show that gender assignments vary hugely among Indo-European languages, but shows that “masculine” nouns are regarded as more “potent.”
Also, Spanish and German speakers were presented with pairs like Spoon/Erika. The Spaniard (spoon=la cuchara) was more likely than the German (spoon=der Löffel) to remember that Erika is a woman. (In the experiment, the Germans and Spaniards were presented with English ‘spoon’, not their native words.)
I have always assumed genderized(?) English words are somehow borrowed from French (thanks, Normans) or Latin such as a country or ship being “she” (unless it’s “the Fatherland”, which is borrowed from bad WWII movies). Note this is an illustration of the earlier point made about such category distinctions disappearing, where outside of places with strong naval traditions, for example, nobody uses the “she” for ships, and outside of strict traditionalists, nobody calls countries “she”. And weather is neutral, even if they did call the wind Mariah.
If you go by French, France and China are indeed “she”, but Mexico and Cambodia are “he”, etc.
Yes, but there are two scenarios here:
or,
There’s no evidence at all, and nouns can certainly switch gender between languages, dialects, and over time, but #1 seems to have fewer logical hurdles to leap than #2. You seem to be suggesting #2.
That doesn’t mean that once the assignment is made, the language’s metaphorical concept of “feminine” doesn’t affect the speakers’ understanding of feminine nouns. In other words, it can start as abstract but need not remain 100% abstract.
The development of noun classes is unclear and varies between languages. Instead of developing a marker to divide nouns into two classes, some gender systems probably arose via mergers from a multi-class or multi-classifier system. Thus the choice between your 1 and 2 is simplistic. Fortunately I wasn’t suggesting either of them — your comment is unrelated to any point I was making.
Note that many languages with two noun classes make an animate/inanimate distinction, not a male/female distinction. (The linguistic term ‘gender’ does NOT mean the classes are sex-based, just that noun class can influence accompanying adjectives. Since there was much confusion upthread, let me say explicitly: In languages where the ‘gender’ distinction is between animate and inanimate, linguists call the two genders ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’, not ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine.’)
Proto-Indo-European is widely agreed to have had a two-gender, animate/inanimate, system. Here’s a pdf which goes into much detail about gender in general and PIE in particular. It subsequently split into a 3-gender system (though some think feminine gender arose as a split-off from inanimate not animate*); in various branches mergers led to different 2-gender systems or even, like in English, the disappearance of basic noun genders. *- Since the terms ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’ are imposed by present-day linguists, it may not be necessary to view this misogynistically!
With one exception: nominal pronouns, which tend to be ellided anyway (nosotros/nosotras); we only make them explicit for emphasis or when reciting verbs. Having to genderize those pronouns which aren’t gendered in Spanish, such as posessives, is one of the problems Hispanics have in English no matter how long we’ve spoken the language, it’s one of the first things which show we’re tired or in a hurry.
One thing that kills me in these discussions is how often the people asking assume that the concept of gender = “euphemism for biological sex” was the original one. It’s a lot more recent than the concept of gender = “type of word”; it’s born as a bastardization of the sociological concept of “behavioral assumptions linked to biological sex”. Sociology is much, much younger than linguistics.
SEX. sex. Sex. Sex. YOU CAN SAY THAT WORD. It’s not dirty! It will not give you genital warts in your mouth!
Here’s a quote from an actual paper on the development of gendered classification of nouns in proto-Indo-European. I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but it’s a good starting point for thinking about this in a less “But how can the gender of a vessel that goes on water depend on the word chosen?!?!?” (Norwegian: et skip (neuter), ei skute (feminine), en båt (masculine))
http://allegatifac.unipv.it/silvialuraghi/Gender%20FoL.pdf
And the same theory described at wikipedia
So imagine PIE has a distinction between nouns that indicates animacy, looking back from the present day, animate behaved like our masculine, inanimate behaved like neuter. Then a way to distinguish female came along. Initially it would have been used for female animals and female persons. But these elements are kind of superfluous, you know “cow” refers to the female animal without having to wait for someone to use it in a context where the grammar shows it’s feminine, so over hundreds of years the original limitations are broken. Some words just work better with the feminine gender, despite being inanimate. Some aspect of grammar changes and words that used to work fine with the rules of their “appropriate” gender require more effort than the “wrong” gender, so language drifts, and with that drift the connection between grammatical and biological gender (and animacy) become less and less dominant (albeit still noticeable).
ETA: Ninja’ed by over 12 hours. I don’t known where my brain went for the last few posts of this thread. I thought I read through it …
I suppose it’s possible that the system was first developed for other things and then, after it existed, it was applied to men and women. Maybe, for example, proto-Spanish originally divided things up into the categories of plants and animals with plant objects having one article and animal objects having another. And then people decided that men belonged with the animals and women belonged with the plants.
But I’ll admit I find that unlikely. It seems to me more plausible that the first things any language used by people is going to be applied to is people. People are going to develop their basic words for people before they develop anything else, even words for concepts like animals and plants. In which case, those early speakers originally divided things up into the categories of men and women with man objects having one article and woman objects having another. And then people decided that animals belonged with the men and plants belonged with the women.
I gather that, plausible or not, this is definitely not what happened in Proto-Indo-European. Your Proto-Proto-Proto-Spanish speakers originally divided things up into the categories of animate and inanimate, not men and women. Furthermore, the “feminine” gender may not originally have had anything to do with sex; naita’s paper’s synopsis says it was used in the derivation of deverbal abstract nouns.
Have a cite for that?
Fascinating. Among other things – it’s probably no coincidence that, in several I-E languages (e.g., Latin and Greek),* -a* can be “feminine singular” or “neuter plural.” The neuter plural (e.g., data, plural of datum) is an abstract noun* from a verb (“to give”), conceived as a collection – so, the modern English tendency to consider “data” as singular is sort of going back to its roots.
*As were “feminine singulars,” at first – as thy still are in, say, Spanish (gloria=glory; muerte=death; gente=people…)
Checking the OED, it turns out that both usages are attested from the 14th century, being natural semantic extensions of the primary meaning “type, kind, class”. Not a euphemism as such.