Was there ever a good reason for male, female, neuter in languages?

Factual Questions
41

Johanna caught my meaning precisely. (And interesting about Bosnian; thanks!)

By “invented” I did in fact mean that Aasen (and others) took the glottae of 19th century Norway, including a wide variety of rural dialects and “Danish-with-an-Oslo/Trondheim-accent” and from them selectively engineered a language capable of functioning in all modern uses, from technical writing to literature to lawmaking to everyday conversation. No doubt there was a “Norwegian” spoken before 1850, Landsmal, but it was the equivalent of Plattdeutsch, rural dialects differing from the pseudo-Danish* Boksmal* and without technical or literary pretensions. Aasen’s achievement, perhaps unique before World War II, was to structure a full-fledged national language, Nynorsk, from those ingredients, and, supported by strong Norwegian nationalism, to persevere in getting it accepted as the language of Norway.

42

One thing I have never understood is how gender got associated with sex. I don’t speak German, but from examples like der Weib, die Frau, das Fraeulein, I come away with the idea that the names of the genders are irrelevant.

A native French speaking professor of linguistics was utterly astonished when I mentioned in passing that all words that end in “-tion” are feminine. She knew of course that each one was, but she never knew it as a general rule. Native speakers of a language often don’t know even the most general rules of this sort.

Another native French speaker I know told me that he and his mother often play the game of assigning genders to nonesense words and almost always agree. Nouns borrowed from English are usually, but not always made masculine. For example, I noticed (printed on hockey tickets) something called La Canadian Arena Company. This is presumably feminine because company is associated with the cognate compagnie.

Gender is also very unstable. An Italian friend who grew up about 100 km from Rome told me that there were numerous gender differences between her dialect and that of Rome.

43

French Canadians tend to feminize English loan word while in France they use masculine:
Quebec une job
France un job
many others…

44

And yet gender is also extraordinarily stable. The genders of two Proto-Indo-European roots for ‘fire’ have persisted across thousands of years and different branches of Indo-European: *egnis (m.) > Latin ignis (m.), Vedic agnih (m.)
*pur- (n.) > Greek pyr (n.), German Feuer (n.)

In fact, this pair of roots has been cited as evidence for a hypothesis of the origin of grammatical gender that traces it back to a stage of language that possibly predated Indo-European.

45

Fascinating discusion. As a former French Lit major with German minor ------I am enjoying it tremendously.

But —to get back to the essence of the original post-----Why sociologically would any primitive people make language so unnecesarily difficult?

Had they nothing better to do in the wintertime? Were they bored as hell at times? --------something to do do pass the time? Intellectual exercise?

“A leaf is a girl. A tree is a guy. ---------let’s go with that. Fun as hell you know.”-------

-----We just got off of grunting to make audible and intelligible sounds. What the hell-------let’s make things a little difficult.

Why would any ancient people even think of bothering with gender?

46

Do you think it might have been a primitive mind game? Something to do when it was awfully cold outside. Nothing to do. Nowhere to go.

Do you think small tribes voted on gender? Or did the big cheese have the final decision?

“Well I don’t care what any of you all thinks---------a damned tree is a macho guy. And a leaf is a girly girl. Like it or lump it” --------- "And that’s the way we gonna talk from now on. "

47

Maybe those folks anthropomorphized alot of stuff…that tree is sturdy and strong, like a man. The leaves are fragile and delicate, like women. (I’d like to meet those fragile and delicate cave dwelling women, but you get my point).
Take the sea–it is tempermental, ever changing and formidable–and it’s feminine, correct? (it is in French-I just happen to have a French dictionary here). I believe it’s fem in German as well (long time since I looked at German).

IOW, maybe ancient man attributed gender to parts of the physical world that reflected commonly ascribed traits to either sex. And, perhaps it had something to do with the gods that controlled that part of the world.

Doesn’t explain how every thing got gendered, but perhaps that’s how the habit started.

48

Still and all----why would any primitive people bother with adding gender and gender modification to their language? Makes no sense at all to me.

Barely got out of grunting-----and here they decided to make things more difficult than necessary (actually in no way necessary to communicate).

Most languages, with the exception of English, do have genders and gender modification.

( methinks that the anglo saxons, and the Normans, having to deal with both Norman and anglo saxon (germanic) languages and their ridiculous genders, decided, very fruitfully, that the whole gender thing was a crock of shit, and they could easily do without it.)

Which modern English has done very succesfully.

Still wondering why very primitive people, barely able to communicate, would choose to adopt genders and all the complications thereof.

Again ----this is more of a socioligical question than a language question.

What the hell was going on in their minds?

Do you think?

49

I wonder, though, whether native speakers of different languages would agree. Back in my IRC days, I wrote a program which would determine the gender of other chatters based on username (part of a Turing-bot I was working on at the time), and for European-origin names, it was very accurate (over 95%). But for Asian-origin names, the accuracy was abyssmal, and I think it was actually considerably lower than 50% for Japanese names. In most European languages, most names ending in -o are masculine, and most ending in -i are feminine, but Japanese either does not have this rule, or actually has the reverse of it (I don’t know Japanese, but of the Japanese names I know of, most ending in -o are feminine, and most ending in -i are masculine).

50

Keep in mind that we are not necessarily talking about mentally “primitive” people here. There is no evidence that people within the timeframe where we have useful information about the details of their languages (a scale of thousands of years) were more primitive in any linguistically significant way - no matter what their technology looked like.

Of course gender is not strictly necessary to communicate, but languages simply add complexity in different places.
You are perhaps not aware of the relatively rigid syntax of English because it seems natural to you - just like gender to me.

51

Interesting point.

But is English so much more rigid than romance languages (for example) in syntax? Somehow I never noticed that part.

52

Interesting point. However ----I have never considered English to be terribly rigid in syntax ----as compared to romance languages or germanic languages.

Please explain.

53

Sorry for the duplicate post

54

Not sure I follow that one. Is English truly rigid in syntax as compared to the romance languages and the germanic languages?

Not that I have actually noticed.

55

Sorry for another basically duplicate post.

56

Padding thread counts, are we? :wink: just kidding

57

Not really.

Just get a little confused sometimes when a post doesn’t appear. So I repost and then regret doing that.

58

That’s exactly it. And it’s also the reason why we say le FBI but la CIA. The FBI is a bureau, which is masculine in French, while the CIA is an agency, or agence in French, which is feminine.

59

Word order in English is much less free than it is in fully inflected languages. For example, in many languages, nouns take a different form depending on whether their subject, direct object, or indirect object. Therefore these can appear in many different positions in the sentence. This allows for subtle shadings in emphasis and meaning. This fact has been pointed out to me several times by Polish speakers.

60

You might find this thread interesting: Linguists: Why does a language’s grammar simplify over time?

The point is made there that since English is a positional language, not an inflected language like Latin, it has a relatively rigid word order in sentences to show the relationship between the words. Word order is not so important in heavily inflected languages, since the inflections (conjugation of verbs, declension of nouns, agreements of adjectives) indicates the relationship between the words, and hence the meaning of the sentence.

Here’s an example: Caesar’s famous comment on crossing the Rubicon, normally given as “Jacta alea est.” In English, it’s translated as “The die is cast.”

But you occasionally see the Latin quote given in slightly different word order. I’ve seen “Est jacta alea,” and also “Alea jacta est.” But that doesn’t change the meaning of the sentence, since the relationship of: / subject / verb / object / is determined in Latin by the inflections. A speaker can play around with the word order to come up with a sentence that has a certain sound or rhythm to it.

You can’t do that in English. You can’t say “Die cast the is” or “Is cast the die”.

The first, “Die cast the is”, is a nonsensical construction, since a definite article, “the”, only precedes a noun construction (noun, or adjective + noun, etc.). A definite article doesn’t precede a verb (except in the rare cases where the verb is being used as a noun, such as in a discussion of grammar: e.g. “the ‘is’ in this sentence indicates a present tense.” Or, a more notorious example of “is” being used as a noun: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” :smiley: )

The second construction “Is cast the die”, is not nonsensical, but it shows that by changing the word order, the meaning of the sentence changes: in English, beginning a sentence with the verb, especially is or are, often indicates a question, rather than a declarative sentence, which we then confirm by adding the question mark: “Is cast the die?”