I found out something interesting when I took French in high school. Not all languages have natural gender like we do in English. In fact in most of the languages of the world, the gender is purely grammatical (for example, in French a door is feminine, the Sun is masculine, etc.).
In Anglo-Saxon, one of the ancestors of English, there was grammatical gender. Then, I guess, some time after the Norman Conquest of 1066 English evolved into a language of natural gender.
How did this happen? Was it a deliberate effort of the people speaking it or did it happen by chance? And why are we one of the few languages in the world that have this (seemingly more logical) thing?
You know, once a week someone posts a question that makes me think “why the hell did I sell back my History of the English Language textbook?!”
Anyway, according to this link we lost the gender thing somewhere during Old English.
This article gives a little more insight on the language “From Chaucer to Shakespeare” and how the gender was lost.
Interestingly, tho, while searching around I did find a few sites that said since English doesn’t have a gender, it makes it harder for English speakers to grasp the concept in other languages.
Monty, that is not grammatical gender. Grammatical gender is like how the word “perro” means “dog” in Spanish, and is a “male” word, even if it’s a female dog. It gets the male articles “el” and “los”…in english it’s just “the.” I think in some languages, words like “wife” are even considered “male” words…
Grammatical gender is hard to explain…cuz it has nothing to do with sex. It’s just that some words are “male” and get the male ending and male article, and some are female.
Then let’s not get into the case of Zulu which has 8 genders.
As for English gender, the story goes thusly (as far as I know);
For some reason, Old English was being simplified. One ethnic group I’ve seen blamed is the Danish, who had conquered half of England. This left the English and Danish speaking amongst each other. At the time, the two lanuages were very similar, some words exactly the same (maybe with a little accent). This meant an Englishman could speak English to a Dane who would still understand. The only major difference between the two would be those pesky endings, verb conjugation and nominal inflection. So, over time, people began leaving them off.
In 1066, the Normans invaded, and Norman French became the language of the law and anyone literate. From now on, the English language was being spoken only by the lower classes and wasn’t being written down. When a language is being written, it is made stagnate. Without English being written, it was allowed to develop.
When English became the legal language of English again after about three centuries, the new English is what was being used, which included the bare minimum nominal inflection. Without inflection, gender didn’t exist. Of course, we were still left with inflection; the possessive (banker’s), the plural (bankers) and the possessive plural (bankers’). But these were obviously simplified to just the one form each.
Well, remember “gender” means “kind” and not “sex.” So depending on your language, you can come up with all sorts of gender. Chechen also has 8 genders, and I thought Zulu had something approaching a dozen, but I may be wrong.
For example, you can have different genders based not only on physical sex (male, female, neuter), but on qualities, such as animal, human, abstract, plant, etc… whatever you feel like making a distinction about.
I’d also like to point out that, while English is unusual for Europe in lacking grammatical gender, it is by no means unique. Many Asian langauages, including the group known as “Chinese”, do without this as well, and creoles also have a tendency to drop it.
When two languages butt heads, like Anglo Saxon and Norman French did around 1066 AD, there is a tendency for the language frills to get dropped. In England, one of the things dropped was grammatical gender and several verb conjugations (we have traces of them in forms like leaf/leaves, knife/knives, which are now considered irregular but used to be an established form)
I don’t know, but I suspect that many Romance languages such as French, Spanish, and Italian show “simplications” from Latin. They’re still encrusted with things like grammatical gender, and the language encounters took place about 1000 years earlier than the one giving rise to modern English so there’s been time to acquire new ornamentations.
As has been pointed out, the Indo-European languages with only 2-3 genders are nowhere near the top of the list, with both Africa and the Americas producing languages with considerably more genders than that.
If the dog is female, her name is perra, not perro, and uses the “la” feminine article to go with it. If the sex of the dog is unknown, then yes, the masculine pronoun is used.
From what I remember from my linguistic course, a popular theory is that the English language circa 900 was a creolization of several Anglo-Saxon dialects and the Scandinavian dialects of the Dane-Law. That was all pre-Norman Conquest. Once the Normans came, there was much French influence, but no true creolization. Creolization involves changing case endings and syntax, while the French influence was primarily in vocabulary.
QUOTE
>From what I remember from my linguistic course, a popular theory is >that the English language circa 900 was a creolization of several >Anglo-Saxon dialects and the Scandinavian dialects of the Dane-Law. >That was all pre-Norman Conquest. Once the Normans came, there was >much French influence, but no true creolization. Creolization >involves changing case endings and syntax, while the French influence >was primarily in vocabulary.
I was attributing the dropping of case endings to the Danish. I mentioned the French because after their language took over, this had sped up the dropping of cases. No doubt if English had remained a literary language, the process would have gone considerably slower. Today, we might even have been left with a masculine and fememnine gender.
Gjorp, I wasn’t disagreeing with you, only expanding on “for some reason, Old English was being simplified”. I think you’re right about the English being a literary language or not affecting its development.
Something else to consider is that the nation-state formation process that western Europe gradually underwent was also a major factor in language development. As nations became more unified, social pressure increased to use the central (and more cosmopolitan and more subject to foreign influence) dialect. Provincial dialectal variants were marginalized.
Apologies for a mild hijack, but my question would be: how did the notion of gender ever get started, in any language? It seems to serve no purpose whatsoever.
I have degree-level qualifications in English, and I know many aspects of grammar seem pointless (to people who don’t get along with the subject) and yet serve some sort of purpose. And I also know that languages evolve, instead of being planned, so they sometimes retain ‘counter-intuitive’ features. All well and good.
But ‘gender’ has always puzzled me. Why have two words for ‘the’? Why have to consider whether the French word for ‘book’ is masculine or feminine - what the heck difference could that possibly make to anything you want to comunicate to another human being?
The idea of grammatical gender for the Indo-European languages started to the original Proto-Indo-European language (PIE for short) spoken by the orignal PIE speakers. Nowadays we see no good reason for grammatical gender, but for the PIE speakers, there probably was. It was probably more of a psychological thing; ie. you see a deer that can run and breath and eat, then you see a rock that sits there and erodes. You tend to think of these two objects as two completely different categories of things, so you also put their two nouns in different categories; animate and neutral. The theory is that the original PIE only had these two genders. This makes perfect sense to me.
Later on, however, the animate gender split into masculine and femenine. This split was completely arbitrary, and it was just a matter of coincidence that the female nouns ended up in the femenine gender and male nouns in the masculine gender. I don’t know what the most accepted theory for this split is. This doesn’t make any sense to me.
But, the people who decided to make the masculine-femenine split don’t exist anymore, so we can’t ask them. Whatever the reason, it stuck and people kept using it, just because the genders were part of the language they learned. Over time, in the romance languages, the neutral gender was abandoned, so the neutral nouns were just assigned either a masculine or femenine noun.
This is true – Latin has five noun declensions (same as verb conjugations, but where the nouns are case-inflected (e.g., the accusative (direct object) usually has a different ending than the nominative(subject) or genitive (possessive)), with the nouns divided by ending (just like verbs in French), and a neuter gender in addition to the masculine and feminine.
English still has vestiges of this in our use of modifed pronouns for accusative and dative cases, and we have a mishmash of genetive usages which aren’t a genetive case!
German is very similar to the Latin you’ve desribed, FWIW.
