Well, for one thing, “book” in French is “livre” - if it’s masculine… yet if the word “livre” is feminine, it means “pound” (as in the English monetary unit or the American weight). In this case, gender matters quite a bit.
On the other hand, I asked that same question of my French Linguistics teacher - our class only went as far back as Latin which had masculine, feminine, and neuter. He said we didn’t have time to go that far back. Lot of help, huh?
Also, KarlGrenze, perhaps ZipperJJ gave a bad example in Spanish, but his rule would work in French. A dog is ALWAYS masculine: le chien. Just like a teacher is always masculine: le prof. Spanish has a tendancy to be more PC in that pretty much all nouns referring to gendered objects (people and animals) can be both masculine and feminine. French doesn’t have that.
My wonder is how in English we have no pluralization for “the.” In French they have “les,” in Spanish “los/las,” and in German (forget about declension) “die.” also, we have no plural for “a/an.” That’s the weirdest one – cause we can’t simply say “a dogs” as we can say “the dogs.” The closest we can come up with is “some,” but that’s not completely accurate. Was there at one point a plural form of “a/an???”
Fascinating! I do hope this isn’t too much of a hijack but …
In languages such as French in which gender is allocated to sexless objects, WHO decides which one a new word receives. Le or la for computer, hard drive, walkman, catalytic converter, wrinkle remover, fabric conditioner. You know, any new stuff. Someone must have to decide. What a job!
…Spanish, even with the organization, can have varied articles (el/la) for different nouns, depending on the country and dialect, especially for modern, technological words.
I thought French had an official language Academy.
To those who argued about sexless objects having feminine/masculine genders in Spanish, I know that. What I was pointing out, as mandielise did, is that the example used for the word perro is wrong. I didn’t know about the chien, thanks mandielise.
Actually, where we have a million Secretary of blah blah blah, the French basically have a guy who’s like the Secretary of the French language. He was the one who decided that the passe simple really didn’t have to be used anymore and can be replaced by the passe compose (they’re forms of the past like “i have read”). Now, you’ll only find the passe simple in academic circles (people wanting to sound smart) and in old literature.
You could ask the same thing about the plural forms for English nouns. Lets do away with it and require an adjective to specify number: “ten dog” or “many dog” or “few many dog” or “helluva many dog”. We could communicate just as accurately that way.
Evidently, this is just the way language is formed in our brains, with this type of structure where a word carries with it more than just a value representing a particular object, but other values as well such as number, gender and other things. I think this is the real answer. Why is there gramatical gender? Cause thats just the way our brains create language.
Can we communicate without these things? Yes! And when languages are formed without the benefit of the full language building software, such as when adults create a new language, its called pidgeon, which lacks these elements that characterize human language. But they get the job of communication done.
Now, to answer your question what purpose does it serve, assuming that real languages are really better than pidgeon, I think that adding a dimension of gender to words adds flavour to our thoughts. Also, its more effecient. For example, If the gender is included in the verb, I can leave off the pronoun. I can say, “went to the store” instead of “she went to the store”. I can say more with fewer words.
In Hebrew, which allows me to add lots of elements to single words, I can say with say 50 words what would take me about 80 to say in English.
As for “le professeur” (shortened : “le prof”), it’s an interesting question. Pretty much all job names which were never held by a woman in the past (pretty much all the “prestigious” job) don’t have a feminine form. So, you would have said "Madame (feminine) LE docteur (masculine) for an ambassador. However, some feminist got pissed and asked for the official use and promotion of a feminine form (which had to be created from scratch). There has been a big debate on this issue, a lot of people being pretty much conservative about language.
The “feminization” side seems to have won, and there are been official recommandations about the use of feminine forms for various jobs. The medias have generally followed the official stance, and though some forms sounded weird at first, most people now are accustomed to them. However, there are still women who don’t like the new form and don’t want it to be used when refering to them, and others who insist on being called the new way. “You’re UNE auteurE who”…“No, I’m UN auteur”…“Madame l’ambassadEUR, you”…“Madame l’ ambassadrICE, please…”
Concerning the “passe simple”, the french academy never decided it shouldn’t be used anymore. It plainly fell out of use naturally. At most, perhaps the academy decided at some point that the use of the “passe composed” was now gramatically correct in instances where the “passe simple” should have been used. Actually, the academicians, being themselves writers, are probably amongst the people who still (are able to?) use tenses like the “passe simple” or the dreaded “imparfait du subjonctif”…
Concerning who decides whether a newly introduced word will be feminine or masculine, I’ve no clue. I never wondered about that before reading this question on english-speaking boards. I would assume that nobody decides. It just happens. Actually, a word for a new item (like computers, etc…) seems to quite always be masculine, except when it can be linked to an existing feminine word (for instance, an e-mail is feminine, probably because a letter is feminine).
Which isn’t to mention that a lot of cultures have more than 2 genders that people can be classified as, such as men who, generally for economic reasons, live out their lives as females, who are regarded as simply another type of female.
I can assure you that the World Health Organization has no power whatever to make these decisions.
However, in the last few years, selection of gender and plural forms for “Euro” has been an issue across the continent. Here is an excellent examination of this subject.
But that’s more of a curse than a word. It’s never (to my knowledge) used without derrogatory connotation, and therefore is NOT a feminized synonym for le chien.
As for who decides what gender nouns take, no one has any real authority. After all, if l’academie français decides that the word ‘e-mail’ is to be feminine, that doesn’t necessarily mean people will be using the word as a feminine noun. The academy does have influence, which means people probably will put ‘e-mail’ in the feminine form.
But that’s all good and well for French, Spanish, (maybe) Italian, Russian, and others that I’m not aware there’s an academy for. But what about German? They have no academy for their language.
German usually assigns the gender of the closest native word to the imported one. Computer is masculine because Rechner, the older word for ‘computer’, is as well (actually, Rechner means ‘calculator’, but the term was used for old computers back when they had about as much power as a cheap pocket calculator). Sometimes, they try to import the gender the word had in its native language - obviously, this cannot happen much for English loans, but this shows up now and then for Latin and French borrowings, mostly for affixes borrowed from either tongue, like -tät, prä- and -anz.
And the rest of the time, they just randomly shuffle it into a gender that the word ‘sounds’ closest to. This varies a lot due to dialect, but then again, so does everything else in German. And you’re right - the closest German equivalent to L’academie Français would be the Goethe Institut, and that’s just dedicated to helping foreign learners learn German; I’m not sure how much influence they have in Germany and the rest of the German-speaking world.
For me, the funny thing is the way Hindustani picked up many hundreds, maybe thousands, of loanwords from Persian—which totally lacks gender—and assigned them all gender, either masculine or feminine. I haven’t the slightest idea how it was decided that, for example, bâzû ‘arm’ would be masculine, and zabân ‘tongue’ would be feminine. Anything ending in the vowel -î became feminine, because native Hindustani words ending in -î are feminine. but apart from that I can’t find any system for assigning gender one way or the other. But the fact remains that Hindustani uses gender, so it had to be done somehow.
