I took French and German in college. Was mostly reading literature so I got pretty good at doing that and didn’t really have to pay much attention to gender. Later on when trying to speak or write in either language…I found out that learning the gender of nouns was very important. Wish I’d paid more attention to that part while originally learning those languages. C’est ma faute. Je sais.
But I was wondering why and when English, borrowed from both languages, which both used gender, and the agreement of gender, decided to give up on the whole seemingly unnecessary thing.
Sometime after 1066, did the Anglo Saxon commoners decide over centuries to just stop using gender? Or did the Normand nobility sitting around a table sometime or other decide themselves to drop gender? Because it was hard enough for people, nobles and commoners, to understand each other even without throwing genders from two different languages into the mix. Maybe some nobleman said “Why are we bothering with all this gender crap? Lets just do away with it”
And the other Normand nobles said …“Bonne idee”
Anybody know anything about when and why English lost its gender?
Lloyd’s List, the ship newspaper officially changed its policy on ship pronouns moving from she and her to it and it.
But seriously, Old english determined gender by noun endings many of which were vowels or relatively unmarked. It’s pretty easy for vowels at the end of words to become unstressed, lose their significance and erode away, especially, when you’ve got the Danes and the Normans and later the Parisian French all jostling your case system around in a time where written documents were hard to come by and schooling relatively non-existent. Once the gendered determiners started to merge together, it was the end of the line for gender and it got mostly chucked. I think somewhere between 1100 and 1300 is when it died out although it has cropped up vaguely throughout history. I know there’s a medical text from the 1600s that recommends cooking a turnip til she turns black as a cure for sore throats, I believe.
edit: I also believe, although I can’t be bothered to look it up officially, that english hasn’t lost gender, exactly. We’ve simply dumped everything into the neuter form as evidenced by our use of it (or hit as it would have been in OE).
That would make sense. If arbitrary genders between languages do not align, and the Norman and Saxon languages were blending into the same community, it would be difficult to establish concord on which gender is preferable for, say, a table or an oxcart, hence, gender would fade away. Basically the same thing would happen with the noun declensions, which were present in OE but not OF: if a language can benefit from simplification, it will, perhaps one might call it a Pidgin-Creole effect.
When I was a boy in the 60’s I used to visit my grandmother in Devon, her and all her family and friends used to give inanimate objects a gender in conversation.
“put her on the table” asking for a plate to be put on a table.
I believe an inanimate object that can give one a ‘ride’ becomes female, maybe due to the TLC expended in preparing ‘her’, the more the expense the more ‘she’ becomes.
I’m a native speaker of English and I agree with this. English still has a three-gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) gender system. What has happened is that almost all non-animate nouns have been classified or reclassified as neuter. In Spanish, almost all nouns are masculine or feminine and take the same pronouns as a boy or girl would (though there is the “a personal” preposition (?) used when a person is a direct object of a sentence.)
E.g.
¿Dónde está mi hermana? (Where is my sister?)
Ella está en Nueva York. (She is in New York.)
¿Dónde está mi camisa? (Where is my shirt?)
Ella está en el armario de tu hermana. (She is in your sister’s closet.)
When I was young, in the 50s and 60s, it was taught that English largely had “natural” gender, with specific defined exceptions. The rules I recall are:
A male person* or a known-male animal takes the masculine pronouns.
A female person*, a known-female animal, or a ship or boat takes the feminine pronouns.
A person of unknown gender (“the teacher”, “the doctor”, “the City Clerk”) takes common-gender pronouns, which are identical to the masculine pronouns.
An inanimate object, an animal of unknown gender, or a baby takes the neuter-gender pronouns.
Personifications “don’t count” – they are intentionally-poetic assignment of gender identity to abstract concepts. (“Dawn blushes as she dances naked in the East” or “Love shoots his arrows into the hearts of men and women.”)
With growing awareness that the “common gender” using masculine pronouns worked injustices on female professional persons, or even shepherd/shepherdess or schoolmaster/schoolmistress and the like, gender-specific terms went into decline and common-gender pronouns were replaced by “he or she” and its declensions or the solecistic singular “they/them”. And referring to a baby as “it” became passe, with the baby’s sex being signalled or properly inquired about.
With this growing effort to use inclusive language, English grammatical gender was left with only the nautical feminine. So odd as it sounds, the 1992 Lloyds shift may actually be the correct answer.
*I intentionally did not use “man or boy” and “woman or girl” here because it would also include gods/goddesses, angels, SF aliens, supernatural and fantasy entities, etc.
I’d never heard it called a personal, but I think you were asking whether it’s a preposition: yes, it is; the construction is exactly, word for word, the same as in English (see below). What I don’t see is what does that have to do with gender.
Dale la camisa a tu padre = give the shirt to your father.
It can be done with brunet/brunette as well, but I don’t think almost anyone does. But that’s not grammatical gender, that’s semantic gender. (It’s also annoying. This isn’t french.)
The origin of grammatical gender, at least as pertains to IE languages, is tightly coupled with declensions of nouns, “declensions” in this case referring to the eight-odd classes of nouns in the language. Each class of nouns was based on the character of its phonology–its “stem”. and had its own pattern of endings for the various combinations of case and number, and, furthermore, most of these classes contained nouns in only one or two of the three possible genders. In a considerably reduced form, the same sort of pattern still exists in German, where the various ways of forming the plural are closely related to the gender of the nouns involved. For instance, many German nouns ending in “e” like die Wiese (“the meadow”), are feminine and form the plural by adding “n”–die Wiesen, nouns that end in consonants like das Blatt (“the leaf”) are usually masculine or neuter, and form their plurals either by changing the root vowel, or by suffixing “-e” or “-er”, or by both–hence, die Blätter. These patterns aren’t infallible, but they are sufficiently reliable to be useful to foreigners who are learning the language.
Grammatical gender in Old English nouns follows that of German fairly closely, in the sense cognate nouns usually have the same gender in both languages. But the decay of grammatical gender had already begun before the Norman Conquest, so that wasn’t the primary cause. In the evolution of Romance and Germanic languages generally, the mergers some terminal sounds and disappearance of others played a significant role in decay of the inflectional system, because the lost distinctions were collectively necessary for the case systems to work. In Dutch and some of the Norse languages the system of grammatical gender is arguably in a state of mid-decay, because there the masculine and feminine genders have collapsed into one “common” gender, in contrast to the neuter which persists.
If so, it’s got a hell of a half-life; the gender system in Swedish appears to have disappeared completely by 1500 and has been relatively stable ever since.
It’s been years since I took that Old English course at Georgetown, but comparing what I remember of texts like *Beowulf *and Bede’s Chronicle with the equally half-remembered texts from Chaucer, I’d venture the argument that English had lost its gender system well before 1400.
Actually, that’s a far worse question, and one that has been dealt with on this board countless times, every time some English-only person thinks that French/German/Spanish/Russian people “really thinks the chair/table/conceptual continuity is a girl LOL”. As has already been pointed out, grammatical gender does not have too much too do with the biological one, and is really just a way to class nouns into groups that behave similarly when declining them.
Exactly. As the article in your link says, there were only two grammatical genders from about 1500 onwards. In contrast to the Romance languages, the reduction of gender resulted not from the loss of the neuter, but from the merger of feminine and masculine. Dutch is similar in this regard, and IIRC the other Norse languages except for Icelandic and Faroese.
The gender system was gone by Chaucer’s time, but was still extant, if moribund, in the early ME period, when the inflection of certain nouns in the genitive plural revealed their feminine gender. The best known example of that is the early 12th C. devotional work Ancrene Wisse. While it’s true enough that the word Ancrene (“Of the anchoresses” or “for the anchoresses”) is a “naturually” feminine word, like “woman” or “girl”, this inflection still existed for some feminines denoting inanimate, or at least genderless objects.
Beg to differ, in UK a fellow with large genitalia is ‘well hung’, it’s a man to man expression, especially when drunk, not used by women, they know the truth.
Due to pc politeness, ‘dumb’ is not used in the UK other than for a person unable to speak. (I’m not criticising).