# Why and when did English stop using gender? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 24, 2013, 5:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797 "2013-03-24T05:06:21Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Svejk\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ea666f/32.png) [@Svejk\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Svejk_1)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2013, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/41 "2013-03-28T20:38:30Z")
Except that German has plural noun suffixes that show more variety and that are linked to the different genders. Dutch basically only has two endings (-en and -s). I’d have to think about whether you could tell the gender of a noun on that basis. It might be the case that all nouns with a plural ending in -s are masculine/feminine. But I’m just thinking of _het plafond, de plafonds_ and _het niveau, de niveaus_. Then again, those are obviously foreign words, perhaps they don’t count. ---
**Author:** ![Giles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/giles/32/60_2.png) [@Giles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giles)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2013, 8:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/42 "2013-03-28T20:58:04Z")
> [@suranyi](#): > > Just as an aside, English hasn’t completely stopped using gender. We still have separate pronounds “he” and “she”, “him” and “her”. > > There are many languages that do not make this distinction, they use the same pronoun for both “he” and “she”. However, in English, the choice of “he”/“she”/“it” does not depend on the noun referred to – it depends on the denotation of the noun. For example, “baby” can be “he” or “she” if you know the sex of the baby, or “it” if you don’t know the sex. So the English noun “baby” has no gender – unlike “bébé” in French, which is always masculine even if the baby referred to is a girl, and unlike “Baby” in German, which is always neuter. ---
**Author:** ![Svejk\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ea666f/32.png) [@Svejk\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Svejk_1)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2013, 9:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/43 "2013-03-28T21:05:06Z")
Not sure what you’re saying here. Do you think French people refer to their baby girl as ‘il’, or that Germans refer to their baby boy as ‘es’? ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2013, 9:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/44 "2013-03-28T21:12:40Z")
I think you know that that’s not what Giles is saying. ---
**Author:** ![Giles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/giles/32/60_2.png) [@Giles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giles)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2013, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/45 "2013-03-28T21:20:16Z")
> [@Svejk\_1](#): > > Not sure what you’re saying here. Do you think French people refer to their baby girl as ‘il’, or that Germans refer to their baby boy as ‘es’? That’s my understanding: the choice of pronoun depends on the noun, not the meaning of the noun. But perhaps someone who knows more French or German than I do could confirm or refute that. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2013, 9:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/46 "2013-03-28T21:26:52Z")
When they’re just referring to a person, they’ll use the normal gendered pronoun – “He is crying.” “She is hungry.” “Er weint.” “Sie ist hungrig.” It’s only when the specific \*noun \*comes into play that the grammatical gender is triggered. “The girl is pretty” = “ **Das** Mädchen ist schön.” ---
**Author:** ![Svejk\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ea666f/32.png) [@Svejk\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Svejk_1)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2013, 9:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/47 "2013-03-28T21:53:26Z")
[QUOTE=Acsenray] I think you know that that’s not what Giles is saying. [/QUOTE] I think you know that I think I know that Giles is saying what he knows I think you’re saying. > [@Giles](#): > > That’s my understanding: the choice of pronoun depends on the noun, not the meaning of the noun. But perhaps someone who knows more French or German than I do could confirm or refute that. Yeah, that’s wrong. The meaning of the noun overrides grammatical gender in determining pronoun choice, especially when it concerns people. Conceivably, the neuter might still be used for animals if grammatical gender so requires (eg das Pferd in German) but I can also imagine that one would just go with the horse’s actual gender. “Guck, ein Pferd. Er ist schoen”, or something. This would certainly be what one would say in Dutch, where horse is also neuter, but where you still use ‘he’ to refer to a horse even if you don’t know whether it’s a mare or a stallion. ---
**Author:** ![Giles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/giles/32/60_2.png) [@Giles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giles)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2013, 10:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/48 "2013-03-28T22:16:08Z")
Thanks for correcting my misunderstanding. Then in French and German gender only controls the form of articles and adjectives, and not the form of pronouns, i.e., the choice of il/elle/ils/elles in French, and of er/sie/es in German, is not determined by grammatical gender. So they are similar to English, where he/she/it is not controlled by grammatical gender. ---
**Author:** ![suranyi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e36b37/32.png) [@suranyi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/suranyi)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2013, 12:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/49 "2013-03-29T00:46:25Z")
> [@Giles](#): > > However, in English, the choice of “he”/“she”/“it” does not depend on the noun referred to – it depends on the denotation of the noun. For example, “baby” can be “he” or “she” if you know the sex of the baby, or “it” if you don’t know the sex. So the English noun “baby” has no gender – unlike “bébé” in French, which is always masculine even if the baby referred to is a girl, and unlike “Baby” in German, which is always neuter. And in Hungarian a baby is always “it”, because there is no word for “he” or “she”. And in fact everyone in Hungarian is an “it”. Which is the point I was making. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2013, 5:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/50 "2013-03-29T05:36:21Z")
> [@Svejk\_1](#): > > Except that German has plural noun suffixes that show more variety and that are linked to the different genders. You do have a point there, but on the other hand in learning German we don’t usually think of the different types of plural forms as being reflective of gender. Well, at least I didn’t; it never occurred to me until I learned a little of the linguistic history including an introductory course in Old Norse. > [@Švejk](#): > > Dutch basically only has two endings (-en and -s). I’d have to think about whether you could tell the gender of a noun on that basis. It might be the case that all nouns with a plural ending in -s are masculine/feminine. But I’m just thinking of _het plafond, de plafonds_ and _het niveau, de niveaus_. Then again, those are obviously foreign words, perhaps they don’t count. On the contrary, I think the obviously foreign words do count because Dutch uses so many more of them, compared with German. IIRC foreign words in German tend to take the gender of the original language, but it gets more complicated if the word comes to German by way of a third language. _Das Hotel_ seems to be one of the exceptions since it can’t possibly be neuter in French. Interestingly, though, the gender does happen to be ambiguous when the definite article is used in the singular. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2013, 5:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/51 "2013-03-29T05:51:28Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > On the contrary, I think the obviously foreign words do count because Dutch uses so many more of them, compared with German… Coding error in my previous post has been reported. ---
**Author:** ![Svejk\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ea666f/32.png) [@Svejk\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Svejk_1)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2013, 9:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/52 "2013-03-29T09:25:18Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > You do have a point there, but on the other hand in learning German we don’t usually think of the different types of plural forms as being reflective of gender. Well, at least I didn’t; it never occurred to me until I learned a little of the linguistic history including an introductory course in Old Norse. I agree, it’s not how you would commonly think about it - but just think of it as asking yourself, can the plural form of a noun die [German Noun][Plural Suffix] or de [Dutch Noun][Plural Suffix] tell me anything about whether that noun’s gender? I’d say that it might, at least in German, which means that the whole thing about gender no longer existing in the plural is only partially true. > [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > [QUOTE=me] > Dutch basically only has two endings (-en and -s). I’d have to think about whether you could tell the gender of a noun on that basis. It might be the case that all nouns with a plural ending in -s are masculine/feminine. But I’m just thinking of het plafond, de plafonds and het niveau, de niveaus. Then again, those are obviously foreign words, perhaps they don’t count. On the contrary, I think the obviously foreign words do count because Dutch uses so many more of them, compared with German. [/QUOTE] I meant maybe you can construct a rule saying all nouns with plurals ending in -s are masc/fem if you exclude the obviously foreign words. But I’ve thought of neuter words (eg. sg het gegeven, pl. de gegevens) that violate the rule. Maybe the rule would work if there were an additional exception (for singular nouns ending in -en (but not -ien, -oen)) in addition to the foreign words exception. As for the use of foreign words, I’m not saying you’re wrong but the notion that Dutch uses more non Dutch than German uses non-German is not immediately plausible to me on the face of it. There’s examples of Germans using English were we don’t (there’s no commonly used English words to refer to a cell phone in Dutch, for instance). So … cite? > [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > IIRC foreign words in German tend to take the gender of the original language, but it gets more complicated if the word comes to German by way of a third language. _Das Hotel_ seems to be one of the exceptions since it can’t possibly be neuter in French. Interestingly, though, the gender does happen to be ambiguous when the definite article is used in the singular. As for gender acquisition in new nouns, it is true is that they don’t all become masculine by default or something, neither in German nor in Dutch - but beyond that I’m skeptical that either language copies gender. The existence of neuter nouns that are obviously of French or English origin flies in the face of that notion. There must be some other method at work here. It’s weird - it seems immediately obvious and natural to me that it should be ‘het team’ (and in German it’s ‘Das Team’) - but there’s no reason that it should be like that, there’s nothing ‘natural’ about it. ---
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2013, 11:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/53 "2013-03-29T11:40:14Z")
To both of you, I recommend the book “Words and Rules,” by Stephen Pinker. It includes a whole chapter on plurals in German and Dutch (and gives examples in a few other languages, including Old and Middle English), with a discussion of how a “default plural form for foreign borrowings” is part of his big argument about how the human mind works. He spends a few paragraphs on the links between gender and plural form for foreign borrowings in these two languages, but mainly focuses on just the plural forms. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2013, 7:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/54 "2013-03-29T19:40:40Z")
> [@Svejk\_1](#): > > I agree, it’s not how you would commonly think about it - but just think of it as asking yourself, can the plural form of a noun die [German Noun][Plural Suffix] or de [Dutch Noun][Plural Suffix] tell me anything about whether that noun’s gender? I’d say that it might, at least in German, which means that the whole thing about gender no longer existing in the plural is only partially true. It works retrospectively for language nerds like us, but for the average learner I think there would be too many exceptions, for example _die Stadt_ and _die Hand_ which are feminine nouns but form plurals like masculines. (The latter is especially interesting because the Romance language words for “hand” are similarly anomalous, e.g. _la main_, _la mano_, etc.) ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2013, 5:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/55 "2013-03-30T05:43:13Z")
> [@Svejk\_1](#): > > As for the use of foreign words, I’m not saying you’re wrong but the notion that Dutch uses more non Dutch than German uses non-German is not immediately plausible to me on the face of it. There’s examples of Germans using English were we don’t (there’s no commonly used English words to refer to a cell phone in Dutch, for instaznce). So … cite? I’ve read this in a published source that was presumably authoritative, but it’s been a long time and I don’t remember where that was. However, the article on the Dutch language in the German version of Wikipedia does back my statement up: [Niederländische Sprache, Absatz “Wortschatz” (Dutch Language, section “Vocabulary”)](http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niederl%C3%A4ndische_Sprache#Wortschatz) > [@](#): > > ``` > Das Niederländische hat zahlreiche Wörter aus anderen Sprachen entlehnt. Besonders bedeutend sind die Wörter, die seit dem frühen 18. Jahrhundert aus dem Französischen übernommen wurden. Die angestammten Wörter blieben daneben in aller Regel gleichberechtigt erhalten (in der Auswahl nach dem Schrägstrich aufgeführt): > > ``` > > \*\*\*Dutch has borrowed numerous words from other languages. Particularly significant are the words which were taken from French beginning in the early 18th century. As a rule the native word has been kept as well. > > * * * > > (List of examples follows) > > ``` > Auch der niederländische Wortschatz hat seit Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts zahlreiche Anglizismen aufgenommen, insbesondere in den Bereichen Wissenschaft, Technik, Informatik und in der Jugendsprache. Da das Niederländische sich flexibel an die Aussprache anpasst, weicht die Schreibweise häufig vom englischen Original ab. > > ``` > > _ **Dutch has also incorporated numerous Anglicisms from the mid 20th century on, especially in the areas of science, technology, informatics, and in the language of youth.** _ I’ll come back tomorrow with another cite asserting that the proportion of foreign words in Dutch comes to near 20%, which I’m sure is considerably higher than German. [/quote] ---
**Author:** ![Svejk\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ea666f/32.png) [@Svejk\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Svejk_1)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2013, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/56 "2013-03-30T16:54:03Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > I’ve read this in a published source that was presumably authoritative, but it’s been a long time and I don’t remember where that was. However, the article on the Dutch language in the German version of Wikipedia does back my statement up: > > [Niederländische Sprache, Absatz “Wortschatz” (Dutch Language, section “Vocabulary”)](http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niederl%C3%A4ndische_Sprache#Wortschatz) > > I’ll come back tomorrow with another cite asserting that the proportion of foreign words in Dutch comes to near 20%, which I’m sure is considerably higher than German. Look, I am perfectly happy to accept that foreign words are more common in Dutch than in German, I don’t have a strong argument against it and given eg. absence of dubbing TV, openness to foreign trade, and relative size of the language area, it makes perfect sense. But your cites don’t do anything to back up your claim. The wikipedia is interesting enough but all it does is list a bunch of Dutch words that are foreign. We know that those exist - and German has a bunch too. Also, it means absolutely nothing to me that the percentage of foreign words in Dutch is 20 per cent. Especially if you include words that entered the language a very long time ago, that makes perfect sense - but I would not really think of ‘krant’ (newspaper, from Fr. courant) as a foreign word like I would of ‘manager’. We’ve had ‘krant’ for about 400 years now ([Dutch Etymological Dictionary](http://gtb.inl.nl/iWNTLINKS/DATADIR/paginazy.html?EWN+/iWDB/search?actie=article_content&wdb=EWN&id=ewn002737)). Probably it’s always been the major way to say ‘newspaper’. If words are still counted as foreign after 400 years I’m not surprised by a twenty percent foreign word score, but I’d also not be ready to say that German is so far behind. Would you think of Kartoffel, which apparently comes from Italian ‘[tartuficolo](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Kartoffel)’ (truffle), as a foreign loan word? ---
**Author:** ![Leo\_Bloom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leo_bloom/32/10377_2.png) [@Leo\_Bloom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leo_Bloom)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2013, 12:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/57 "2013-03-31T00:42:40Z")
> [@BobArrgh](#): > > English hasn’t lost all of its gender-specific nouns. > > Executor / Executrix > Steward / Stewardess > Shepherd / Shepherdess > > I’m sure there are others. My father, born overseas, is the only person I know who says and uses the word “Jewess.” It drove my mother and his later editors crazy, since he publishes an enormous amount of Jewish history. Also, I’ve noticed that imported nouns into Hebrew seem to take the feminine. True? ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2013, 1:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/58 "2013-03-31T01:19:50Z")
> [@Svejk\_1](#): > > Look, I am perfectly happy to accept that foreign words are more common in Dutch than in German, I don’t have a strong argument against it and given eg. absence of dubbing TV, openness to foreign trade, and relative size of the language area, it makes perfect sense. But your cites don’t do anything to back up your claim. If you believe my statement to be dubious, then perhaps others do as well so I do think at least one authoritative cite would be helpful here. [Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor, eds. Loanwords in the world’s languages: a comparative handbook. DeGruyter Mouton, Berlin. 2009](http://books.google.com/books?id=HnKeVbwTwyYC&lpg=PA337&dq=Loanwords%20dutch%20old%20high%20german&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=Loanwords%20dutch%20old%20high%20german&f=false). [p350](http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/9482/slanguagesp350charti.png). (I’m dubious myself about the inclusion of 2.7% of words ‘borrowed’ from German, given how close Dutch and German are to begin with. Excluding the German words would mean just over 17% loanwords in Dutch, going by the chart cited. ) > [@](#): > > The wikipedia is interesting enough but all it does is list a bunch of Dutch words that are foreign. We know that those exist - and German has a bunch too. My motive in citing the Wikipedia article was that the article is written from the perspective of one who knows both languages well and is presumably a German native speaker, so if he or she wrote that Dutch has “numerous” loanwords, then this means “significantly more than German does”. And this is relevant because it may bear some relationship to the different degrees to which those two languages have retained their inflections. Among IE languages, it does seem that the “purest” ones, e.g. Icelandic or Lithuanian, remain the most inflected. > [@](#): > > Also, it means absolutely nothing to me that the percentage of foreign words in Dutch is 20 per cent. Especially if you include words that entered the language a very long time ago, that makes perfect sense - but I would not really think of ‘krant’ (newspaper, from Fr. courant) as a foreign word like I would of ‘manager’. We’ve had ‘krant’ for about 400 years now ([Dutch Etymological Dictionary](http://gtb.inl.nl/iWNTLINKS/DATADIR/paginazy.html?EWN+/iWDB/search?actie=article_content&wdb=EWN&id=ewn002737)). Probably it’s always been the major way to say ‘newspaper’. Of course I am including long-established loanwords; for the purpose of this discussion I believe they are more important in terms of their influence the host language. Recall that we’re talking about changes taking place over a period of centuries, so foreign words that are too new and too limited in their application to have been assimilated by the borrowing language are beside the point. Words like “Weltanschauung” and “raison d’etre” are familiar enough in certain English language contexts, but their influence on the grammar of the language is negligible. > [@](#): > > If words are still counted as foreign after 400 years I’m not surprised by a twenty percent foreign word score, but I’d also not be ready to say that German is so far behind. Would you think of Kartoffel, which apparently comes from Italian ‘[tartuficolo](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Kartoffel)’ (truffle), as a foreign loan word? Probably yes, although I’m rather surprised at the etymology. It seems quite a promotion for the humble spud. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2013, 4:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/59 "2013-03-31T04:29:39Z")
> [@Acsenray](#): > > When they’re just referring to a person, they’ll use the normal gendered pronoun – “He is crying.” “She is hungry.” “Er weint.” “Sie ist hungrig.” > > It’s only when the specific \*noun \*comes into play that the grammatical gender is triggered. > > “The girl is pretty” = “ **Das** Mädchen ist schön.” I don’t know to what extent this still happens, but I’ve seen older German texts in which the neuter gender of a word like _Mädchen_ (“girl”) or a metonym like _Rotkäppchen_\*\* (“Little Red Riding Hood”) governs all pronomial references with a grip of iron as it were. Throughout “Little Red Riding Hood” as the Grimms wrote it down, she is referred to as “it” because LRRH is neuter in German. ---
**Author:** ![Svejk\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ea666f/32.png) [@Svejk\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Svejk_1)\ **Post date:** [April 1, 2013, 11:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/60 "2013-04-01T11:34:12Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > If you believe my statement to be dubious, then perhaps others do as well so I do think at least one authoritative cite would be helpful here. > [Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor, eds. Loanwords in the world’s languages: a comparative handbook. DeGruyter Mouton, Berlin. 2009](http://books.google.com/books?id=HnKeVbwTwyYC&lpg=PA337&dq=Loanwords%20dutch%20old%20high%20german&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=Loanwords%20dutch%20old%20high%20german&f=false). [p350](http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/9482/slanguagesp350charti.png). > > (I’m dubious myself about the inclusion of 2.7% of words ‘borrowed’ from German, given how close Dutch and German are to begin with. Excluding the German words would mean just over 17% loanwords in Dutch, going by the chart cited. ) > > My motive in citing the Wikipedia article was that the article is written from the perspective of one who knows both languages well and is presumably a German native speaker, so if he or she wrote that Dutch has “numerous” loanwords, then this means “significantly more than German does”. And this is relevant because it may bear some relationship to the different degrees to which those two languages have retained their inflections. Among IE languages, it does seem that the “purest” ones, e.g. Icelandic or Lithuanian, remain the most inflected. > > Of course I am including long-established loanwords; for the purpose of this discussion I believe they are more important in terms of their influence the host language. Recall that we’re talking about changes taking place over a period of centuries, so foreign words that are too new and too limited in their application to have been assimilated by the borrowing language are beside the point. Words like “Weltanschauung” and “raison d’etre” are familiar enough in certain English language contexts, but their influence on the grammar of the language is negligible. Thanks for the cite, it’s an interesting read. And I could see how Dutch might have simplified as a result of borrowing so much and being so heavily influenced from abroad. I wonder, though, if that link between morphological simplicity, on the one hand, and foreign influence, on the other, holds up in Slavic languages. There you see for instance that Bulgarian and Macedonian have basically lost the Slavic case system, which has remained in tact in all other Slavic languages. On the other end, Slovenian has retained not only its case system but also a full-fledged dual, which is only rudimentarily present in other Slavic languages; Czech continues to have a vocative which is only rudimentarily present in other Slavic languages. Would we find more loanwords in Bulgarian than in Slovenian or Czech? I should look that up in the book you posted as a cite. > [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > I don’t know to what extent this still happens, but I’ve seen older German texts in which the neuter gender of a word like _Mädchen_ (“girl”) or a metonym like _Rotkäppchen_\*\* (“Little Red Riding Hood”) governs all pronomial references with a grip of iron as it were. Throughout “Little Red Riding Hood” as the Grimms wrote it down, she is referred to as “it” because LRRH is neuter in German. Well I’ll be damned. [Link](http://www.grimmstories.com/de/grimm_maerchen/rotkaeppchen). > [@Brother's Grimm](#): > > Rotkäppchen schlug die Augen auf, und als es sah, wie die Sonnenstrahlen durch die Bäume hin und her tanzten und alles voll schöner Blumen stand, dachte es: Wenn ich der Grossmutter einen frischen Strauss mitbringe, der wird ihr auch Freude machen; es ist so früh am Tag, dass ich doch zu rechter Zeit ankomme, lief vom Wege ab in den Wald hinein und suchte Blumen. Und wenn es eine gebrochen hatte, meinte es, weiter hinaus stände eine schönere, und lief danach und geriet immer tiefer in den Wald hinein. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797.md?page=4)