Note that English does still have vestiges of gender. The one I’m aware of is the word “twain”, as in “never the twain shall meet”.
Twain is the masculine; two is the feminine.
I’m not sure how relevant that is since at this point twain/two is never used with respect to the gender, either grammatical or semantic, of nouns in English.
It’s like two gears that, instead of meshing, strip each other.
I just think it’s a cool bit of semi-relevant trivia about the English language and its history.
Eesh. You don’t have to be a dick about it; especially if you’re just going to provide a cross-reference rather than an answer.
He’s probably just testy because we talked about it a week ago. Thread.
That doesn’t address the point of having two arbitrary classes of nouns in the first place, though.
The answer to that is “because people make languages and people are idiots.”
English hasn’t lost all of its gender-specific nouns.
Executor / Executrix
Steward / Stewardess
Shepherd / Shepherdess
I’m sure there are others.
I don’t even think estate lawyers use the word “executrix.” Gendered job titles have been giving way to genderless alternatives, or universal masculines, for a long time now, too. Consider:
Steward/stewardess -> flight attendant
Actor/actress -> actor
Policeman/woman -> police officer
Fireman/woman -> firefighter
Mailman/woman -> mail carrier
Waiter/waitress -> server
I haven’t met any, but I’m sure any female shepherds under the age of 100 are perfectly fine with being called a shepherd.
More than semi-relevant I’d say. If we’re going to talk about when a particular feature of the language faded away, then how can we not be interested in extant vestigial examples of it?
IANA Linguist, but I wonder how accurate it is to say that English still has gender, just with nearly all objects sent to the neutral gender. After all in Romance languages (at least the ones I know of)(and I believe German, too?), choosing pronouns is only a small part of gender (heck, it’s even optional in Spanish); the bigger part is agreement in gender of nouns and adjectives (and articles). And, in English, Boys, Ladies and boxes of hammers all take the same form of adjectives.
Now, I guess it might be more complicated, since Romance languages also have singular/plural agreement in adjectives while English has dropped that, too (except a vestige in ‘a’ versus ‘some’). I don’t really know how that fits in.
But it seems to me more accurate to say that English has dropped gender entirely, except in the single instance of third-person singular pronouns, a few occupation names, and the odd loan word from modern French (e.g. blond/blonde), rather than saying it has gender, just with most things in neuter.
English grammar was considerably simplified by the interaction, specifically, with Danes starting in the 9th century. This interaction is essentially the transition between Old English and Middle English.
“feminine” and “masculine,” both a social constructs because society in general, is determined to divide men and women in to specific gender roles.
Whe I Google a question, for eg. who is actor Angie Harmon, as soon as the page comes up, there are multiple links and Google put in bold…actress. I don’t understand WHY Google NEEDS to feminize women. Actor like doctor, is a gender-neutral term. Adding an ESS to the word, makes the person, second hand. Patriarchy does that for you. Men come first and women, they’re feminized.
Wait! Isn’t “testy” feminine? If “he” is masculine then it should be:
“He’s probably just testicle because we talked about it a week ago.”
My point is more that I wouldn’t classify it as “half-decay” because the constructions have been stable for about 500 years. If we were still noticing some sort of drift - say, the neuter gender collapsing into the common - then I think your appellation would be more accurate. I don’t think the gender system in Swedish - or any Scandinavian language, for that matter - is currently decaying.
There’s some talk about this possibly happening in Dutch. Predominantly amongst immigrants, and to some extent amongst non-immigrants who spend considerable time with immigrants, there can be a tendency to strictly treat nouns as feminine/masculine, disregarding the neuter. This is understandable, as the default for nouns is feminine/masculine, and although there are some rules that can be identified, I’d venture that knowing gender for Dutch nouns is trickier than it is for eg French or German. Knowing the German often helps, but going strictly on the Dutch nouns, it can be very hard to know. A lot of this learning comes down to just cramming. It’s unfortunate, because it is at the same time insanely difficult to learn, hardly an indicator of how well or how poorly one actually speaks the language, but a very strong giveaway that someone did not grow up in a family where the language was commonly spoken. It might even still be a persons native language, in that it’s not necessarily true they’ll speak Arabic or Turkish all that much better - but it will still mark them as an immigrant, and if indigenous Dutch want to imitate an immigrant accent, this is the mistake they exploit.
In any case, under this influence, there’s been some conjecture that over time, this will lead to a merger of the neuter and masculine/feminine. And to be fair, I’ve graded a fair amount of undergrad writing in the Netherlands where mistakes like these are made, so it’s not something that is confined to the heavily underprivileged. And, as I mentioned, it’s not even exclusively an immigrant thing. Still, I can’t really think of any examples of this shift occurring in more formal writing or speech, and the category of neuter nouns is still productive, so it’s not as though neuter words are necessarily dying out. The neuter gender can also be applied to foreign words adopted into the Dutch language (het cadeau, het niveau, het level, het interview).
Insofar as it is going on, I think the ‘half-time’ metaphor is poorly chosen, as it suggests that the extinction of the neuter gender now would be related to the merger of masculine and feminine earlier. It implies that both developments would be part of a larger process, when in fact what would be going on now could be explained by pointing to much more proximate causes.
From what I remember of the two quarter units I had of Dutch I took around 1980, I agree with this. I knew a lot more German, and found that many of the German gender rules (and “guidelines”) worked equally well Dutch, like the one that says diminutive nouns are always neuter–like het meisje. IIRC all of the -ion words borrowed from French are feminines in German, thus common-gendered in Dutch. In fact, it seemed to be true that the Dutch cognate of any non-neuter German noun turned out to be common gender. On the other hand, the loss of the case system in Dutch means little or no redundancy in articles and adjectives to help reinforce what gender a word belongs to. Moreover, I don’t remember to what extent, if any, Dutch uses strong and weak adjective declensions, as German does (e.g. gute Leute (good people) vs. die guten Leute (the good people).
There are ways to tell the gender in the absence of the article (or to put it the other way, other things than the article need to conform to the gender of the noun). These exist only in the singular, though, in the plural all nouns, adjectives, and articles behave as masculine/feminine and there is no distinction that speakers need to make or ways that one could tell gender from a plural noun. In the singular, there are some differences. For starters, the demonstrative pronouns have separate forms: in addition to de/het there’s *deze/dit *(this); and die/dat (that).
Furthermore, adjectives have separate forms: -e/[null]. However, these are used only in the singular after the indefinite article *een *as well as a number of other pronouns such as *elk(e), ieder(e), welk(e) * (each, every, which), which themselves as adjectives here. After de/het, adjectives take -e regardless of gender, so: de kleine stad (the small city), het kleine paard (the small horse). However, after een, only feminine/masculine words (‘de’ words) take -e, neuter ‘het’ words don’t. So: een kleine stad, een klein paard. And also elke kleine stad, elk klein paard; iedere kleine stad, ieder klein paard, etc.
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”.
This is true in German as well, in a way, since gender differentiation disappears in the plural.