I cannot imagine any good reason for any language to have genders. With the exception of English most modern languages do. Along with the more ancient ones.
What was the point? Why would any culture developing a language want to make it unnecessarily difficult to learn?
What was the point? What was the justification?
That’s not true. Most Indo-European languages have gender, but most other major languages do not, e.g., Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian.
So that’s part of the answer: most modern Indo-European languages have gender because they evolved from Proto-Indo-European, which would have had gender.
Language is arbitrary. Nobody sat down and drew up some arcane rules, they just happened to be how the language evolved naturally.
That said, more recently there have been attempts to reform various languages (though usually in the spelling and writing department rather than things like case usage or gender), but they’re usually to bring old rules in line with modern usage or address some problem native speakers have with the language.
If your question is also, more generally, what it is about human linguistics that drives so many languages to have things like grammatical gender, (or inanimate/animate in at least one case – though it acts identically and is generally indistinguishable from grammatical gender, don’t know the blanket term), I’m not sure if linguists have a satisfying explanation for why the feature occurs – but I’d be interested if they do.
There are a few uncommon languages (I think including one or two American Indian ones) that have something that either is gender, or almost exactly like it. So it’s certainly not limited to Indo-European languages.
OK…
So what were the Proto-Indo-Europeans thinking? I can’t think of any reason.
Seeing as little kids easily pick up whichever language they’re exposed to, gender or no, this complaint has a flawed premise.
I’m hardly an expert, but I feel the need to point out an implicit error in your thinking. Natural languages are not designed; they develop very slowly over time with no master plan or planner. They evolve. Nobody ever sat down and said, “Well, this is what Attic Greek should be like.”
ETA: Also, it seems likely to me that you find the idea of grammatical gender difficult to learn because your milk tongue does not have it. If the first language being spoken around you had been a language with gender, it would seem natural to you.
By analogy, consider that Latin has no articles, while English does. A native-latin speaker (if such existed) might wonder why we include the pointless words “the,” “a,” and “an” in English speech.
I was going to put that in another post, but you beat me.
Yeah, kids easily pick up any language, no language of antiquity was molded by how hard it was to learn – except perhaps certain trade languages or elite dialects that may have been kept deliberately obtuse for various reasons (or just not allowed to evolve so they remained “pure” or becuase “that’s the natural, correct way” or whatever).
It’s a good question and the answer is far from clear. There are various suppositions about its utility. If I am trying to think of a word and I know it’s masculine, say, I can ignore all words my brain has marked as feminine or neuter which could conceivably save on search time. Gendered nouns make antecedents more obvious. If I talk about a masculine and a feminine noun and then use a gendered pronoun, it’s clear which I mean.
An important thing to remember is that gender in this instance means kind and while many languages have a masculine/feminine divide, others can divide words into big/small, food/notfood, long and pointy, round and smooth and so on and so forth.
Sexual dimorphism is a pretty notable feature of the human condition and the habit of animal and plant husbandry. There isn’t a one to one correspondence but language usually encodes concepts important to a culture. Apparently proto-indo-Europeans noticed males and females were different and found this difference significant enough to want to talk about it a lot, and extrapolate it to non-human, non-animal things.
Couldn’t we ask the exact same question about singular and plural. If you think the reason we don’t need gender to be in the verb is because it can be easily figured out from the noun, the exact same goes for plurals.
I’ve wondered about this too. It seems like it just overly encumbers a language. What difference does it make if a non-animal noun is male or female?
It make sense when the descriptor is used identify the sex of an animal. For example, “le dog” for the male dog and “la dog” for the female dog. But seems silly and unnecessary when words like rock, stick, house, etc. have a gender.
I believe that IS “gender”, in a way… The word comes from the same roots as “genus” in biology and it refers to grouping nouns on the basis of “kinds” of thing or ideas being named. [ETA: what Inner Stickler said while I typed] Just so happens that by the time it got to us the main divide we had was that of sexes (“nouns have genders; living beings have sexes” said to me a teacher once).
But do males and females speak differently, eat differently, or walk differently? And different to such a degree that warrants what is basically a whole new word?
I don’t see it. If the nouns are different, why do the articles need to be different?
Yes, so when we have masculine or feminine groupings it is because the prototypical example of that group should be man or woman and not that things in that group are mannish or womanish.
Right, though I have been told by linguists that it used to be highly taboo to suggest that grammatical gender had anything to do with the prototypes – but there’s been at least some recent evidence to suggest that at the very least your language’s grammatical gender may influence the way you perceive objects (i.e. being more likely to see a bridge as having traits belonging to your culture’s conception of male, female, food, animate, whatever depending on what your language classifies it as). Even so, beyond the prototypes the groupings are arbitrary because there’s no a priori reason for many things to fit into a certain classification.
Obligatory David Sedaris link (warning: .pdf file): http://dana.ucc.nau.edu/vrs26/english_105/PDF%20documents/Sedaris_-_Make_that_a_double_PDF.pdf
Yeah, I was surprised as well but there are rumblings that Lena Boroditsky’s work is being considered (in as polite a way as possible) less than stellar.
I forget which book it’s in, but probably Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass (which is relatively controversial as well) it’s mentioned that at least one language currently developing grammatical gender uses man and woman as markers for its masculine/feminine split. This isn’t to say that because one language does it now, all languages have done it forever that way but I also happen to know that Deutscher at least is a big proponent of “the present is the key to the past” and that we can make guesses about the development of ancient languages by observing the development of current similar languages.
From a purely practical point of view, if you have a masculine gender but man is not masculine, what’s the point of labeling it so?
Not to hijack, but there is an interesting side conversation to the question of why some languages have genders.
Words that have different endings due to their assigned “gender” are not masculine or feminine in the normal sense (or neuter in addition for some languages); there are languages that actually have different forms that are spoken due to the speaker’s sex.
Japanese men and women have what might be considered two parallel languages in a limited way. Men use certain words and vocal tones, while women use other words and vocal tones to say essentially the same thing. If a man were to use the woman’s words, he would be in social “trouble” and vice versa.
So this is an example of true gendered language, not just different forms of the same word.
See Gender differences in Japanese - Wikipedia
There are other languages that have parallel languages developed to an even greater degree. For examples see: Sumerian, Sanskrit, Garifuna, and ancient Greek. This demonstrates that languages can develop similar patterns even when far apart in time, space, and relations to one another.
“Noun classes” is the general wider phenomenon under which grammatical gender is included. Bantu languages like Swahili are a good illustration of noun classes. Swahili has some 14 different noun classes. One of them is used for humans: *m- *in the singular and wa- in the plural. Others are attached to certain types of nouns in a way that sometimes looks like an intuitive grouping and other times it’s inexplicable.
There’s a theory that Proto-Indo-European in its earliest phase (or that which came before PIE) had two noun classes: one for active things and one for inert things. This is seen in Hittite grammar. Hittite was the earliest written IE language that split away from all the others thousands of years before any languages current today ever existed.
Later a third noun class was added: originally a number ending marking words for groups or collectivities. In IE languages like Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Russian, Lithuanian, and early Germanic, the active class became called the masculine gender, the inert class the neuter gender, and the collectivity marker the feminine gender. That’s how they came about.
As for the two-gender system in Afro-Asiatic, that would be another topic altogether. But in I can tell you in Arabic the feminine gender is used for types of collectivity also, as well as for types of singularities (it’s fairly complex in this regard). As for the three-gender system in Dravidian, I think it closely resembles the Proto-Indo-European pattern. In Algonquian languages, the noun class system is simple and intuitive with only two classes: animate and inanimate. Humans, animals, and spirits are animate. Everything else is inanimate. I like the Algonquian version.
However, that’s not what linguists call “gender”, which is two or more classes of nouns for which there are different rules, e.g., different forms of articles and adjectives. Japanese does not have articles, and when you conjugate Japanese articles you conjugate theme for tense, etc., in the same way as verbs are conjugated – they don’t change form based on the noun they go with.