# Why do so many languages use gender? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 19, 2013, 7:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388 "2013-03-19T19:25:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Mississippienne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d2c977/32.png) [@Mississippienne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mississippienne)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2013, 12:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/41 "2013-03-21T00:13:40Z")
“Pointless things” in the English language: – Grammatical plural – Articles – Ridiculous numbers of vowels – Irregular verbs – Some rare sounds, such as “th” ---
**Author:** ![suranyi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e36b37/32.png) [@suranyi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/suranyi)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2013, 1:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/42 "2013-03-21T01:13:44Z")
> [@filmore](#): > > Gender is clearly useful when describing something which is genetically male or female. But it seems useless to assign a sex to inanimate objects such as a book, cloud, rock, etc. What does it matter if ‘bread’ is male or female? If it’s male, what does that tell you about bread? If it’s female, what does that tell you? Nothing, that’s what it tells you. That’s why it seems useless. If there is going to be a modifier, make it be something that conveys useful information such as size, color, quantity, etc. > > Saying an inanimate object is male or female is like saying an object is left or right. It’s an arbitrary label. Every language has arbitrariness to it, structural items that seem totally useless to outsiders. That’s one of the features of natural human languages. You’re wrong if you think English is immune to it, as has been pointed out. That’s why any question of the sort, “Why does language X have such-and-such strange feature” are impossible to answer. It evolved naturally is the best we can say. A lot of people seem to think that language is, or at least should be, based on logic. It isn’t. ---
**Author:** ![TokyoBayer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tokyobayer/32/13989_2.png) [@TokyoBayer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TokyoBayer)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2013, 1:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/43 "2013-03-21T01:45:10Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > One thing that noun classes do is make it easier to vary the word order, which is generally hard in English. For some purposes, Japanese has some 20 word classes, one of which roughly corresponds to (non-human) mammals. But squirrels are classified as birds and whales as fish. As a result (presumably) when there was a taboo against eating mammals (which ended with the Meiji revolution), they still ate squirrels and whales. Are you talking about [measure words](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_counter_word) for counting? There are a bunch, but your examples are incorrect. Whales are given the same counter word 頭 _tou_ as large animals. It’s not squires but rabbits which are counted as birds, and while some people say that it’s because of the prohibition of Buddhist monks on meat, others have pointed out that the prohibition was for all meat, including birds. I wouldn’t be surprised if that explanation was created afterward to explain something which is really just – yet another – illogical exception to a rule, something languages love. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2013, 2:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/44 "2013-03-21T02:23:57Z")
Another linguistic term for counter or measure words is classifiers: > **[Classifier (linguistics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_(linguistics))** > > A classifier (abbreviated .mw-parser-output span.smallcaps{font-variant:small-caps}.mw-parser-output span.smallcaps-smaller{font-size:85%}clf or cl) is a word or affix that accompanies nouns and can be considered to "classify" a noun depending on the type of its referent. It is also sometimes called a measure word or counter word. Classifiers play an important role in certain languages, especially East Asian languages, including Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese. Classifiers are absent In... ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2013, 2:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/45 "2013-03-21T02:34:58Z")
Having studied Russian, Spanish, and especially French, my “ideal” language would omit: –the subjunctive –any and all declensions (cases) –articles –present tense of “to be” –gender Are there any widely spoken languages that fit this wishlist, anyone know? ---
**Author:** ![ombre12](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/d26b3c/32.png) [@ombre12](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ombre12)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2013, 3:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/46 "2013-03-21T03:58:28Z")
> [@SlackerInc](#): > > Having studied Russian, Spanish, and especially French, my “ideal” language would omit: > > –the subjunctive > –any and all declensions (cases) > –articles > –present tense of “to be” > –gender > > Are there any widely spoken languages that fit this wishlist, anyone know? That is what I was thinking. Why do languages have to be so damned unnecessarily difficult? For no particularly good reason? If I were starting a language I would not even consider putting useless stuff in there. Were our ancestors just plain bored during the long winters and needed something to do to keep their minds active? ---
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2013, 4:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/47 "2013-03-21T04:04:15Z")
Nobody “started” any language. It’s all arbitrary. Linguistic evolution is just like regular evolution. There’s no rhyme or reason, things just happen and some things stick. Now, there are common elements to languages that have to do with the human brain, but nobody sat down as said “new thing called language need subjunctive, Thog!” ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2013, 4:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/48 "2013-03-21T04:07:37Z")
> [@filmore](#): > > Gender is clearly useful when describing something which is genetically male or female. But it seems useless to assign a sex to inanimate objects such as a book, cloud, rock, etc. What does it matter if ‘bread’ is male or female? If it’s male, what does that tell you about bread? If it’s female, what does that tell you? Nothing, that’s what it tells you. That’s why it seems useless. If there is going to be a modifier, make it be something that conveys useful information such as size, color, quantity, etc. > > Saying an inanimate object is male or female is like saying an object is left or right. It’s an arbitrary label. Haven’t you been reading the thread? Grammatical gender does _not_ assign a sex to an object. This is a common misconception by speakers of languages without grammatical gender. You should get that out of your head. ---
**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 21, 2013, 4:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/49 "2013-03-21T04:44:17Z")
> [@SlackerInc](#): > > Having studied Russian, Spanish, and especially French, my “ideal” language would omit: > > –the subjunctive > –any and all declensions (cases) > –articles > –present tense of “to be” > –gender > > Are there any widely spoken languages that fit this wishlist, anyone know? I think that Chinese fits your wish list, and it’s definitely widely spoken. Of course, you pay a price – you have to learn thousands of characters, and you have to learn how tones work. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2013, 4:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/50 "2013-03-21T04:54:11Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > Another linguistic term for counter or measure words is classifiers: > > [Classifier (linguistics) - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_(linguistics)) These are similar to the classifiers I described for Thai. Letting ‘cylinder’ denote the classifier for ‘pencil,’ Thai says I have pencil three cylinder or I have pencil red three cylinder or I have pencil cylinder red (The classifier can take a non-counting adjective if no counting adjective is present.) In practice, many Thais forget the more obscure classifiers. Generic classifiers meaning “piece” or “thing” are in wide use. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2013, 5:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/51 "2013-03-21T05:19:47Z")
> [@SlackerInc](#): > > Having studied Russian, Spanish, and especially French, my “ideal” language would omit: > > –the subjunctive > –any and all declensions (cases) > –articles > –present tense of “to be” > –gender > > Are there any widely spoken languages that fit this wishlist, anyone know? Malay/Indonesian is an example that fits all your criteria. ---
**Author:** ![Inner\_Stickler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/inner_stickler/32/318_2.png) [@Inner\_Stickler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inner_Stickler)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2013, 5:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/52 "2013-03-21T05:36:18Z")
> [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](#): > > Do we have anyone on the board whose native tongue uses grammatical gender? I’d like to hear from them. Well, Guy Deutscher in _Through the Language Glass_ has this to say: > [@Guy Deutscher](#): > > But if you native speakers of English are tempted to feel sorry for those of us who are shackled by the heavy load of an irrational gender system, then think again. I would never want to change places with you. My mind may be weighed down by an arbitrary and illogical set of associations, but my world has so much to it that you entirely miss out on, because the landscape of my language [Hebrew] is so much more fertile than your arid desert of ‘it’s’. > > It goes without saying that genders are language’s gift to poets. Heine’s masculine pine tree longs for the feminine palm; Boris Pasternak’s _My Sister Life_ can only work because ‘life’ is feminine in Russian; English translations of Charles Baudelaire’s ‘L’homme et la mer,’ however inspired, can never hope to capture the tempestuous relationship of attraction and antagonism that he evokes between ‘him’ (the man) and ‘her’ (the sea); nor can English do justice to Pablo Neruda’s ‘Ode to the Sea,’ in which the (masculine) _el mar_ strikes a stone (_una piedra_) and then ‘he caresses her, kisses her, drenches her, pounds his chest, repeating his own name’ – the English ‘it caresses it, it kisses it, it drenches it, pounds its chest’ is not quite the same. I’m not really sure I’m convinced but then, it’s not really up to me anyway. ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2013, 6:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/53 "2013-03-21T06:15:53Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > Malay/Indonesian is an example that fits all your criteria. Is it also free of the painful elements of Chinese that Giles pointed out? Oh, and I thought of another criterion: phonetic spelling (like in Russian for the most part). English is truly awful in that regard. As for the point about language not being “thought up” by anyone, that’s obviously true (well, except for Esperanto, Klingon, Dothraki, etc.). But my expectation would be that as it evolves, language would tend to shake off unwieldy and unnecessary elements just as a matter of course. Young people would notice they can still communicate the same thing without all of that, and at first it would be “slang” that the older crowd would cluck their tongues at, but eventually it would be standard. ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2013, 6:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/54 "2013-03-21T06:18:35Z")
It seems rather obvious to me that the complex grammatical idiosyncrasies of language developed as an aid to clarity. If someone is talking to you and for some reason you lose part of their utterance, the “arbitrary irregularities” of whatever your language make it easier for you to reconstruct what they were saying. I think this is prettymuch true for most or all spoken languages. The thing I have noticed about spoken English, as I know it, is it can be a rather musical language, with intonation carrying a much more significant linguistic load than is commonly attested to. I can utter a sentence that would be all but incoherent to anyone but a regional native speaker, but the musical pattern of tone and rhythm makes the sentence resolvable. When you only see a language in print, its oddities are much more evident and superfluous than when you hear it used in speaking. ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2013, 6:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/55 "2013-03-21T06:22:36Z")
> [@SlackerInc](#): > > As for the point about language not being “thought up” by anyone, that’s obviously true (well, except for Esperanto, Klingon, Dothraki, etc.). But my expectation would be that as it evolves, language would tend to shake off unwieldy and unnecessary elements just as a matter of course. Young people would notice they can still communicate the same thing without all of that, and at first it would be “slang” that the older crowd would cluck their tongues at, but eventually it would be standard. The flip side would be that kids like to play with things, and language would be one of their toys. Older people are generally not whence originate memes. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2013, 6:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/56 "2013-03-21T06:52:06Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > Malay/Indonesian is an example that fits all your criteria. As does Thai. (_To be_ is not always omitted; sometimes เป็น (‘pen’) – an overworked verb also meaning _to be able to_ – is used.) ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2013, 11:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/57 "2013-03-21T11:44:10Z")
> [@SlackerInc](#): > > Is it also free of the painful elements of Chinese that Giles pointed out? Oh, and I thought of another criterion: phonetic spelling (like in Russian for the most part). English is truly awful in that regard. Huh? Russian has not the greatest fit between spelling and pronunciation. Malay and Indonesian are much better in that regard. The only problem in the unified orthography they adopted in 1972 is they dropped the distinction between /ə/ and /e/, which are both written with plain \, so that you have to memorize which of the two vowels goes in which word. They use numeric classifiers too, like in Japanese, Korean, Thai, Burmese, and I think also Mongolian. Malay has about 10 or so in common use. It seems that any country doing business with China adapted to using numeric classifiers. Even Turkish and Persian, via the Silk Road in the steppes of Central Asia, use numeric classifiers, only much simplified. In Persian they have only two: one for persons (_nafar_) and one for everything else: _tā_, which simply means ‘item(s)’. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2013, 11:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/58 "2013-03-21T11:45:57Z")
> [@septimus](#): > > As does Thai. (_To be_ is not always omitted; sometimes เป็น (‘pen’) – an overworked verb also meaning _to be able to_ – is used.) Likewise, in Malay & Indonesian, while the verb _ada_ ‘be’ is often omitted, it’s also pressed into service to mean ‘have’. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2013, 11:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/59 "2013-03-21T11:59:41Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > Haven’t you been reading the thread? Grammatical gender does _not_ assign a sex to an object. This is a common misconception by speakers of languages without grammatical gender. You should get that out of your head. Yeah, as I’ve said in other threads, in Spanish for example and until the very recent _Ley de Violencia de Género_ (law about gender violence), living beings including people did not have a _género_, they had a _sexo_ - _género_ equaled gender when talking about words or art, but not about living beings. At the same time, words don’t have sex unless it’s in a surrealist painting. Same thing in French, Italian, German… they’re just two completely different concepts. ---
**Author:** ![suranyi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e36b37/32.png) [@suranyi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/suranyi)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2013, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/60 "2013-03-21T17:15:08Z")
> [@SlackerInc](#): > > Is it also free of the painful elements of Chinese that Giles pointed out? Oh, and I thought of another criterion: phonetic spelling (like in Russian for the most part). English is truly awful in that regard. > > As for the point about language not being “thought up” by anyone, that’s obviously true (well, except for Esperanto, Klingon, Dothraki, etc.). But my expectation would be that as it evolves, language would tend to shake off unwieldy and unnecessary elements just as a matter of course. Young people would notice they can still communicate the same thing without all of that, and at first it would be “slang” that the older crowd would cluck their tongues at, but eventually it would be standard. When language shake off certain “unnecessary” elements, they tend to gain others. For example, English no longer has noun case endings, but instead we now have a fairly strict word order. Other languages are much more free with word order, since the endings indicate which nouns are the subject and object. Or, another example: In English we always have to use the pronoun subject with any verb, because the verb change in the present is minimal. If I said just “read”, that’s not a complete sentence. You wouldn’t know if I meant “I read”, “You read”, “We read”, or “They read”. There are many languages where a sentence like this would just require the verb, because the pronoun would be implied by the verb ending. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388.md?page=4)