Gendered Nouns

[Volk359]

When I studied Spanish back in high school it came as a surprise and an oddity to me that nouns had a gender. Some things were masculine and some were feminine and even some were neutral. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason, or purpose for the most part, as to which gender an item belonged to. I could understand why an object could be neutral but what would make an object male but not female or vice-versa? And if objects have gender why make some neutral? To complicate things, as I found, many objects can change genders in different languages.

What purpose does it serve by making a noun male or female or even neutral? English is based on many European languages, among others, but apparently gendered nouns were dropped. Does anybody know when or why genderizing was dropped?

 

[MakeItSo]

I think, it might have some cultural/religious background.
In German, "Sun" is female, and "Moon" is male.
This comes certainly from the Norse goddess of the sun, "Sol", and the Norse God of the moon, "Mani".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Norse_mythology

In French, it is exactly vice versa (le soleil (m), la lune (f)). Probably due to the male Roman solar deity "Sol" (Greek equivalent Helios" and the female Greek deity "Luna".

http://en.wikipedia.org

I suppose, that this scheme can be applied to many things, to the symbolism behind objects or animals and their association with deities or attributes.


Now today's English mythology is more or less a mixture of Norse, Greek/Roman and Celtic mythology.
Hence of male AND female solar deities, male AND female lunar deities, a.s.o.

So, perhaps their mixture of Norse, Greek/Roman and Celtic mythology clashed and contradicted so hard, that they decided to just refer to "the" Sun, Moon, Earth a.s.o.

Just a wild guess though.


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[jsteph]

Does anybody know when or why genderizing was dropped

The Politically Correct Police, perhaps? Seriously, I tend to agree with MakeItSo--English being derived from so many different (and conflicting, in this context) influences that they just said "screweth it" and made it gender neutral.
--Jim

 

[MakeItSo]

Here's a very interesting read to this topic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender

Excerpt:

In linguistics, grammatical genders, also called noun classes, are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words; every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be very few which belong to several classes at once (Hockett 1958: 231).

Some languages have only one noun class, and treat all nouns in the same way grammatically. Most Indo-European languages have one to three noun classes, which are traditionally called grammatical genders rather than noun classes. Some Caucasian languages have four to eight, and most Bantu languages have ten to twenty noun classes.

Noun class systems have direct bearing on the way words and sentences are put together. In a typical example from the Bantu language Swahili, for example, the class marker 'ki' (marking singular nouns in class number 7) shows up on both the adjective (-kubwa) and the verb (-anguka), to express their relation to the class seven noun kitabu 'book':

* kitabu kikubwa kinaanguka (7.book 7.big 7.PRESENT-fall) 'The big book falls.'

Common criteria for distinguishing noun classes include:

* animate vs. inanimate (as with Ojibwe)
* rational vs. non-rational (as with Tamil)
* human vs. non-human
* male vs. other
* male human vs. other
* masculine vs. feminine (as with French)
* masculine vs. feminine vs. neuter (as with Latin, German, or Slavic languages)
* strong vs. weak
* augmentative vs. diminutive

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[Volk359]

that they just said "screweth it"

...and bless them!

Good ol' Wikipedia to the rescue. I did a read through the article, which really stirred up the pot, but I'm not sure my original question got answered and that was "What was the point?"

Perhaps MakeItSo's response from religious backgrounds toward things that were worshipped, earth, moon, sun maybe even fire. Is it suggesting that genderizing spilled over into common every day objects?

The common criteria list is helpful but doesn't really explain buy gender can change between languages. Male vs. female (logical) makes sense, his pants vs. her dress, as does strong vs. weak (no offence to the ladies), knife vs. cheese(?) but then how would you explain rock/paper/scissors? ;-)

Grammatical structure changes from language to language (noun/verb, verb/noun) as does the general thinking process. My wife is Russian and I've found they tend to think with the general idea about things so consequently through our conversations she'll say something that made perfect sense to her yet I had no idea what she just said. (maybe this is common thruout all marraiges ;-)) All this in English, of course. Anyway, the point there was there appears to be a number of environmental, social, political(?) and religious reasons, and possibly more, why gender could change throughout the different languages.

 

[tsdragon]

I'm not sure what the point is either, but I do know that in some languages the rules for which gender a noun has can create some silly situations. For example, in German the gender for brassiere (or bra) is masculine. It sounds ridiculous, but it follows the rules. The word is "Der Bustenhalter" ("bust holder"). In German a compound word takes the gender of the last word from which it is formed, which in this case is Der Halter (Die Buste is feminine), so the word is masculine. Needless to say, in high school German class we got a kick out of this.

Tracy Dryden

Meddle not in the affairs of dragons,
For you are crunchy, and good with mustard.

 

[Chopstik]

Interesting... In Spanish, most/all (it's been a while since I spoke the language fluently) nouns are gendered. In English, the use of he/she/it pronouns are common. In Chinese, neither of these situations exist.

As an aside, many Chinese will refer to everyone as "he" because trying to differentiate is something of a chore when they do not have to do it in their native tongue. For native speakers, it can be somewhat difficult to determine the true subject of discussion as a result of the habit.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I am not young enough to know everything."
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

 

[MakeItSo]

Concerning rock/paper/scissors and other objects:

Culture plays a big role there, I think.

The rock, for example, is something hard, strong, something you can build on - i.e. something male by nature (OK, I'm a sexist...)

I don't think, that "rock" is female in any language, is it?
- German: Der Stein (m),
- French: La pierre (f)


Or the car: In German, it is either neuter (Das Auto) or male (Der Wagen).
In French, it is ....guess what: LA voiture (f)


Why that? Do the French always have to take the opposite gender to German? Is it on purpose? To tease us?


Honestly: I understand, why the British desisted from using gendered nouns...


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[columb]

Whilst 'proper' English has discarded gendered nouns, back around 1400 if memory serves, they are still used in colloquial speech in some areas of the west country (the south west corner of England for non Brits). Back in the seventies I worked with a man from Devon who would use 'he' and 'she' more often than 'it'. As ever there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to which gender was assigned to which noun.


Columb Healy

 

[AngelB]

Does anyone know how gender is assigned when a new noun enters common usage? New words come along all the time, so how is it decided which gender they should be?

Gez



If you have a problem, if there's no one else to blame, and if you can find him, maybe you can blame... DPlank

 

[Volk359]

Columb, now that I think about it we still do genderize nouns albeit to a much lesser degree and typically feminine. Boats are the one thing that comes to mind and fortunately a boat is a boat with or without the gender.

Hurricanes came to mind also but I think that's more from assigning a name for tracking purposes rather then a gender.

 

[CajunCenturion]

The question of why nouns were genderized or classified, and it goes back as least to Latin, is a good one, and I've not found a good answer yet.

To second question, when and why has genderization been dropped, I'm not sure there is a single answer. I tend to think it is an on-going process, as quite recently, political correctness has influenced the process. A man would be an heir, but a woman would be an heiress. Not too long ago, both actors and actresses worked in Hollywood. Where have all the actresses gone? Women comics used to be called comediennes. Men are no longer widowers either. These are some very recent examples of de-genderization.

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[sleipnir214]

English was purely Germannic language until the time of the Norman Conquest. After that, English evolved into a language with a Germannic grammar and syntax, but with an enormous number of imported Romance words via French.

It was during this time that English shed the genetive case, noun genders and other features. I'm thinking, as MakeItSo has pointed out, that the shedding could be a compromise between Germannic and Romance influences.



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[columb]

This site has some intersting stuff about gender including

Grammatical gender

The gender of Old English nouns was grammatical and had no bearing on natural gender. In effect it and was not determined by meaning but was purely arbitrary. It continued to exist well into the Middle English period (and indeed still survives today in modern German and Icelandic).

Columb Healy