What exactly does gender achieve in a language? Is English missing out on any nuance? Is it literally thinking about nouns as male or female, or is it just a weird name for the concept? Who decides gender when a new noun is made? What about borrowed words from other languages? Do you sound stupid if you speak French without using it, or are you just a language hipster?
Speaking as a gendered language user (Italian) it is sometimes weird.
For example, car is feminine but our name for an off-road vehicle is masculine, as is the word for truck. Since you have to apply the gender of the noun to verbs, articles and adjectives, which one do you use when talking about your SUV? Feminine because it’s a car or masculine because it’s an offroader?
For borrowed words there’s usually a consensus on gender that forms over time. Sometimes a borrowed word inherits its gender from the translation of that word that fell out of use. One example of this could be the word computer. An equivalent term exists in Italian (calcolatore) which fell out of use but gave it a definite gender, masculine.
I’m not an expert. But I believe it is something to do with information redundancy.
If you mishear a word but surrounding words must match gender and number, you may reconstruct the misheard word.
As a native spanish speaker, I don’t think of the actual sexuality of objects, it’s just a characteristic of the word that should match other words in the sentence. For example the word screen (pantalla) is femenine, and the word monitor (monitor) is masculine. So when I see my monitor I don’t think of an actual female or male object. But the nouns should match adjectives gender, so if someone says “broken monitor” (monitor roto) or “broken screen” (pantalla rota) I have this kind of redundancy if I misheard a word.
But I’m not an expert of linguistics. Don’t quote me.
English weirdly use feminine for ships, so think of it like that. But no it doesn’t achieve much.
I don’t think it change the way we think about objects much, but probably unconsciously yes. For example, France itself is feminine and seeing some caricature personifying as a dude always feels weird.
Usage dictates the gender. And some recent words are more or less controversial: gameboy, wifi, COVID, Nutella…
When I think about the gender of a word I will usually derive it from a broader category. But that’s not always obvious, for example Gameboy is a game console (feminine) but the words game and boy are masculine. COVID is a disease (feminine) but also a virus (masculine). And in the meme a washing machine is a machine (feminine).
You can’t not use gender since french doesn’t have neutral pronouns. But I don’t think it’s frowned upon for a non native speaker to make this kind of mistakes.
Old English used gender, and there are a few vestiges of it left in modern English. A couple adjectives can still use it (blond man, blonde woman), and a few nouns are still in use (actor vs actress). Some of those nouns have basically fallen out of use in the last few decades, like how pretty much no one uses comedienne anymore.
What exactly does gender achieve in a language? Is English missing out on any nuance?
Sort of. Grammatical gender and the interplay with grammatical case (the “role” of a noun in a sentence) allows some extra meaning to be packed in. For example, German has 3 genders and 4 cases leading to 12 different contexts for nouns to be in. Many of those have their own conjugation patterns, and separate words for the articles “a/the”.
That can, theoretically, allow meaning of the type “whose what did what to whom” to be obvious or pieced together in a sentence, whereas translating it into English you might need to spell it out, lose it, or rely on context.
In practice, a lot of that sort of information is often redundant or clear from context anyway, and only matters if you’re being clever or succinct. My German is shit, so I will not try to provide examples.
It’s also worth pointing out that it’s a naturally occurring feature, likely arisen by accident.
Is it literally thinking about nouns as male or female, or is it just a weird name for the concept?
It is mostly just a weird name. Some of it makes sense along (social) gender lines, much of it makes no sense at all. This thread is full of good examples of counterintuitive noun genders in all kinds of languages.
Who decides gender when a new noun is made? What about borrowed words from other languages?
The speakers of the language, collectively, usually with some disagreement, trial and error. Borrowing depends: a gendered noun borrowed into a non-gendered language would just slip in there. In the reverse case, people would just arrive at some gender for it arbitrarily or based on similar words, what gender any “parts” of the term might be if translated, or whatever other method. There’s no correct answer.
Do you sound stupid if you speak French without using it, or are you just a language hipster?
Quite likely. There’s no “without it” in gendered languages, it is a more or less fundamental part of the noun and the language, like how certain nouns and verbs are just different in English. Dropping random grammar and syntax from English would just be “doing it wrong”, ranging from cute foreign accent quirks to Ralph Wiggum’s cave-dwelling ancestor.
Of course, fucking up is unavoidable when learning languages, and most people will give you a lot of leeway due to being foreign. Maybe not everywhere in France, though…
You sound odd, like a child or someone not fluent if you don’t use our misuse the genders of words.
That being said, as native Spanish that lived in the UK for a while, I noticed that genders and verb forms are useful for providing more context when talking.
Cannot think of specific examples now, but in general in a phrase if you don’t hear a word or don’t know the meaning, it is easier to guess it because the rest of the phrase is constructed around the gender and more complex verbal forms.
Russian speakers might say the same thing about things that exist in English but not Russian like articles (the words “a”/“an” and “the”), Afrikaans speakers may say the same thing about verb conjugation at all, Chinese speakers may say the same thing about tense, Japanese speakers may say the same thing about having a separate present & future tense. There is a good explanation here or two already, but language features that seem “useless” or “complex” to us are important in other languages and are there for a purpose. Every language has features that would make others question it.
on borrowing we can look at nouns borrowed into Spanish. They take the word change any sounds in native language to match Spanish sounds. Then they just slap on a gender ending. Yes it just what ever catches on. Which means we could have lived in world with potata.
Gender from french genre, latin genus, means category and that’s all it is, a category system, with confusing category names and no real rules for which word belongs to which category. There’s nothing masculine, feminine or neuter about words, nothing “sexual” or whatever, otherwise every person would be a woman because the word for person (from latin persona) is feminine in a lot of european languages, or French and German people would have to think really different about stuff like tables because in French it’s “feminine” and in German it’s “masculine”. Btw, looking at English adjectives with French origin they almost always are the feminine version, like feminine or masculine. Some people think there is a hidden sexual meaning though and they come up with lots of different systems for gender neutral language, stuff like latinx.
You can’t speak french without using it, because the gender of a word changes the gender of particles attached. Think as if in English there was a male “the” and a female “the”, like “mthe” and “fthe”. You can’t just not choose on of those to talk about fthe sun!
Gender in nouns exists to reduce ambiguity (in general, complexity reduces ambiguity), especially in times before widespread dictionaries or even the internet.
More ancient languages with more widespread use tend to be even more complex: think of latin, where particles are inserted within the word depending on their function in the phrase. It’s as if in English to say “I go to work” we’d say “I go workt”, but to say “this is for work” we’d say “this is workf”
Again, more complex to be less ambiguous
What exactly does gender achieve in a language? Is English missing out on any nuance? Is it literally thinking about nouns as male or female, or is it just a weird name for the concept? Who decides gender when a new noun is made? What about borrowed words from other languages? Do you sound stupid if you speak French without using it, or are you just a language hipster?
Language, dude…
Speaking as a gendered language user (Italian) it is sometimes weird.
For example, car is feminine but our name for an off-road vehicle is masculine, as is the word for truck. Since you have to apply the gender of the noun to verbs, articles and adjectives, which one do you use when talking about your SUV? Feminine because it’s a car or masculine because it’s an offroader?
For borrowed words there’s usually a consensus on gender that forms over time. Sometimes a borrowed word inherits its gender from the translation of that word that fell out of use. One example of this could be the word computer. An equivalent term exists in Italian (calcolatore) which fell out of use but gave it a definite gender, masculine.
I’m not an expert. But I believe it is something to do with information redundancy.
If you mishear a word but surrounding words must match gender and number, you may reconstruct the misheard word.
As a native spanish speaker, I don’t think of the actual sexuality of objects, it’s just a characteristic of the word that should match other words in the sentence. For example the word screen (pantalla) is femenine, and the word monitor (monitor) is masculine. So when I see my monitor I don’t think of an actual female or male object. But the nouns should match adjectives gender, so if someone says “broken monitor” (monitor roto) or “broken screen” (pantalla rota) I have this kind of redundancy if I misheard a word.
But I’m not an expert of linguistics. Don’t quote me.
This sounds right. I think it’s just a hint for listeners for what the noun might be, and it happens to align to the male/female genders.
English weirdly use feminine for ships, so think of it like that. But no it doesn’t achieve much.
I don’t think it change the way we think about objects much, but probably unconsciously yes. For example, France itself is feminine and seeing some caricature personifying as a dude always feels weird.
Usage dictates the gender. And some recent words are more or less controversial: gameboy, wifi, COVID, Nutella…
When I think about the gender of a word I will usually derive it from a broader category. But that’s not always obvious, for example Gameboy is a game console (feminine) but the words game and boy are masculine. COVID is a disease (feminine) but also a virus (masculine). And in the meme a washing machine is a machine (feminine).
You can’t not use gender since french doesn’t have neutral pronouns. But I don’t think it’s frowned upon for a non native speaker to make this kind of mistakes.
Old English used gender, and there are a few vestiges of it left in modern English. A couple adjectives can still use it (blond man, blonde woman), and a few nouns are still in use (actor vs actress). Some of those nouns have basically fallen out of use in the last few decades, like how pretty much no one uses comedienne anymore.
Sort of. Grammatical gender and the interplay with grammatical case (the “role” of a noun in a sentence) allows some extra meaning to be packed in. For example, German has 3 genders and 4 cases leading to 12 different contexts for nouns to be in. Many of those have their own conjugation patterns, and separate words for the articles “a/the”.
That can, theoretically, allow meaning of the type “whose what did what to whom” to be obvious or pieced together in a sentence, whereas translating it into English you might need to spell it out, lose it, or rely on context.
In practice, a lot of that sort of information is often redundant or clear from context anyway, and only matters if you’re being clever or succinct. My German is shit, so I will not try to provide examples.
It’s also worth pointing out that it’s a naturally occurring feature, likely arisen by accident.
It is mostly just a weird name. Some of it makes sense along (social) gender lines, much of it makes no sense at all. This thread is full of good examples of counterintuitive noun genders in all kinds of languages.
The speakers of the language, collectively, usually with some disagreement, trial and error. Borrowing depends: a gendered noun borrowed into a non-gendered language would just slip in there. In the reverse case, people would just arrive at some gender for it arbitrarily or based on similar words, what gender any “parts” of the term might be if translated, or whatever other method. There’s no correct answer.
Quite likely. There’s no “without it” in gendered languages, it is a more or less fundamental part of the noun and the language, like how certain nouns and verbs are just different in English. Dropping random grammar and syntax from English would just be “doing it wrong”, ranging from cute foreign accent quirks to Ralph Wiggum’s cave-dwelling ancestor.
Of course, fucking up is unavoidable when learning languages, and most people will give you a lot of leeway due to being foreign. Maybe not everywhere in France, though…
You sound odd, like a child or someone not fluent if you don’t use our misuse the genders of words.
That being said, as native Spanish that lived in the UK for a while, I noticed that genders and verb forms are useful for providing more context when talking.
Cannot think of specific examples now, but in general in a phrase if you don’t hear a word or don’t know the meaning, it is easier to guess it because the rest of the phrase is constructed around the gender and more complex verbal forms.
Russian speakers might say the same thing about things that exist in English but not Russian like articles (the words “a”/“an” and “the”), Afrikaans speakers may say the same thing about verb conjugation at all, Chinese speakers may say the same thing about tense, Japanese speakers may say the same thing about having a separate present & future tense. There is a good explanation here or two already, but language features that seem “useless” or “complex” to us are important in other languages and are there for a purpose. Every language has features that would make others question it.
on borrowing we can look at nouns borrowed into Spanish. They take the word change any sounds in native language to match Spanish sounds. Then they just slap on a gender ending. Yes it just what ever catches on. Which means we could have lived in world with potata.
Civilization if the Spanish used ‘potata’:
Gender from french genre, latin genus, means category and that’s all it is, a category system, with confusing category names and no real rules for which word belongs to which category. There’s nothing masculine, feminine or neuter about words, nothing “sexual” or whatever, otherwise every person would be a woman because the word for person (from latin persona) is feminine in a lot of european languages, or French and German people would have to think really different about stuff like tables because in French it’s “feminine” and in German it’s “masculine”. Btw, looking at English adjectives with French origin they almost always are the feminine version, like feminine or masculine. Some people think there is a hidden sexual meaning though and they come up with lots of different systems for gender neutral language, stuff like latinx.
You can’t speak french without using it, because the gender of a word changes the gender of particles attached. Think as if in English there was a male “the” and a female “the”, like “mthe” and “fthe”. You can’t just not choose on of those to talk about fthe sun!
Gender in nouns exists to reduce ambiguity (in general, complexity reduces ambiguity), especially in times before widespread dictionaries or even the internet.
More ancient languages with more widespread use tend to be even more complex: think of latin, where particles are inserted within the word depending on their function in the phrase. It’s as if in English to say “I go to work” we’d say “I go workt”, but to say “this is for work” we’d say “this is workf” Again, more complex to be less ambiguous