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> So the whole statement seems based on not understanding what "gender" is at all. Your parent was just saying gender is unnecessary, and you did not answer an

by throwaway1967 11y ago

> So the whole statement seems based on not understanding what "gender" is at all. Your parent was just saying gender is unnecessary, and you did not answer anything to disprove that, or to prove that they were once needed. For instance (speaking of Latin), why is Lapis (stone) masculine but Saxum (stone) neuter? The Romans could have chosen to place all new words on the 2nd declension neuter (the simplest) but instead it (Classical Latin) created 3 more 3rd declension variants on top of the existing ones! And it was more productive, in this 3rd declension, in assigning masculine and feminine rather than neutral, which the 3rd declension also supported! So what is the reason for that?

hugh4 11y ago
I suspect that sometimes we deliberately complicate our languages to make it harder for the less educated classes to speak them properly, thus creating a larger barrier between us and them.
dragonwriter 11y ago
I think it's a mistake to think of natural languages as being rationality, deliberately constructed. They evolve organically, most often without -- and often in direct resistance too -- conscious design efforts. Elements of language are sometimes imposed by deliberate, premeditated campaigns, but these tend to be the exception rather than the rule. Languages aren't generally products of design.
dreyfiz 11y ago
A few great comments from /r/linguistics on Reddit really enlightened me on this topic. Gender isn't senseless, it's a checksum strategy for information. It's not even about sex, lots of grammars have genders that have nothing to do with male/female. The point of gender is agreement: if you're talking about something female, all verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in the sentence have to agree, or the listener gets a syntax error. The syntax error helps the listener figure out that they missed something, or that the transmission was garbled. https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3i1695/eli5_why_do_some_languages_assign_gender_to/cuce7gc https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3i1695/eli5_wh... If you get rid of gender, as English mostly has, you end up forced to adopt different constraints that seem equally arbitrary and wasteful, like strict word order and lots of prepositions. https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3i1695/eli5_why_do_some_languages_assign_gender_to/cucmfb7 https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3i1695/eli5_wh... Very excellent comment demonstrating the point about English and word order - in Russian, you can say three words that mean "the dog saw the rabbit" in every possible order, and it's still a valid sentence that means the same thing, because Russian doesn't depend on word order. If it was English, "the dog saw the rabbit", "saw the rabbit the dog", "saw the dog the rabbit", "the rabbit the dog saw", and "the dog the rabbit saw" would all mean exactly the same thing, unambiguously, because the gender of "dog" would have to match the gender of "saw". https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/1kdxsc/are_there_any_reasonable_theories_as_to_why_nouns/cbo3fk5 https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/1kdxsc/are_the...
- throwaway1967 11y ago
  I'm sorry, but that still does not explain why the Romans created more gendered 3rd declension variants when using the neuters from the 2nd and 3rd declensions would have made more sense (since the things they were naming were sexless, like rivers and trees and other geographical things) while they would nevertheless have retained the "checksum" and "free word ordering" benefits from a language that declines its nouns. For example, Finnish is utterly genderless, but it has more declension cases for nouns than Latin had. And so, Finnish affords itself the ability to have free word order and checksum benefits while doing entirely away with the concept of gender. So I reject your explanation on the basis that it is clear to me that the declension of nouns into cases is what is responsible for the checksum and word order benefits, and not whether a language has grammatical gender.
  - dllthomas 11y ago
    The free word order seems to come predominately from declension rather than gender, but I don't see how declension provides much in the way of a checksum.
  - javert 11y ago
    > For example, Finnish is utterly genderless, but it has more declension cases for nouns than Latin had. That's consistent with simply making a tradeoff. So a Roman could say: I don't understand why the Finns created more declension cases when they could have just used gender.

hugh4 11y ago

I suspect that sometimes we deliberately complicate our languages to make it harder for the less educated classes to speak them properly, thus creating a larger barrier between us and them.

dragonwriter 11y ago

I think it's a mistake to think of natural languages as being rationality, deliberately constructed. They evolve organically, most often without -- and often in direct resistance too -- conscious design efforts. Elements of language are sometimes imposed by deliberate, premeditated campaigns, but these tend to be the exception rather than the rule. Languages aren't generally products of design.

dreyfiz 11y ago

A few great comments from /r/linguistics on Reddit really enlightened me on this topic. Gender isn't senseless, it's a checksum strategy for information. It's not even about sex, lots of grammars have genders that have nothing to do with male/female. The point of gender is agreement: if you're talking about something female, all verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in the sentence have to agree, or the listener gets a syntax error. The syntax error helps the listener figure out that they missed something, or that the transmission was garbled. https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3i1695/eli5_why_do_some_languages_assign_gender_to/cuce7gc https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3i1695/eli5_wh... If you get rid of gender, as English mostly has, you end up forced to adopt different constraints that seem equally arbitrary and wasteful, like strict word order and lots of prepositions. https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3i1695/eli5_why_do_some_languages_assign_gender_to/cucmfb7 https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3i1695/eli5_wh... Very excellent comment demonstrating the point about English and word order - in Russian, you can say three words that mean "the dog saw the rabbit" in every possible order, and it's still a valid sentence that means the same thing, because Russian doesn't depend on word order. If it was English, "the dog saw the rabbit", "saw the rabbit the dog", "saw the dog the rabbit", "the rabbit the dog saw", and "the dog the rabbit saw" would all mean exactly the same thing, unambiguously, because the gender of "dog" would have to match the gender of "saw". https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/1kdxsc/are_there_any_reasonable_theories_as_to_why_nouns/cbo3fk5 https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/1kdxsc/are_the...

throwaway1967 11y ago
I'm sorry, but that still does not explain why the Romans created more gendered 3rd declension variants when using the neuters from the 2nd and 3rd declensions would have made more sense (since the things they were naming were sexless, like rivers and trees and other geographical things) while they would nevertheless have retained the "checksum" and "free word ordering" benefits from a language that declines its nouns. For example, Finnish is utterly genderless, but it has more declension cases for nouns than Latin had. And so, Finnish affords itself the ability to have free word order and checksum benefits while doing entirely away with the concept of gender. So I reject your explanation on the basis that it is clear to me that the declension of nouns into cases is what is responsible for the checksum and word order benefits, and not whether a language has grammatical gender.
- dllthomas 11y ago
  The free word order seems to come predominately from declension rather than gender, but I don't see how declension provides much in the way of a checksum.
- javert 11y ago
  > For example, Finnish is utterly genderless, but it has more declension cases for nouns than Latin had. That's consistent with simply making a tradeoff. So a Roman could say: I don't understand why the Finns created more declension cases when they could have just used gender.