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Grammatical gender is an unfortunately-named construct that has little to do with sociological gender. The main connection is that most common words have gramma

Grammatical gender is an unfortunately-named construct that has little to do with sociological gender. The main connection is that most common words have grammatical genders matching their sociological one ("der Vater," "die Mutter"), but even that doesn't hold very well ("das Mädchen"). There's an interesting theory that grammatical gender helps reduce ambiguity, because the inflections of surrounding words make it clearer which roots they modify.

wrs 8y ago
Sure, it’s not literally that objects have a gender, and it is an extra bit of redundant information that probably helps with intelligibility. But even though “he” is the generic first person pronoun in English and doesn’t literally mean a male person when used that way, you can’t avoid the connotations, which is where the controversy arises. I’m imagining a similar effect with noun genders — they aren’t called “noun type A” and “noun type B”, they are known as masculine and feminine, and things that literally are masculine and feminine can use the same mechanism. E.g., a generic dog in French is masculine (le chien), but if I want to communicate that I have a female dog it’s acceptable to make up a feminine form (la chienne). Thus, noun genders are not quite arbitrary; they can be used to communicate actual genders, so do they not have some small connotation at all times?
- gizmo686 8y ago
  Linguists do refer to "gender" as "noun class". In languages where noun classes happen to align with gender, reffering to them as gender has stuck around. It is true that noun classes tend to make a gender distinction, so there is likely something innate in human language about that.
FeteCommuniste 8y ago
Originally Indoeuropean had two noun classes, animate and inanimate, which did correspond to the meaning of words. The genders we know today evolved from those.

wrs 8y ago

Sure, it’s not literally that objects have a gender, and it is an extra bit of redundant information that probably helps with intelligibility. But even though “he” is the generic first person pronoun in English and doesn’t literally mean a male person when used that way, you can’t avoid the connotations, which is where the controversy arises. I’m imagining a similar effect with noun genders — they aren’t called “noun type A” and “noun type B”, they are known as masculine and feminine, and things that literally are masculine and feminine can use the same mechanism. E.g., a generic dog in French is masculine (le chien), but if I want to communicate that I have a female dog it’s acceptable to make up a feminine form (la chienne). Thus, noun genders are not quite arbitrary; they can be used to communicate actual genders, so do they not have some small connotation at all times?

gizmo686 8y ago
Linguists do refer to "gender" as "noun class". In languages where noun classes happen to align with gender, reffering to them as gender has stuck around. It is true that noun classes tend to make a gender distinction, so there is likely something innate in human language about that.

FeteCommuniste 8y ago

Originally Indoeuropean had two noun classes, animate and inanimate, which did correspond to the meaning of words. The genders we know today evolved from those.