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English native speaker here (en_GB!) However, I have studied Latin, both classical: "Cicero sic in omnibus, Brutus aderat." and medieval: Erasmus, as he toddle

English native speaker here (en_GB!) However, I have studied Latin, both classical: "Cicero sic in omnibus, Brutus aderat." and medieval: Erasmus, as he toddled around Europe, drank nearly as much red wine as I do. I've also failed French and German O levels (old UK exam at age 15.) So, Latin generally had M, F and N. Modern French (Romance language du jour) ostensibly has M and F. Modern Germanic languages have .... OK: - German M,F,N. - English - nouns don't have a gender - Dutch - I don't know - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Dutch_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Dutch_grammar could be complicated - I've run out of language knowledge here So that was scientific. The article notes that proto-indo-european only had animate and inanimate and that is not the same as gender. Animate here is "alive". A human and a tree are animate but a rock is inanimate. Rocks (outside of Terry Pratchett books do not procreate).

danans 6y ago
> The article notes that proto-indo-european only had animate and inanimate and that is not the same as gender Grammatically, it is the same. Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex, but rather a categorization system of nouns and their associated inflection patterns. > Animate here is "alive". A human and a tree are animate but a rock is inanimate. Outside of words for humans (and even there there are exceptions), the application of these categories is pretty random. For example, the Latin word for rock, petra, is feminine, not neuter.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Swizec 6y ago
  > Grammatically, it is the same. Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex, but rather a categorization system of nouns and their associated inflection patterns. Yep, a chair is male in Slovenian, but tree is neuter. Cats are feminine, dogs are male. Studying German and French I quickly learned that their categories are different. You have to memorize the gender together with noun. Often you can guess correctly based on the suffix.
  - qayxc 6y ago
    Yeah, it's a common joke in German that you can't tell someone's gender by looking at their face: the nose is female ("die Nase"), the mouth is male ("der Mund") and the eyes are neuter ("das Auge") :D
- ACow_Adonis 6y ago
  > Grammatically, it is the same. Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex, but rather a categorization system of nouns and their associated inflection patterns. Funny story: I've always remembered my german teacher getting flaberghasted at our inability to gender a table (as english speakers). She was all: "Come on! what kind of qualities do you think a table has!" And us high-schooler english speakers were just sitting there all :|
  - DavidSJ 6y ago
    Teaching a foreigner one's native language is one of those situations where completely arbitrary conventions (including, by the way, how to segment and classify phonemes!) can misleadingly seem like "obvious" facts, and like the foreigner is just being weirdly obtuse by not having a built-in intuition for those arbitrary conventions.
  - ddalex 6y ago
    Funny, in German a "table" is masculine (der tisch) but in Romanian (romance language) is feminine (o masa), in Spanish is feminine (la mesa), Italian is masculine (il tavolo) unless you talk about having a supper (la tavola). What I'm trying to say is that logic has nothing to do with it.
- gerdesj 6y ago
  "Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex" I'm quite aware of that, especially after an unfortunate encounter that never happened with a table. She claimed to be French but it turned out to be German. That all sounds a bit crap in English. I don't really know how "gender" for nouns feels or works in languages that emphasise it. We do ascribe gender to some nouns in English, such as boats/ships: "she". Why on earth is petra feminine? I've been to Petra (capital P) and it is an incredible place.
  - jhoechtl 6y ago
    Petra is the feminin to Petrus, that's why.
Grieving 6y ago
> The article notes that proto-indo-european only had animate and inanimate and that is not the same as gender. Animate here is "alive". A human and a tree are animate but a rock is inanimate. Rocks (outside of Terry Pratchett books do not procreate). Baseless speculation: I think I can see how gender might develop out of this paradigm. Far as I remember, there's the sky father and earth mother, and the sky impregnates the earth to create life. The animate/active is associated with the masculine, and the inanimate/passive with the feminine. I've read a little about alchemy and the various ways one might determine the elemental nature of a thing, and this process was much more involved than one might expect, leading to a variety of interesting conclusions. I can imagine something similar behind the genders of things, at least at the beginning.
mannerheim 6y ago
Dutch in colloquial language, masculine and feminine are merged to the common gender Danish and Swedish are both common/neuter Norwegian depends on the dialect. The dialects with more Danish influence may drop the feminine (or they may use masculine adjectives/determiners with feminine nouns), but certain words will still more commonly be used with feminine determiners, even if it might be OK to use masculine. E.g., 'boka mi' ('my book') and 'kona mi' ('my wife') is more idiomatic than 'boken min' and 'konen min' (I'm not a native speaker, so I can't be entirely certain about this). Icelandic has m/f/n, as does Faroese I believe.
- lordnacho 6y ago
  Bornholmish retains three genders, in contrast to standard Danish.
  - ochrist 6y ago
    It's a bit more complicated than that: https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danske_dialekter https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danske_dialekter Look at the map here: https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danske_dialekter#/media/Fil:Denmark-gender.png https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danske_dialekter#/media/Fil:De...
thaumasiotes 6y ago
> English - nouns don't have a gender Ordinary nouns might not appear to, but pronouns do; in fact, you can see two different gender distinctions in the English pronouns. "Plain" pronouns have masculine, feminine, and neuter genders, he / she / it. Interrogative/relative pronouns don't, but they do exhibit a gender distinction between who (for people) and what (for everything else). And since relative pronouns are applied to ordinary nouns, you can use relative who to identify which nouns belong to the people gender and, by implication, which don't. (As a technical matter, you could also classify nouns into the masculine / feminine / neuter genders by looking at which pronouns substitute for them. This isn't really going to work in English. But the rules for who are strict enough to reflect a robust grammatical distinction in the language.) The person/nonperson gender distinction is frequently read back into the plain pronouns, with it being reserved for nonpeople.
- tom_mellior 6y ago
  This now makes me wonder if there are languages that do not make a who/what distinction. Hungarian has no gender and doesn't even have distinct pronouns for he and she, but it does have a distinction between the pronoun ő (he/she/sentient animal/sometimes informally for inanimate objects) on the one hand and the determiners (?) ez/az (literally this/that, for inanimate objects) on the other hand. There is also a clear distinction between ki/mi (who/what). I've never heard of this being analyzed as a "gender" distinction, but I guess if the definition of gender is along the lines of "a group of words that behave in a distinct way", then it applies.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    The Latin interrogative pronouns are quis (masculine and feminine) and quid (neuter). I do not believe there is any distinction made between people and nonpeople. (Quis on its own will be translated as "who", and quid as "what", but this is just an example of the more general phenomenon that when modifiers appear alone in Latin, you supply an implicit "man", "woman", or "thing" as the noun to be modified. Thus dicta is common in the meaning "things that were said", without the need to explicitly say res [things] dictae or verba [words] dicta, and quis is common in the meaning "who?" without the need to explicitly say quis homo. If you wanted to ask "what sand...?", you'd say quis harena, not quid harena.) The relative pronouns are qui (masculine) / quae (feminine) / quod (neuter); again I don't think any distinction is available to be made between people and nonpeople. You have to use the pronoun that matches m/f/n gender. > I guess if the definition of gender is along the lines of "a group of words that behave in a distinct way" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender : > In linguistics, grammatical gender is a specific form of noun class system in which the division of noun classes forms an agreement system with another aspect of the language, such as adjectives, articles, pronouns, or verbs. In this case, we have an agreement system between nouns and pronouns. There is another very significant division of noun classes in English, the division between mass nouns ("stuff"; "ice cream") and count nouns ("things"; "ice cube"). This has effects in several areas of the grammar (e.g. mass nouns do not have plural forms), and it does have some agreement effects also (you could analyze many and much as the same word in agreement with a count noun (for many) or a mass noun (for much)), but this distinction for whatever reason usually wouldn't be thought of as a "gender". The people/nonpeople distinction, which is reflected only in agreement effects, is much more typical of the terminology "gender".

danans 6y ago

> The article notes that proto-indo-european only had animate and inanimate and that is not the same as gender Grammatically, it is the same. Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex, but rather a categorization system of nouns and their associated inflection patterns. > Animate here is "alive". A human and a tree are animate but a rock is inanimate. Outside of words for humans (and even there there are exceptions), the application of these categories is pretty random. For example, the Latin word for rock, petra, is feminine, not neuter.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Swizec 6y ago
> Grammatically, it is the same. Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex, but rather a categorization system of nouns and their associated inflection patterns. Yep, a chair is male in Slovenian, but tree is neuter. Cats are feminine, dogs are male. Studying German and French I quickly learned that their categories are different. You have to memorize the gender together with noun. Often you can guess correctly based on the suffix.
- qayxc 6y ago
  Yeah, it's a common joke in German that you can't tell someone's gender by looking at their face: the nose is female ("die Nase"), the mouth is male ("der Mund") and the eyes are neuter ("das Auge") :D
ACow_Adonis 6y ago
> Grammatically, it is the same. Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex, but rather a categorization system of nouns and their associated inflection patterns. Funny story: I've always remembered my german teacher getting flaberghasted at our inability to gender a table (as english speakers). She was all: "Come on! what kind of qualities do you think a table has!" And us high-schooler english speakers were just sitting there all :|
- DavidSJ 6y ago
  Teaching a foreigner one's native language is one of those situations where completely arbitrary conventions (including, by the way, how to segment and classify phonemes!) can misleadingly seem like "obvious" facts, and like the foreigner is just being weirdly obtuse by not having a built-in intuition for those arbitrary conventions.
- ddalex 6y ago
  Funny, in German a "table" is masculine (der tisch) but in Romanian (romance language) is feminine (o masa), in Spanish is feminine (la mesa), Italian is masculine (il tavolo) unless you talk about having a supper (la tavola). What I'm trying to say is that logic has nothing to do with it.
gerdesj 6y ago
"Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex" I'm quite aware of that, especially after an unfortunate encounter that never happened with a table. She claimed to be French but it turned out to be German. That all sounds a bit crap in English. I don't really know how "gender" for nouns feels or works in languages that emphasise it. We do ascribe gender to some nouns in English, such as boats/ships: "she". Why on earth is petra feminine? I've been to Petra (capital P) and it is an incredible place.
- jhoechtl 6y ago
  Petra is the feminin to Petrus, that's why.

Grieving 6y ago

> The article notes that proto-indo-european only had animate and inanimate and that is not the same as gender. Animate here is "alive". A human and a tree are animate but a rock is inanimate. Rocks (outside of Terry Pratchett books do not procreate). Baseless speculation: I think I can see how gender might develop out of this paradigm. Far as I remember, there's the sky father and earth mother, and the sky impregnates the earth to create life. The animate/active is associated with the masculine, and the inanimate/passive with the feminine. I've read a little about alchemy and the various ways one might determine the elemental nature of a thing, and this process was much more involved than one might expect, leading to a variety of interesting conclusions. I can imagine something similar behind the genders of things, at least at the beginning.

mannerheim 6y ago

Dutch in colloquial language, masculine and feminine are merged to the common gender Danish and Swedish are both common/neuter Norwegian depends on the dialect. The dialects with more Danish influence may drop the feminine (or they may use masculine adjectives/determiners with feminine nouns), but certain words will still more commonly be used with feminine determiners, even if it might be OK to use masculine. E.g., 'boka mi' ('my book') and 'kona mi' ('my wife') is more idiomatic than 'boken min' and 'konen min' (I'm not a native speaker, so I can't be entirely certain about this). Icelandic has m/f/n, as does Faroese I believe.

lordnacho 6y ago
Bornholmish retains three genders, in contrast to standard Danish.
- ochrist 6y ago
  It's a bit more complicated than that: https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danske_dialekter https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danske_dialekter Look at the map here: https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danske_dialekter#/media/Fil:Denmark-gender.png https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danske_dialekter#/media/Fil:De...

thaumasiotes 6y ago

> English - nouns don't have a gender Ordinary nouns might not appear to, but pronouns do; in fact, you can see two different gender distinctions in the English pronouns. "Plain" pronouns have masculine, feminine, and neuter genders, he / she / it. Interrogative/relative pronouns don't, but they do exhibit a gender distinction between who (for people) and what (for everything else). And since relative pronouns are applied to ordinary nouns, you can use relative who to identify which nouns belong to the people gender and, by implication, which don't. (As a technical matter, you could also classify nouns into the masculine / feminine / neuter genders by looking at which pronouns substitute for them. This isn't really going to work in English. But the rules for who are strict enough to reflect a robust grammatical distinction in the language.) The person/nonperson gender distinction is frequently read back into the plain pronouns, with it being reserved for nonpeople.

tom_mellior 6y ago
This now makes me wonder if there are languages that do not make a who/what distinction. Hungarian has no gender and doesn't even have distinct pronouns for he and she, but it does have a distinction between the pronoun ő (he/she/sentient animal/sometimes informally for inanimate objects) on the one hand and the determiners (?) ez/az (literally this/that, for inanimate objects) on the other hand. There is also a clear distinction between ki/mi (who/what). I've never heard of this being analyzed as a "gender" distinction, but I guess if the definition of gender is along the lines of "a group of words that behave in a distinct way", then it applies.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  The Latin interrogative pronouns are quis (masculine and feminine) and quid (neuter). I do not believe there is any distinction made between people and nonpeople. (Quis on its own will be translated as "who", and quid as "what", but this is just an example of the more general phenomenon that when modifiers appear alone in Latin, you supply an implicit "man", "woman", or "thing" as the noun to be modified. Thus dicta is common in the meaning "things that were said", without the need to explicitly say res [things] dictae or verba [words] dicta, and quis is common in the meaning "who?" without the need to explicitly say quis homo. If you wanted to ask "what sand...?", you'd say quis harena, not quid harena.) The relative pronouns are qui (masculine) / quae (feminine) / quod (neuter); again I don't think any distinction is available to be made between people and nonpeople. You have to use the pronoun that matches m/f/n gender. > I guess if the definition of gender is along the lines of "a group of words that behave in a distinct way" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender : > In linguistics, grammatical gender is a specific form of noun class system in which the division of noun classes forms an agreement system with another aspect of the language, such as adjectives, articles, pronouns, or verbs. In this case, we have an agreement system between nouns and pronouns. There is another very significant division of noun classes in English, the division between mass nouns ("stuff"; "ice cream") and count nouns ("things"; "ice cube"). This has effects in several areas of the grammar (e.g. mass nouns do not have plural forms), and it does have some agreement effects also (you could analyze many and much as the same word in agreement with a count noun (for many) or a mass noun (for much)), but this distinction for whatever reason usually wouldn't be thought of as a "gender". The people/nonpeople distinction, which is reflected only in agreement effects, is much more typical of the terminology "gender".