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> Grammatical gender, as in a whole lot of European languages “In german, a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has.” Imagine if Twain knew about some of the

> Grammatical gender, as in a whole lot of European languages “In german, a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has.” Imagine if Twain knew about some of the several-hundred-gender languages…

MauranKilom 5y ago
young lady = (das) Mädchen turnip = (die) Rübe (for those wondering)
- ben_w 5y ago
  This really confused me when I was starting to learn German — naturally I incorrectly inferred that “das” was feminine rather than neuter. When I learned that “-chen” is a diminutive („Hund” = “dog”, „Hündchen” = “puppy”), I assumed there must be a “Mad*” as a non-diminutive alternative word for women. Turns out, there’s an archaic root in „Magd”, which also became the English “maid”.
- liversage 5y ago
  Thanks for the clarification. I would like to further add that "das" is the definite article for Neutrum/neuter gender and "die" is the definite article for Femininum/feminine gender.
- q-big 5y ago
  Native German speaker: Many people confuse the grammatical genus (as used in practice in contemporary German) of German words with the biological concept of sex. This is made even more complicated by SJWs who confuse these two unrelated concepts (genus, sex) with their concept of gender. So, it is better to imagine the genus of German word as something like the "'color' of a word" ("color" in the sense of the "color charge" of quarks).
  - hprotagonist 5y ago
    friend of mine went to live in germany and for a hot second tried to just use diminutives for everything so he didn’t have to learn gender forms. this lasted as long as it took for someone to tell him he sounded like a toddler. “do you have any mitten-wittens? my handsie-wandsies are coooooold” was i think what convinced him otherwise.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > This is made even more complicated by SJWs who confuse these two unrelated concepts (genus, sex) with their concept of gender. People described by their opponents as SJWs are more likely than, well, pretty much everyone else on the planet to distinguish biological sex, gender identity, socially ascribed gender, and grammatical gender. The people who use “SJW” as a dismissive epithet, on the other hand, are most likely to fail to distinguish those things.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      And people who see all non-praising use of "SJW" as "a dismissive epithet", on the gripping hand, are 100% likely to miss the odd case where it's just used as a handily descriptive piece of shorthand.
      - pseudalopex 5y ago
        It wasn't handily descriptive. They reversed the positions. People described by their opponents as SJWs don't describe themselves as SJWs except ironically occasionally. People who want a neutral or positive tone use other terms like social justice advocates.
  - pseudalopex 5y ago
    It isn't coincidental most words for men and male animals are masculine and most words for women and female animals are feminine. It's the people who complain about "SJWs" who say sex and gender are the same.
    - fpig 5y ago
      > It's the people who complain about "SJWs" who say sex and gender are the same. Ironically, you've just confirmed what GP said by confusing the concept of grammatical gender with the modern social studies concept of gender.
      - pseudalopex 5y ago
        How? They used gender to mean social gender. So did I.
    - hprotagonist 5y ago
      https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender still, the grammatical sense predates the sex sense by a bit, and has always been around to mean “genre”. So you always have to disambiguate usage
      - pseudalopex 5y ago
        Your point is unclear to me. Gender doesn't mean genre in contemporary English. And context is enough to distinguish grammatical gender from other meanings usually.
        hprotagonist 5y ago
        except when context is not enough; i.e., when a grammatical gender form applies to nouns that describe persons with social genders. And then people usually get very huffy about which non-sentient nouns “share” “their” “gender”.
        5y ago
  - Tainnor 5y ago
    I'm very skeptical about some of the attempts to change the German language to be more "gender-neutral" due to a number of reasons, but I feel it's not correct to frame this as a misunderstanding between "genus" and "sexus", as I've now read a number of times. If people really confused grammatical gender with "the biological concept of sex", then we'd have a lot more arguments about random nouns needing to have feminine gender instead of masculine (there's this famous joke about "die Salzstreuerin"). But that's not really what happens. Nobody seems to care about the table being masculine. What the argument is mostly about is that we use words that, by themselves, refer to masculine people and pluralise them to denote a possible mixed-gender group. This has everything to do with semantics (and so with how concrete biological/social gender expression is encoded in the words of a language), and isn't really that much concerned with grammatical gender, which after all disappears anyway as a distinctive feature once you're in the plural.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- StavrosK 5y ago
  But it does have a gender, the neuter gender.
1cvmask 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Awful_German_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Awful_German_Language Edit: Since I am being downvoted it would be great if they understood the reference first. It is the Mark Twain humorous article on trying to learn the German language and in response to the above Mark Twain German language reference.
bradrn 5y ago
> several-hundred-gender languages I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing. My understanding is that Fula, with ~24 noun classes, is widely agreed to have the most number of genders. A language with several hundred genders really would be unlearnable!
- hprotagonist 5y ago
  “Gender” is related to “genre”, and means merely a group of nouns lumped together for grammatical purposes. Linguists talk instead of “noun classes”, which may have to do with shape or size, or whether the noun is animate, but often rules are hard to see. George Lakoff, a linguist, memorably described a noun class of Dyirbal (spoken in north-eastern Australia) as including “women, fire and dangerous things”. To the extent that genders are idiosyncratic, they are hard to learn. Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 of them. https://medium.economist.com/we-went-in-search-of-the-worlds-hardest-language-95a27c2cff3 https://medium.economist.com/we-went-in-search-of-the-worlds...
  - tom_mellior 5y ago
    > To the extent that genders are idiosyncratic, they are hard to learn. Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 of them. Interesting. Wikipedia says that Bora has more than 350 "classifiers", but that doesn't seem to be the same concept as genders. There is a specific section at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_(linguistics)#Noun_classifiers_versus_noun_classes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_(linguistics)#Noun_... contrasting classifiers and "noun classes", of which grammatical genders are a special case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_grammatical_genders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_g... lists one language with "50–140 noun classes", several Bantu languages with 16-20 of them, and apparently all other languages of the world have significantly fewer. (I am not a linguist.)
    - bradrn 5y ago
      I’m not a linguist either, but I’d say most of this is correct, though incomplete. There’s a bunch of different ways of classifying nouns, including those you mention. A complete list: • Noun classes/genders: usually a fairly small set (<7 in most cases outside Africa), are marked on multiple words at once, commonly distinguishes male/female or animate/inanimate • Noun classifiers: commonly small (<20) but may be a larger set, most commonly occur as free words next to the noun • Numeral classifiers: can be a very large set, occur next to numerals to specify what you’re counting • Possessive classifiers: occur in a possessive construction to show the exact relationship between two nouns • Verbal classifiers: incorporated into the verb to show what kind of object it’s acting on • Deictic classifiers: incorporated into deictic words (like ‘this’ or ‘that’) to precisely specify the kind and orientation of the object you’re referring to And then of course these overlap somewhat. Tuyuca — the language with ‘50–150 noun classes’ — has a set of classifiers which act simultaneously as numeral classifiers, possessive classifiers and deictic classifiers, as well as modifying adjectives. GP’s example of Bora seems to use numeral classifiers. (All this is taken from Aikhenvald’s Classifiers, which is probably the best resource if you want to know more about this.)

> Grammatical gender, as in a whole lot of European languages “In german, a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has.” Imagine if Twain knew about some of the several-hundred-gender languages…

MauranKilom 5y ago

young lady = (das) Mädchen turnip = (die) Rübe (for those wondering)

ben_w 5y ago
This really confused me when I was starting to learn German — naturally I incorrectly inferred that “das” was feminine rather than neuter. When I learned that “-chen” is a diminutive („Hund” = “dog”, „Hündchen” = “puppy”), I assumed there must be a “Mad*” as a non-diminutive alternative word for women. Turns out, there’s an archaic root in „Magd”, which also became the English “maid”.
liversage 5y ago
Thanks for the clarification. I would like to further add that "das" is the definite article for Neutrum/neuter gender and "die" is the definite article for Femininum/feminine gender.
q-big 5y ago
Native German speaker: Many people confuse the grammatical genus (as used in practice in contemporary German) of German words with the biological concept of sex. This is made even more complicated by SJWs who confuse these two unrelated concepts (genus, sex) with their concept of gender. So, it is better to imagine the genus of German word as something like the "'color' of a word" ("color" in the sense of the "color charge" of quarks).
- hprotagonist 5y ago
  friend of mine went to live in germany and for a hot second tried to just use diminutives for everything so he didn’t have to learn gender forms. this lasted as long as it took for someone to tell him he sounded like a toddler. “do you have any mitten-wittens? my handsie-wandsies are coooooold” was i think what convinced him otherwise.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > This is made even more complicated by SJWs who confuse these two unrelated concepts (genus, sex) with their concept of gender. People described by their opponents as SJWs are more likely than, well, pretty much everyone else on the planet to distinguish biological sex, gender identity, socially ascribed gender, and grammatical gender. The people who use “SJW” as a dismissive epithet, on the other hand, are most likely to fail to distinguish those things.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    And people who see all non-praising use of "SJW" as "a dismissive epithet", on the gripping hand, are 100% likely to miss the odd case where it's just used as a handily descriptive piece of shorthand.
    - pseudalopex 5y ago
      It wasn't handily descriptive. They reversed the positions. People described by their opponents as SJWs don't describe themselves as SJWs except ironically occasionally. People who want a neutral or positive tone use other terms like social justice advocates.
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  It isn't coincidental most words for men and male animals are masculine and most words for women and female animals are feminine. It's the people who complain about "SJWs" who say sex and gender are the same.
  - fpig 5y ago
    > It's the people who complain about "SJWs" who say sex and gender are the same. Ironically, you've just confirmed what GP said by confusing the concept of grammatical gender with the modern social studies concept of gender.
    - pseudalopex 5y ago
      How? They used gender to mean social gender. So did I.
  - hprotagonist 5y ago
    https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender still, the grammatical sense predates the sex sense by a bit, and has always been around to mean “genre”. So you always have to disambiguate usage
    - pseudalopex 5y ago
      Your point is unclear to me. Gender doesn't mean genre in contemporary English. And context is enough to distinguish grammatical gender from other meanings usually.
      - hprotagonist 5y ago
        except when context is not enough; i.e., when a grammatical gender form applies to nouns that describe persons with social genders. And then people usually get very huffy about which non-sentient nouns “share” “their” “gender”.
        5y ago
- Tainnor 5y ago
  I'm very skeptical about some of the attempts to change the German language to be more "gender-neutral" due to a number of reasons, but I feel it's not correct to frame this as a misunderstanding between "genus" and "sexus", as I've now read a number of times. If people really confused grammatical gender with "the biological concept of sex", then we'd have a lot more arguments about random nouns needing to have feminine gender instead of masculine (there's this famous joke about "die Salzstreuerin"). But that's not really what happens. Nobody seems to care about the table being masculine. What the argument is mostly about is that we use words that, by themselves, refer to masculine people and pluralise them to denote a possible mixed-gender group. This has everything to do with semantics (and so with how concrete biological/social gender expression is encoded in the words of a language), and isn't really that much concerned with grammatical gender, which after all disappears anyway as a distinctive feature once you're in the plural.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
StavrosK 5y ago
But it does have a gender, the neuter gender.

1cvmask 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Awful_German_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Awful_German_Language Edit: Since I am being downvoted it would be great if they understood the reference first. It is the Mark Twain humorous article on trying to learn the German language and in response to the above Mark Twain German language reference.

bradrn 5y ago

> several-hundred-gender languages I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing. My understanding is that Fula, with ~24 noun classes, is widely agreed to have the most number of genders. A language with several hundred genders really would be unlearnable!

hprotagonist 5y ago
“Gender” is related to “genre”, and means merely a group of nouns lumped together for grammatical purposes. Linguists talk instead of “noun classes”, which may have to do with shape or size, or whether the noun is animate, but often rules are hard to see. George Lakoff, a linguist, memorably described a noun class of Dyirbal (spoken in north-eastern Australia) as including “women, fire and dangerous things”. To the extent that genders are idiosyncratic, they are hard to learn. Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 of them. https://medium.economist.com/we-went-in-search-of-the-worlds-hardest-language-95a27c2cff3 https://medium.economist.com/we-went-in-search-of-the-worlds...
- tom_mellior 5y ago
  > To the extent that genders are idiosyncratic, they are hard to learn. Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 of them. Interesting. Wikipedia says that Bora has more than 350 "classifiers", but that doesn't seem to be the same concept as genders. There is a specific section at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_(linguistics)#Noun_classifiers_versus_noun_classes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_(linguistics)#Noun_... contrasting classifiers and "noun classes", of which grammatical genders are a special case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_grammatical_genders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_g... lists one language with "50–140 noun classes", several Bantu languages with 16-20 of them, and apparently all other languages of the world have significantly fewer. (I am not a linguist.)
  - bradrn 5y ago
    I’m not a linguist either, but I’d say most of this is correct, though incomplete. There’s a bunch of different ways of classifying nouns, including those you mention. A complete list: • Noun classes/genders: usually a fairly small set (<7 in most cases outside Africa), are marked on multiple words at once, commonly distinguishes male/female or animate/inanimate • Noun classifiers: commonly small (<20) but may be a larger set, most commonly occur as free words next to the noun • Numeral classifiers: can be a very large set, occur next to numerals to specify what you’re counting • Possessive classifiers: occur in a possessive construction to show the exact relationship between two nouns • Verbal classifiers: incorporated into the verb to show what kind of object it’s acting on • Deictic classifiers: incorporated into deictic words (like ‘this’ or ‘that’) to precisely specify the kind and orientation of the object you’re referring to And then of course these overlap somewhat. Tuyuca — the language with ‘50–150 noun classes’ — has a set of classifiers which act simultaneously as numeral classifiers, possessive classifiers and deictic classifiers, as well as modifying adjectives. GP’s example of Bora seems to use numeral classifiers. (All this is taken from Aikhenvald’s Classifiers, which is probably the best resource if you want to know more about this.)