4 ms·

I wonder if there are any examples of this in languages from the many cultures past and present that always recognized more than two sex-derived genders.

by Kye 5y ago

bregma 5y ago
English, for example, has two pronoun genders: animate and inanimate. The animate gender is further subdivided into two subgenders: masculine and feminine. Of course, none of this has anything to do with sex, unless you prefer to attempt reproduction with inanimate objects as many have instructed me to do using the imperative mood (literally "fuck it").
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- kgeist 5y ago
  Slavic languages have both 3 classic genders and grammatical animacy for masculine. I.e. if you view an object as an inanimate object, it will have a slightly different declension in accusative compared to animate objects. But it only works for words of masculine gender.
  - tazjin 5y ago
    Russian also has this for feminine plural accusative.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Doesn't 'it' refer to both inanimate objects and animate objects (animals)? Or is 'inanimate' a kind of term of art here refering to humans and human-like beings (instead of the more common meaning of 'non-living')?
  - retrac 5y ago
    Yes, it's a linguistics term. Animate things are perceived as having human-like agency. Many languages have a grammatical category clustering things like large non-human animals, the weather, or fire, or trees, together with humans. Animate. Everything else is inanimate and presumably less alive. In English, many animals are referred to with "he" or "she". Being a mammal, large, being domesticated, being familiar, are all more likely to be animate rather than inanimate. A pet mare is going to be "she". Insects are always "it". Livestock or a reptile might get either. Babies sometimes get treated as inanimate. ("Is it a boy or girl?")
    - occamrazor 5y ago
      When I first learned English in school (almost 40 years ago) I was told that very young babies were grammatically neuter. Now I never hear anyone using “it” for a baby. Has English changed in the last decades, or was my teacher wrong?
      - omegaham 5y ago
        I was loudly corrected on this subject (that is, I had used "it," and he asserted that I was wrong) by a drill instructor in Marine Corps basic training a little more than a decade ago. I'm not quite sure how much credence to give his opinion considering that his expertise was in pain, misery, and shooting guns rather than linguistics and grammar, but he certainly had strong beliefs on the subject, and I wasn't going to try to convince him otherwise.
      - bregma 5y ago
        It can be considered an insult to get the sex of a baby wrong because males are generally considered more valuable than females. It's socially better the refer to an infant as inanimate than to mistakenly refer to a male child using the female gender. That said, as soon as one knows the correct sex (often indicated by the colour of cloth used in swaddling or clothing, or other markers like design patterns of trucks or ponies, as appropriate) it's important to start using the corresponding grammatical gender otherwise the early indoctrination lacks the enforcement required for a lifetime of identity with arbitrary social constructs like masculinity and femininity. It's not a grammar rule, it's a social rule.
culi 5y ago
Most languages with grammatical gender have a distinct third class which linguists usually call "neuter". Languages like French are somewhat unique in having lost that third gender It's important to note that neuter is distinct from "gender"-less nouns
- kgeist 5y ago
  I like the fact that in most languages with 3 genders, the word kid is neuter: German "das Kind", Slavic "ditia", Greek "teknon". I guess that's because a child is not a fully developed man/woman, so it's assumed genderless.
  - apocolyps6 5y ago
    This feels like cherry-picking. There are non-neuter ways to refer to kids, including in those languages. Also, the diminutive (at least in German) is neuter, and is often used with children. Some of these terms are specifically neutral (i.e. not "boy" or "girl"). So the reasons are much more likely linguistic than ..sociological.
    - kgeist 5y ago
      It's not cherry-picking, it's a well-known fact in Indoeuropean studies, and this interpretation is supported by some linguists. For example (Luraghi 2018): "More than simply indicating referential sex, Luraghi (2009b: 127 and 2011) makes the argument, with which Melchert (2014: 264) agrees, that an involvement in procreation may have played a role in gender assignment in PIE. It may have been a key factor motivating the split between masculine and feminine. Nouns that referred to male or female humans/animals were, for the most part, assigned to masculine and feminine, respectively (Lundquist and Yates 2018: 2095). For example, there was the masculine noun ph2tḗr ‘father’ beside feminine méh2tēr ‘mother’ and wĺ̥kwos ‘(he-)wolf’ beside wl̥kwíhxs ‘she-wolf’ (Lundquist and Yates 2018: 2095). However, words that indicated children and young animals were often neuter in the IE languages (Melchert 2014: 264), e.g. Gk. téknon, OHG kind, and OCS dětę (Lundquist and Yates 2018: 2095). The humans/animals to which those nouns refer are too young to procreate, so, despite being physically animate, they are grammatically neuter. A questionnaire experiment determined that feminine anaphors were used more if Mädchen referred to, for example, an eighteen-year-old girl “as opposed to a two- or [twelve]-year-old one, where neuter pronouns were more frequent. These results show that speakers perceive biological sex as more important for adults than for children” (Corbett and Fedden 2016: 522). This supports Luraghi’s theory that involvement in procreation was a factor—alongside individuation—in gender assignment in PIE" Words that refer to children and which aren't of neuter gender today may simply be of later origin, when the system stopped being productive. For example, the Russian word for "child" is rebenok, which today has masculine gender, but stems from earlier "rebia" which was neuter (a synonym of another word, "ditia", also neuter).
Dma54rhs 5y ago
There are languages like German or Estonians where gender and sex have the same meaning, or rather term gender and the idea of it simply don't exist.
- Kye 5y ago
  That's interesting considering Germany had (more or less) one of the first queer centers in roughly the form we think of them now. I wonder what could have led to that and a diversifying concept of gender being wiped out of the language and culture... I kid. Of course it was the purges leading up to WW2. I think they would have eventually developed as robust a concept of gender as we have today. It wasn't that long ago that we only had a concept in English of two binary sexes with gender being bound to secondary sexual characteristics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissenschaft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen...
goto11 5y ago
Danish have two grammatical genders, "neuter" and "common". Male and female have same grammatical gender. So conflating gender and sexual identity becomes really confusing!
peoplefromibiza 5y ago
German

I wonder if there are any examples of this in languages from the many cultures past and present that always recognized more than two sex-derived genders.

by Kye 5y ago

I wonder if there are any examples of this in languages from the many cultures past and present that always recognized more than two sex-derived genders.

bregma 5y ago

English, for example, has two pronoun genders: animate and inanimate. The animate gender is further subdivided into two subgenders: masculine and feminine. Of course, none of this has anything to do with sex, unless you prefer to attempt reproduction with inanimate objects as many have instructed me to do using the imperative mood (literally "fuck it").

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kgeist 5y ago
Slavic languages have both 3 classic genders and grammatical animacy for masculine. I.e. if you view an object as an inanimate object, it will have a slightly different declension in accusative compared to animate objects. But it only works for words of masculine gender.
- tazjin 5y ago
  Russian also has this for feminine plural accusative.
tsimionescu 5y ago
Doesn't 'it' refer to both inanimate objects and animate objects (animals)? Or is 'inanimate' a kind of term of art here refering to humans and human-like beings (instead of the more common meaning of 'non-living')?
- retrac 5y ago
  Yes, it's a linguistics term. Animate things are perceived as having human-like agency. Many languages have a grammatical category clustering things like large non-human animals, the weather, or fire, or trees, together with humans. Animate. Everything else is inanimate and presumably less alive. In English, many animals are referred to with "he" or "she". Being a mammal, large, being domesticated, being familiar, are all more likely to be animate rather than inanimate. A pet mare is going to be "she". Insects are always "it". Livestock or a reptile might get either. Babies sometimes get treated as inanimate. ("Is it a boy or girl?")
  - occamrazor 5y ago
    When I first learned English in school (almost 40 years ago) I was told that very young babies were grammatically neuter. Now I never hear anyone using “it” for a baby. Has English changed in the last decades, or was my teacher wrong?
    - omegaham 5y ago
      I was loudly corrected on this subject (that is, I had used "it," and he asserted that I was wrong) by a drill instructor in Marine Corps basic training a little more than a decade ago. I'm not quite sure how much credence to give his opinion considering that his expertise was in pain, misery, and shooting guns rather than linguistics and grammar, but he certainly had strong beliefs on the subject, and I wasn't going to try to convince him otherwise.
    - bregma 5y ago
      It can be considered an insult to get the sex of a baby wrong because males are generally considered more valuable than females. It's socially better the refer to an infant as inanimate than to mistakenly refer to a male child using the female gender. That said, as soon as one knows the correct sex (often indicated by the colour of cloth used in swaddling or clothing, or other markers like design patterns of trucks or ponies, as appropriate) it's important to start using the corresponding grammatical gender otherwise the early indoctrination lacks the enforcement required for a lifetime of identity with arbitrary social constructs like masculinity and femininity. It's not a grammar rule, it's a social rule.

culi 5y ago

Most languages with grammatical gender have a distinct third class which linguists usually call "neuter". Languages like French are somewhat unique in having lost that third gender It's important to note that neuter is distinct from "gender"-less nouns

kgeist 5y ago
I like the fact that in most languages with 3 genders, the word kid is neuter: German "das Kind", Slavic "ditia", Greek "teknon". I guess that's because a child is not a fully developed man/woman, so it's assumed genderless.
- apocolyps6 5y ago
  This feels like cherry-picking. There are non-neuter ways to refer to kids, including in those languages. Also, the diminutive (at least in German) is neuter, and is often used with children. Some of these terms are specifically neutral (i.e. not "boy" or "girl"). So the reasons are much more likely linguistic than ..sociological.
  - kgeist 5y ago
    It's not cherry-picking, it's a well-known fact in Indoeuropean studies, and this interpretation is supported by some linguists. For example (Luraghi 2018): "More than simply indicating referential sex, Luraghi (2009b: 127 and 2011) makes the argument, with which Melchert (2014: 264) agrees, that an involvement in procreation may have played a role in gender assignment in PIE. It may have been a key factor motivating the split between masculine and feminine. Nouns that referred to male or female humans/animals were, for the most part, assigned to masculine and feminine, respectively (Lundquist and Yates 2018: 2095). For example, there was the masculine noun ph2tḗr ‘father’ beside feminine méh2tēr ‘mother’ and wĺ̥kwos ‘(he-)wolf’ beside wl̥kwíhxs ‘she-wolf’ (Lundquist and Yates 2018: 2095). However, words that indicated children and young animals were often neuter in the IE languages (Melchert 2014: 264), e.g. Gk. téknon, OHG kind, and OCS dětę (Lundquist and Yates 2018: 2095). The humans/animals to which those nouns refer are too young to procreate, so, despite being physically animate, they are grammatically neuter. A questionnaire experiment determined that feminine anaphors were used more if Mädchen referred to, for example, an eighteen-year-old girl “as opposed to a two- or [twelve]-year-old one, where neuter pronouns were more frequent. These results show that speakers perceive biological sex as more important for adults than for children” (Corbett and Fedden 2016: 522). This supports Luraghi’s theory that involvement in procreation was a factor—alongside individuation—in gender assignment in PIE" Words that refer to children and which aren't of neuter gender today may simply be of later origin, when the system stopped being productive. For example, the Russian word for "child" is rebenok, which today has masculine gender, but stems from earlier "rebia" which was neuter (a synonym of another word, "ditia", also neuter).

Dma54rhs 5y ago

There are languages like German or Estonians where gender and sex have the same meaning, or rather term gender and the idea of it simply don't exist.

Kye 5y ago
That's interesting considering Germany had (more or less) one of the first queer centers in roughly the form we think of them now. I wonder what could have led to that and a diversifying concept of gender being wiped out of the language and culture... I kid. Of course it was the purges leading up to WW2. I think they would have eventually developed as robust a concept of gender as we have today. It wasn't that long ago that we only had a concept in English of two binary sexes with gender being bound to secondary sexual characteristics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissenschaft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen...

goto11 5y ago

Danish have two grammatical genders, "neuter" and "common". Male and female have same grammatical gender. So conflating gender and sexual identity becomes really confusing!

peoplefromibiza 5y ago

German