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It's worth pointing out that, in linguistics, grammatical gender can be seen as a specific type of noun class system. The term is mostly useful when talking abo
by culi 5y ago
It's worth pointing out that, in linguistics, grammatical gender can be seen as a specific type of noun class system. The term is mostly useful when talking about Indo-European languages where the feminine-masculine distinction is most prevalent
It's also worth noting that grammatical gender evolves over time. Originally, most Indo-European languages had the three classes of feminine, masculine, and neuter. But, for example, French's loss of the neuter class is pretty recent. We're also seeing modern efforts to drive these processes with, for example, the usage of the gender-neutral term "Latine" instead of "Latino" or "Latina".
- kgeist 5y ago>Originally, most Indo-European languages had the three classes of feminine, masculine, and neuter. Early Proto-Indoeuropean is theorized to have 2 genders - animate/inanimate, but by the late PIE period it evolved to the classic three.
- monopoledance 5y agoI want that! If we ever get our shit together, let’s use that for a common language. For us, for our home - earth. Edit: Oh, I translated this as alive/not alive. Guess, this was originally down to soul. Not advocating to go down that path again…
- fourtrees 5y agoHaving missed your comment, I was about to post about this. One interesting fact I can add is that Hittite, the oldest written IE language, has the animate/inanimate gender system rather than the 3-way system. You can also see remnants of the old system here and there in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, ect. Of course, this is largely theoretical like you said, and I'm sure you could dig up some dissenting papers if you wanted to.
- kgeist 5y ago>You can also see remnants of the old system here and there in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, ect. For example, there are some adjectives in Latin and Ancient Greek, which only have two declensions instead of three: one common declension for masculine/feminine, and one for neuter. For example: naturalis (masc), naturalis (fem), naturale (neut), as opposed to novus (masc), nova (fem), novum (neut).
- asveikau 5y agoOne of my favorite stories about a neutral gender being preserved is in words like Spanish esto. Typically in comparing Latin with modern Romance, the merger of neuter into masculine is one of the loss of distinguishing suffices. You can't distinguish between bonus and bonum if the final constant is lost and they are both bonu (or bueno in Spanish). But some words didn't distinguish masculine from neuter by just a consonant. Take iste (m) and istud (n). Remove final consonants and you have iste and istu. So in Spanish there's este and esto. The different vowel gets preserved, so you can distinguish between masculine and neuter still, where with most words you cannot.
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- superflit2 5y agoOn Romantic languages "latinE" a noun ending in "e" or "ne" would express a word from French/Galic. "Champagne", "Vitrine" as exemple. The ""new"" gender neutral a woke fashion that has disregard for people with dyslexia or people who needs software to read (blind).
- asveikau 5y agoIn both your examples (cf. Campania, vitrina), the pattern is that French makes an -a suffix in Latin into a silent -e. I believe there were earlier parts of the history of french phonetics where it was pronounced as a schwa, so you can kind of imagine it as "softening" over time, starting out as a proper A sound and eventually disappearing over the centuries.
- tasogare 5y agoIt's not even their worst attempt. In France, those fringe "woke" people are advocating a forked version of French which is written with a lot of dots everywhere to display genders simultaneously. For example: "Bonjour à tou.s.tes les étudiant.e.s." which is very hard to read even for non-dyslexic people. The normal people are fighting it but they succeeded to promote that crap via a ministry and lot of universities are writing their emails like that.
- b3orn 5y agoShouldn't that be "Bonjour à tou.te.s les étudiant.e.s."? Also as far as I know it's banned from schools for now.
- School-Cotton 5y agoSimilar systems are now widespread in Germany and as far as I can tell they don’t impede comprehension.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]