5 ms·

Georgians have been gender-unassuming since ancient time

godelski 3y ago
Fun fact, there is a thing called a "noun class" which some people use synonymously with "grammatical gender"[0]. (not all noun classes are gendered) Personally I always liked the former term better because really just from a statistical point of view it doesn't make sense to me to call the "gender" conjugations gender based. There's far more inanimate objects that have a g̶e̶n̶d̶e̶r̶ categorical class than there are people, so I think it is more clear that you share the same categorical class as a table/chair/spoon/whatever than you do with the gender. I mean no French person thinks a vagina is masculine[1]. It always made more sense to me that the category is based on sound rather than gender because no person is really internalizing the gender of an inanimate object except for that one study that couldn't be replicated[2], so our brains don't seem to be placing strong connections on those (but do create strong connections with sounds). Personally, it just feels like gendered languages just place men and women in different noun classes while non-gendered languages don't. But it feels weird to place the emphasis on the gender when the vast majority of things in the category don't have gender. It's all rather confusing and I'm not a linguist so don't take anything I say with high confidence. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class [1] https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-french-word-for-vagina-a-masculine-noun https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-french-word-for-vagina-a-ma... [2] https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/gcla-2014-0004/html?lang=en https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/gcla-2014-000...
- kubanczyk 3y ago
  I think that "noun class" muddles the picture. Experience of learning some gendered languages makes it painfully obvious that it's a runaway effect, some kind of a mind virus. If 3 alcohols the wine, the champagne, and the sangria happen to use 3 distinct rules for declination in a language (and make you sound like a nitwit if you misremember one) something must have gone seriously awry. Partying hard cannot require such complexity. If there would be some usefulness in that distinction, you might argue that it's as useful to assign woman together with one of the alcohols, man with a different one, and a child with the remaining one. To me it looks like standing the issue on its head.
  - maltelau 3y ago
    Noun class is a benefit for reliable communication, and that's why most languages evolved (and kept) those mechanisms. Languages are optimized firstly for the people that speak it as their first language. There are some suggestions that in some cases, a group of people that learned a language later in life can influence the development of the language too, but it's not the primary mover. When you are a L1 speaker, the grammatical gender doesn't really require any cognitive effort in most cases. And there is an actual benefit in a conversation between two proficient speakers: redundancy. If you're in a bar that serves those three kinds of alcohol, if you were speaking a language without grammatical case, you'd only have to miss one word (the alcohol) to misunderstand the order. If there is also a gendered article, you'd be able to mostly understand the order even if you missed the alcohol. They also let you communicate more complex ideas more easily but letting you use two or more pronouns in parallel without ambiguity. This sentence is confusing in English, but makes total sense in gendered languages: "Hand me the wine and the sangria. It's in the tall bottle, and it's behind that door"
    - kubanczyk 3y ago
      > Languages are optimized firstly for the people that speak it as their first language. Truly optimized? I'd rather say: having arrived at a random local minimum. The anecdata I can offer. The people who speak this (non-fictional) language as their first one, struggle very much in the beginning. It's far from being given for free: children are not immune from opportunity costs.
- b3orn 3y ago
  Gender comes from french genre, latin genus, same origin as generic and and means class/kind/sort it just shifted in meaning and now doesn't fit that well anymore.
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    Greek genos, Latin genus and English kind are cognate words, deriving from the same Indo-European root.

Fun fact, there is a thing called a "noun class" which some people use synonymously with "grammatical gender"[0]. (not all noun classes are gendered) Personally I always liked the former term better because really just from a statistical point of view it doesn't make sense to me to call the "gender" conjugations gender based. There's far more inanimate objects that have a g̶e̶n̶d̶e̶r̶ categorical class than there are people, so I think it is more clear that you share the same categorical class as a table/chair/spoon/whatever than you do with the gender. I mean no French person thinks a vagina is masculine[1]. It always made more sense to me that the category is based on sound rather than gender because no person is really internalizing the gender of an inanimate object except for that one study that couldn't be replicated[2], so our brains don't seem to be placing strong connections on those (but do create strong connections with sounds). Personally, it just feels like gendered languages just place men and women in different noun classes while non-gendered languages don't. But it feels weird to place the emphasis on the gender when the vast majority of things in the category don't have gender. It's all rather confusing and I'm not a linguist so don't take anything I say with high confidence. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class [1] https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-french-word-for-vagina-a-masculine-noun https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-french-word-for-vagina-a-ma... [2] https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/gcla-2014-0004/html?lang=en https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/gcla-2014-000...

kubanczyk 3y ago
I think that "noun class" muddles the picture. Experience of learning some gendered languages makes it painfully obvious that it's a runaway effect, some kind of a mind virus. If 3 alcohols the wine, the champagne, and the sangria happen to use 3 distinct rules for declination in a language (and make you sound like a nitwit if you misremember one) something must have gone seriously awry. Partying hard cannot require such complexity. If there would be some usefulness in that distinction, you might argue that it's as useful to assign woman together with one of the alcohols, man with a different one, and a child with the remaining one. To me it looks like standing the issue on its head.
- maltelau 3y ago
  Noun class is a benefit for reliable communication, and that's why most languages evolved (and kept) those mechanisms. Languages are optimized firstly for the people that speak it as their first language. There are some suggestions that in some cases, a group of people that learned a language later in life can influence the development of the language too, but it's not the primary mover. When you are a L1 speaker, the grammatical gender doesn't really require any cognitive effort in most cases. And there is an actual benefit in a conversation between two proficient speakers: redundancy. If you're in a bar that serves those three kinds of alcohol, if you were speaking a language without grammatical case, you'd only have to miss one word (the alcohol) to misunderstand the order. If there is also a gendered article, you'd be able to mostly understand the order even if you missed the alcohol. They also let you communicate more complex ideas more easily but letting you use two or more pronouns in parallel without ambiguity. This sentence is confusing in English, but makes total sense in gendered languages: "Hand me the wine and the sangria. It's in the tall bottle, and it's behind that door"
  - kubanczyk 3y ago
    > Languages are optimized firstly for the people that speak it as their first language. Truly optimized? I'd rather say: having arrived at a random local minimum. The anecdata I can offer. The people who speak this (non-fictional) language as their first one, struggle very much in the beginning. It's far from being given for free: children are not immune from opportunity costs.
b3orn 3y ago
Gender comes from french genre, latin genus, same origin as generic and and means class/kind/sort it just shifted in meaning and now doesn't fit that well anymore.
- adrian_b 3y ago
  Greek genos, Latin genus and English kind are cognate words, deriving from the same Indo-European root.