4 ms·

You probably mean word genders? So you probably say it's sometimes difficult to derive the gender of a noun, hence the correct article

andoando 6d ago
Genders in language is seemingly such a needlessly pointless concept I am really confused as to how it ever developed. I still feel Armenian is such a great Indo European language. No articles, no genders, completely phonetic, consistent verb endings, no particular word ordering
- smgpie 6d ago
  Nevertheless, embedding gender into the language grammar enables many very elegant expressions of phrases as seem in many Latin and Greek poets.
- eru 6d ago
  > Genders in language is seemingly such a needlessly pointless concept I am really confused as to how it ever developed. Genders, or word classes in general, often work like registers in a computer. So you can quickly refer to things mentioned earlier.
  - andsoitis 6d ago
    How does gendered nouns make it so you can more quickly refer to something mentioned earlier?
    - nlitened 6d ago
      For example, if I am talking about a window and a door, and a window is masculine and a door is feminine, I can use the pronoun "it" in either masculine or feminine form to clearly refer to one or the other. Or I could use a verb "opened" in a masculine or feminine form, and it will be clear which of two things I mean without explicitly repeating.
      - andoando 6d ago
        Ah not all gendered languages have gendered verbs but for the ones that do it makes sense. In armenian we dont even have he/she and its fine. In some cases Im sure its not as elequant. For a natural speaker it doesnt matter, and for the vast majority of history you more or less had only natural speakers, but if were talking about learning languages, it is needlessly complicated for little to no benefit
        eru 6d ago
        Well, in German you don't have gendered verbs, but windows are neutral and doors are female. So you can use the German equivalent of 'it' to refer to the window and 'she' to refer to the door, if you just mentioned them. Especially for long nouns, that's a lot faster than repeating them.
    - shakow 6d ago
      FR: « J'ai transporté le canapé (M) et la table (F), mais il (M) s'est cassé. » -> the canapé/sofa is broken. EN: “I carried over the sofa and the table, but it(?)/the sofa broke”
  - jameshart 6d ago
    Great way to frame it. But it does rely on just chance that the nouns you’re talking about will slot into different categories. Would be much more useful if pronouns let us refer to ‘the previously mentioned subject’ or ‘the previously mentioned object’ rather than ‘the previously mentioned masculine person’. Like in “John met David. He was delighted to meet him.” We have a conflict over the ‘masculine object’ register, so ‘he’ and ‘him’ are ambiguous. But if we had a pronoun like ‘de/dim’ for ‘previous subject’ and ‘ne/nim’ for ‘previous object’ you could unabiguously say “John met David. De was delighted to make nis acquaintance, but ne wasn’t so keen”
    - Aachen 6d ago
      Sounds logical; I'd like such a system. Do you know if, if any language had such a system and it's intuitive enough, it is more likely to perpetuate than an inferior system? I was thinking about what makes a language spread but, short of the language being so poor that it causes the speakers to be outcompeted by other tribes with other languages (like if you couldn't convey where the attack is coming from before the enemy killed you), it seems to me entirely arbitrary. You speak whatever the person you want to talk to understands (and in rarer cases, what your oppressor tells you to speak), which is just a chance factor (whatever they grew up with) and not based on any quality of the language. I'm not aware of any case where both sides agreed to speak a different language for that language's efficacy and not just because they both speak it better
      - jameshart 6d ago
        Yep. Languages would be much better if they followed an RFC process.
    - cwnyth 6d ago
      Latin, does this. It's a bit of an unidiomatic construction, but roughly translated into Latin, you get: > Ioannes Davido occurrit. Hunc occurrere illi placet. Here it's clear that hunc refers to Davidus, since that's the closer name in the sentence, and illi refers to Ioannes, since that name sits further out.
    - 6d ago
- nlitened 6d ago
  > I am really confused as to how it ever developed Upon digging, I actually found it fascinating. As I understand how it happened for Proto-Indo-European languages (with a bit of healthy speculation because for the earlier parts there's not much reliable statistical data to confirm it exactly, and there are always some competing explanations by different linguists): First, before PIE, the older language had no genders, but instead had cases with a twist similar to what they have in Basque language: instead of our usual nominative+accusative cases it had absolutive+ergative cases. The difference is as follows in two sentences: "cat walks" and "dog eats bone". In modern PIE descendants we have "cat" and "dog" in nominative, and "bone" is in accusative case. In modern Basque and the hypothetic language before PIE the "cat" and the "bone" are in absolutive case, and the "dog" is in ergative. So basically, there was a word form that meant "something does action upon something else" and another word form that meant "something receives an action from another actor or performs the action by itself". Then these word forms were reinterpreted as "people or animals that do things" and "inanimate or dumb things". So it became two genders: animate and inanimate. People started assigning new words to these genders (sometimes randomly). Then the plural form of inanimate gender started meaning collective and abstract things. As an analogy, "cows" would also start meaning a collective "herd", not only multiple cows; "grains" would start meaning "cereal", not only multiple grains of wheat. Over time, people started conjugating the plural inanimate abstract words in a pattern similar to singular animate, thus a third gender appeared - many thousand years later we called it "feminine", the former animate gender we started calling "masculine", and the former inanimate gender we started calling "neuter" (literally means "neither"). After the word gender patterns established over time, new words and new word forms started being distributed among these genders also without strict rules, sometimes by chance, or by analogy with existing words that sounded similarly in that period. Thus we had three genders of Proto-Indo-European languages that developed over millenia for no particular reason and without a specific goal, just naturally and due to fossilizing old speech elements being reinterpreted a little bit differently by new generations — over many generations over thousands of years.
  - my-huge-pony 6d ago
    Interestingly my language has both genders and (reduced but present) animate-inanimate distinction. It also used to have singular, plural and "double" declination. As far as I understand this all was originally "invented" in proto-indo-european. Man, PIE was wild.
- thrance 6d ago
  It's like everything else, natural languages have some redundancy so you can understand the other party even when you failed to catch ~10% of they were saying. A binary gender, like in French, is one more bit of information. German also has neutral, so one more trit.
- my-huge-pony 6d ago
  As a native speaker of a language with genders, it's not complex if you're a native speaker (basically nobody ever makes grammar errors related to gender when speaking/writing). As for their role, I think they may work as a simple error correction code (if genders in the sentence don't match, you misheard something) FWIW I struggle with using English articles and past/present/future perfect time, because those concepts are absent from my language. Despite decades of experience with English at this point.
  - ivanjermakov 6d ago
    > nobody ever makes grammar errors related to gender For most words, yes. Some loanwords are tricky to gender because of their declension. For example gender of "coffee" in russian is highly disputed: https://www.reddit.com/r/russian/comments/h08q29/the_insistence_on_%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%84%D0%B5_having_masculine_gender/ https://www.reddit.com/r/russian/comments/h08q29/the_insiste...
    - tiagod 6d ago
      In (European) Portuguese some people (I've seen this more in older people) use feminine for hamburgers (like in Spanish, afaik), but most people use masculine. I guess it would make sense to be feminine because it's a sandwich, and sandwich is feminine.
      - ivanjermakov 6d ago
        In Russian it's quite common too. Car can be feminine (машина), masculine (авто/автомобиль), and neuter (транспортное средство). And different car brands usually have their own gender too: for example Mercedes is usually masculine even though named after founder's daughter, and Honda is isually feminine.
      - lbschenkel 6d ago
        As a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, today I learnt that "sanduíche" is feminine in Portugal. I had no idea!
  - 6d ago
- igsomething 6d ago
  In languages with genders you need fewer unique words for gender-related concepts. For example English (genderless) has "boy" and "girl", while Spanish (male and female) has "niño" and "niña".
  - SamBam 6d ago
    But that doesn't help you understand why "chair" might be feminine while "book" might be masculine.
    - jventura 6d ago
      Not sure about spanish, but in portuguese, as a general rule, you decide the gender of an object by the last caracther. For instance “cadeira” (chair) is feminine while “livro” (book) is masculine. Basically, most feminine words end with an “a” while masculine words end with an “o”, although there are some words that end with other letters whose genders is not that easy to identify. For instance “árvore” (tree) ends with an “e” and is feminine (“a árvore”), while “peixe” (fish) also ends with an “e” but is masculine (“o peixe“).
      - dmd 6d ago
        Er, that sounds backwards to me. I thought you put the a on the word because it is feminine. You're saying the word is feminine because there's an a on it?
        thaumasiotes 6d ago
        Strictly speaking there's no causality in either direction. A word's gender determines what it takes for other words to agree with it, while the form of the word itself can be anything. A word can always be irregular. But not every word can be irregular. Mostly the words that belong to a gender will match a set of patterns, and the words belonging to another gender will match a different set of patterns. If you're lucky, you can learn a word from some usage that makes its gender explicit (and for irregular words, this is the only way you can learn about their irregularity). But often all you have to go on is the word, and in that case, when you want to use it, you have to make a choice. You'll do that based on the form of the word. ----- If you want some examples of how gender irregularity in nouns works, here are a few different phenomena in Latin: - An adjective in the first/second declensions has masculine (singular) endings -us, -ī, -ō, -um, -ō, -e and feminine endings -a, -ae, -ae, -am, -ā, -a. If you see one of these endings, and you know the adjective is first/second declension¹, then you've fully specified the gender of the adjective. There are no exceptions. - First and second declension nouns mostly follow this pattern. Lana means wool and, as the -a suffix would lead you to expect, it's feminine. Campus means field as, as the -us suffix would lead you to expect, it's masculine. What this means is that "white wool" is lana alba and "a white field" is campus albus. - Trees are weird. They are second declension (or sometimes fourth; pretend that's not true), appearing to be masculine, but instead they're feminine. So you'd have pinus alba, a white pine tree, or quercus alba, a white oak tree. - There's a short list of profession terms that are first declension, appearing to be feminine, but that are nevertheless masculine. So it'd be agricola albus, a white farmer, or nauta albus, a white sailor. - What about corpus? Well, it's neuter. Corpus album, a white body. Corpus is a third declension noun, and the third declension works completely differently. The apparent -us ending is misleading; the root of this noun is actually corpor- and the suffixes, of course, belong to the third declension. - What do you do if you run into a word you don't know how to deal with? Pretend it's normal. Manus is a Latin word that means "hand"; it appears to be masculine, but it's feminine. It turns out that referring to hands is common enough that Spanish speakers today still remember that this masculine-looking word, now mano, is actually feminine. But we may compare Biblia, which is feminine in Spanish today despite the fact that in Latin it was neuter. It's feminine now because of that -a ending. ¹ That isn't actually true; the neuter suffixes are mostly just masculine suffixes except for one that is feminine. There are no distinctive second-declension neuter suffixes. But the suffixes by themselves are sufficient to distinguish masculine gender from feminine.
- thaumasiotes 6d ago
  There's an active gender distinction in English between people (using the relativizer who) and everything else (using the relativizer which). It is an area of current dispute whether the pronoun it can be applied to people or not.
subscribed 6d ago
And to make things worse, genders differ between languages, say, German, Portuguese, or Slavic languages :)

andoando 6d ago

Genders in language is seemingly such a needlessly pointless concept I am really confused as to how it ever developed. I still feel Armenian is such a great Indo European language. No articles, no genders, completely phonetic, consistent verb endings, no particular word ordering

smgpie 6d ago
Nevertheless, embedding gender into the language grammar enables many very elegant expressions of phrases as seem in many Latin and Greek poets.
eru 6d ago
> Genders in language is seemingly such a needlessly pointless concept I am really confused as to how it ever developed. Genders, or word classes in general, often work like registers in a computer. So you can quickly refer to things mentioned earlier.
- andsoitis 6d ago
  How does gendered nouns make it so you can more quickly refer to something mentioned earlier?
  - nlitened 6d ago
    For example, if I am talking about a window and a door, and a window is masculine and a door is feminine, I can use the pronoun "it" in either masculine or feminine form to clearly refer to one or the other. Or I could use a verb "opened" in a masculine or feminine form, and it will be clear which of two things I mean without explicitly repeating.
    - andoando 6d ago
      Ah not all gendered languages have gendered verbs but for the ones that do it makes sense. In armenian we dont even have he/she and its fine. In some cases Im sure its not as elequant. For a natural speaker it doesnt matter, and for the vast majority of history you more or less had only natural speakers, but if were talking about learning languages, it is needlessly complicated for little to no benefit
      - eru 6d ago
        Well, in German you don't have gendered verbs, but windows are neutral and doors are female. So you can use the German equivalent of 'it' to refer to the window and 'she' to refer to the door, if you just mentioned them. Especially for long nouns, that's a lot faster than repeating them.
  - shakow 6d ago
    FR: « J'ai transporté le canapé (M) et la table (F), mais il (M) s'est cassé. » -> the canapé/sofa is broken. EN: “I carried over the sofa and the table, but it(?)/the sofa broke”
- jameshart 6d ago
  Great way to frame it. But it does rely on just chance that the nouns you’re talking about will slot into different categories. Would be much more useful if pronouns let us refer to ‘the previously mentioned subject’ or ‘the previously mentioned object’ rather than ‘the previously mentioned masculine person’. Like in “John met David. He was delighted to meet him.” We have a conflict over the ‘masculine object’ register, so ‘he’ and ‘him’ are ambiguous. But if we had a pronoun like ‘de/dim’ for ‘previous subject’ and ‘ne/nim’ for ‘previous object’ you could unabiguously say “John met David. De was delighted to make nis acquaintance, but ne wasn’t so keen”
  - Aachen 6d ago
    Sounds logical; I'd like such a system. Do you know if, if any language had such a system and it's intuitive enough, it is more likely to perpetuate than an inferior system? I was thinking about what makes a language spread but, short of the language being so poor that it causes the speakers to be outcompeted by other tribes with other languages (like if you couldn't convey where the attack is coming from before the enemy killed you), it seems to me entirely arbitrary. You speak whatever the person you want to talk to understands (and in rarer cases, what your oppressor tells you to speak), which is just a chance factor (whatever they grew up with) and not based on any quality of the language. I'm not aware of any case where both sides agreed to speak a different language for that language's efficacy and not just because they both speak it better
    - jameshart 6d ago
      Yep. Languages would be much better if they followed an RFC process.
  - cwnyth 6d ago
    Latin, does this. It's a bit of an unidiomatic construction, but roughly translated into Latin, you get: > Ioannes Davido occurrit. Hunc occurrere illi placet. Here it's clear that hunc refers to Davidus, since that's the closer name in the sentence, and illi refers to Ioannes, since that name sits further out.
  - 6d ago
nlitened 6d ago
> I am really confused as to how it ever developed Upon digging, I actually found it fascinating. As I understand how it happened for Proto-Indo-European languages (with a bit of healthy speculation because for the earlier parts there's not much reliable statistical data to confirm it exactly, and there are always some competing explanations by different linguists): First, before PIE, the older language had no genders, but instead had cases with a twist similar to what they have in Basque language: instead of our usual nominative+accusative cases it had absolutive+ergative cases. The difference is as follows in two sentences: "cat walks" and "dog eats bone". In modern PIE descendants we have "cat" and "dog" in nominative, and "bone" is in accusative case. In modern Basque and the hypothetic language before PIE the "cat" and the "bone" are in absolutive case, and the "dog" is in ergative. So basically, there was a word form that meant "something does action upon something else" and another word form that meant "something receives an action from another actor or performs the action by itself". Then these word forms were reinterpreted as "people or animals that do things" and "inanimate or dumb things". So it became two genders: animate and inanimate. People started assigning new words to these genders (sometimes randomly). Then the plural form of inanimate gender started meaning collective and abstract things. As an analogy, "cows" would also start meaning a collective "herd", not only multiple cows; "grains" would start meaning "cereal", not only multiple grains of wheat. Over time, people started conjugating the plural inanimate abstract words in a pattern similar to singular animate, thus a third gender appeared - many thousand years later we called it "feminine", the former animate gender we started calling "masculine", and the former inanimate gender we started calling "neuter" (literally means "neither"). After the word gender patterns established over time, new words and new word forms started being distributed among these genders also without strict rules, sometimes by chance, or by analogy with existing words that sounded similarly in that period. Thus we had three genders of Proto-Indo-European languages that developed over millenia for no particular reason and without a specific goal, just naturally and due to fossilizing old speech elements being reinterpreted a little bit differently by new generations — over many generations over thousands of years.
- my-huge-pony 6d ago
  Interestingly my language has both genders and (reduced but present) animate-inanimate distinction. It also used to have singular, plural and "double" declination. As far as I understand this all was originally "invented" in proto-indo-european. Man, PIE was wild.
thrance 6d ago
It's like everything else, natural languages have some redundancy so you can understand the other party even when you failed to catch ~10% of they were saying. A binary gender, like in French, is one more bit of information. German also has neutral, so one more trit.
my-huge-pony 6d ago
As a native speaker of a language with genders, it's not complex if you're a native speaker (basically nobody ever makes grammar errors related to gender when speaking/writing). As for their role, I think they may work as a simple error correction code (if genders in the sentence don't match, you misheard something) FWIW I struggle with using English articles and past/present/future perfect time, because those concepts are absent from my language. Despite decades of experience with English at this point.
- ivanjermakov 6d ago
  > nobody ever makes grammar errors related to gender For most words, yes. Some loanwords are tricky to gender because of their declension. For example gender of "coffee" in russian is highly disputed: https://www.reddit.com/r/russian/comments/h08q29/the_insistence_on_%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%84%D0%B5_having_masculine_gender/ https://www.reddit.com/r/russian/comments/h08q29/the_insiste...
  - tiagod 6d ago
    In (European) Portuguese some people (I've seen this more in older people) use feminine for hamburgers (like in Spanish, afaik), but most people use masculine. I guess it would make sense to be feminine because it's a sandwich, and sandwich is feminine.
    - ivanjermakov 6d ago
      In Russian it's quite common too. Car can be feminine (машина), masculine (авто/автомобиль), and neuter (транспортное средство). And different car brands usually have their own gender too: for example Mercedes is usually masculine even though named after founder's daughter, and Honda is isually feminine.
    - lbschenkel 6d ago
      As a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, today I learnt that "sanduíche" is feminine in Portugal. I had no idea!
- 6d ago
igsomething 6d ago
In languages with genders you need fewer unique words for gender-related concepts. For example English (genderless) has "boy" and "girl", while Spanish (male and female) has "niño" and "niña".
- SamBam 6d ago
  But that doesn't help you understand why "chair" might be feminine while "book" might be masculine.
  - jventura 6d ago
    Not sure about spanish, but in portuguese, as a general rule, you decide the gender of an object by the last caracther. For instance “cadeira” (chair) is feminine while “livro” (book) is masculine. Basically, most feminine words end with an “a” while masculine words end with an “o”, although there are some words that end with other letters whose genders is not that easy to identify. For instance “árvore” (tree) ends with an “e” and is feminine (“a árvore”), while “peixe” (fish) also ends with an “e” but is masculine (“o peixe“).
    - dmd 6d ago
      Er, that sounds backwards to me. I thought you put the a on the word because it is feminine. You're saying the word is feminine because there's an a on it?
      - thaumasiotes 6d ago
        Strictly speaking there's no causality in either direction. A word's gender determines what it takes for other words to agree with it, while the form of the word itself can be anything. A word can always be irregular. But not every word can be irregular. Mostly the words that belong to a gender will match a set of patterns, and the words belonging to another gender will match a different set of patterns. If you're lucky, you can learn a word from some usage that makes its gender explicit (and for irregular words, this is the only way you can learn about their irregularity). But often all you have to go on is the word, and in that case, when you want to use it, you have to make a choice. You'll do that based on the form of the word. ----- If you want some examples of how gender irregularity in nouns works, here are a few different phenomena in Latin: - An adjective in the first/second declensions has masculine (singular) endings -us, -ī, -ō, -um, -ō, -e and feminine endings -a, -ae, -ae, -am, -ā, -a. If you see one of these endings, and you know the adjective is first/second declension¹, then you've fully specified the gender of the adjective. There are no exceptions. - First and second declension nouns mostly follow this pattern. Lana means wool and, as the -a suffix would lead you to expect, it's feminine. Campus means field as, as the -us suffix would lead you to expect, it's masculine. What this means is that "white wool" is lana alba and "a white field" is campus albus. - Trees are weird. They are second declension (or sometimes fourth; pretend that's not true), appearing to be masculine, but instead they're feminine. So you'd have pinus alba, a white pine tree, or quercus alba, a white oak tree. - There's a short list of profession terms that are first declension, appearing to be feminine, but that are nevertheless masculine. So it'd be agricola albus, a white farmer, or nauta albus, a white sailor. - What about corpus? Well, it's neuter. Corpus album, a white body. Corpus is a third declension noun, and the third declension works completely differently. The apparent -us ending is misleading; the root of this noun is actually corpor- and the suffixes, of course, belong to the third declension. - What do you do if you run into a word you don't know how to deal with? Pretend it's normal. Manus is a Latin word that means "hand"; it appears to be masculine, but it's feminine. It turns out that referring to hands is common enough that Spanish speakers today still remember that this masculine-looking word, now mano, is actually feminine. But we may compare Biblia, which is feminine in Spanish today despite the fact that in Latin it was neuter. It's feminine now because of that -a ending. ¹ That isn't actually true; the neuter suffixes are mostly just masculine suffixes except for one that is feminine. There are no distinctive second-declension neuter suffixes. But the suffixes by themselves are sufficient to distinguish masculine gender from feminine.
thaumasiotes 6d ago
There's an active gender distinction in English between people (using the relativizer who) and everything else (using the relativizer which). It is an area of current dispute whether the pronoun it can be applied to people or not.

subscribed 6d ago

And to make things worse, genders differ between languages, say, German, Portuguese, or Slavic languages :)