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> 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 langu

> 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 12d 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.
- Xirdus 12d ago
  My language has male/female/neuter in singular and male-person/everything-else in plural (e.g. singular dog is male and declines like boy, but plural dogs is non-male-person and declines like girls). It used to have dual number, now it's just singular and plural. There are, however, exactly three words that use the dual number rules for its plural, even for N>2: hands, eyes and ears.
roshin 12d ago
one thing that doesn't fit is that I would expect a majority of nouns to be according to the animate / inanimate split. but from my (not so vast) knowledge, the split is either (mostly) the last letter of the word, or a list of suffixes
- nlitened 12d ago
  > I would expect a majority of nouns to be according to the animate / inanimate split Well, as I understand, the actual animate/inanimate split was there at least 10 000 years ago (or more)! And the language has gradually changed over the years until it's barely recognizable. For half of the period that passed we didn't even have written languages, and can only approximately deduce the words by tracing their common origins in related languages. See how modern English has changed in 500 years from the earlier Middle English — as a non-native English speaker, I can barely recognize a few things, and it's otherwise completely unintelligible for me. Now multiply that change by at least 20x. So how words are split between genders in modern languages - has very little relation to how they were before. For example, in modern Spanish, masculine gender is a fusion of Latin masculine and neuter genders. So technically if we say that in Classical Latin there was still a statistically significant animate/inanimate split between masculine and neuter genders - nowadays it's the same single gender in Spanish.
Xirdus 12d ago
This would explain why German singular feminine and plural everything use the same article (in most cases).
- deleted 12d ago
  [deleted]
cvoss 12d ago
> plural inanimate abstract words ... "feminine" A relic of gendered nouns in English can still be seen in how we treat concepts like countries, churches, schools, organizations, languages, and complex machines (especially ships). While usually people ascribe the pronoun "it" to these, occasionally they use a gendered pronoun, and if so, it's always "she", never "he". Two churches or organizations or even ideas might be "sisters" or in a "mother/daughter" relationship. The common theme through all these examples is plurality and abstractness.
- PaulDavisThe1st 12d ago
  Decades ago I was at a party where some people were gathered around a rather nice table, and someone said "This is a lovely table". A french person said (in English) "Yes, she is, isn't she". It's the first and only time I've had the sense of what it probably sounds like to speakers of gendered languages when an English (or other) speaker gets the gender wrong.

my-huge-pony 12d 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.

Xirdus 12d ago
My language has male/female/neuter in singular and male-person/everything-else in plural (e.g. singular dog is male and declines like boy, but plural dogs is non-male-person and declines like girls). It used to have dual number, now it's just singular and plural. There are, however, exactly three words that use the dual number rules for its plural, even for N>2: hands, eyes and ears.

roshin 12d ago

one thing that doesn't fit is that I would expect a majority of nouns to be according to the animate / inanimate split. but from my (not so vast) knowledge, the split is either (mostly) the last letter of the word, or a list of suffixes

nlitened 12d ago
> I would expect a majority of nouns to be according to the animate / inanimate split Well, as I understand, the actual animate/inanimate split was there at least 10 000 years ago (or more)! And the language has gradually changed over the years until it's barely recognizable. For half of the period that passed we didn't even have written languages, and can only approximately deduce the words by tracing their common origins in related languages. See how modern English has changed in 500 years from the earlier Middle English — as a non-native English speaker, I can barely recognize a few things, and it's otherwise completely unintelligible for me. Now multiply that change by at least 20x. So how words are split between genders in modern languages - has very little relation to how they were before. For example, in modern Spanish, masculine gender is a fusion of Latin masculine and neuter genders. So technically if we say that in Classical Latin there was still a statistically significant animate/inanimate split between masculine and neuter genders - nowadays it's the same single gender in Spanish.

Xirdus 12d ago

This would explain why German singular feminine and plural everything use the same article (in most cases).

deleted 12d ago
[deleted]

cvoss 12d ago

> plural inanimate abstract words ... "feminine" A relic of gendered nouns in English can still be seen in how we treat concepts like countries, churches, schools, organizations, languages, and complex machines (especially ships). While usually people ascribe the pronoun "it" to these, occasionally they use a gendered pronoun, and if so, it's always "she", never "he". Two churches or organizations or even ideas might be "sisters" or in a "mother/daughter" relationship. The common theme through all these examples is plurality and abstractness.

PaulDavisThe1st 12d ago
Decades ago I was at a party where some people were gathered around a rather nice table, and someone said "This is a lovely table". A french person said (in English) "Yes, she is, isn't she". It's the first and only time I've had the sense of what it probably sounds like to speakers of gendered languages when an English (or other) speaker gets the gender wrong.