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The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

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Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#11

Post by danans »

gerdesj wrote: post #9

English native speaker here (en_GB!) However, I have studied Latin, both classical: "Cicero sic in omnibus, Brutus aderat." and medieval: Erasmus, as he toddled around Europe, drank nearly as much red wine as I do. I've also failed French and German O levels (old UK exam at age 15.) So, Latin generally had M, F and N. Modern French (Romance language du jour) ostensibly has M and F. Modern Germanic languages have ....…

> The article notes that proto-indo-european only had animate and inanimate and that is not the same as gender

Grammatically, it is the same. Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex, but rather a categorization system of nouns and their associated inflection patterns.

> Animate here is "alive". A human and a tree are animate but a rock is inanimate.

Outside of words for humans (and even there there are exceptions), the application of these categories is pretty random. For example, the Latin word for rock, petra, is feminine, not neuter.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#12

Post by jgwil2 »

falcor84 wrote: post #10

I was surprised at the lack of mention of Russian there, currently being the 8th most spoken language in the world, in which neuter nouns are quite common. A quick glance at Wiktionary (for lack of a better source) shows that about 14% of the most common Russian words nouns are neuter[0]. [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Russian_nouns_by_gen...

Because the article is about Latin?

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#13

Post by OnlyOneCannolo »

jgwil2 wrote: post #5

Surprised the article didn't mention the Spanish definite article lo , which can be paired with a masculine adjective to form a nominal phrase meaning the abstract notion of the adjective: lo mismo - the same [thing], lo bueno - the good, that which is good. My understanding is this derives from the Latin neuter as well. Edit: why on earth is this being downvoted? Seriously confused - is something here wrong or contr…

I can't down-vote, so I don't know. But what's the significance of that example? It's one instance of many remnants of the Latin neuter in modern languages.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#14

Post by [deleted] »

danans wrote: post #11
gerdesj wrote: post #9

English native speaker here (en_GB!) However, I have studied Latin, both classical: "Cicero sic in omnibus, Brutus aderat." and medieval: Erasmus, as he toddled around Europe, drank nearly as much red wine as I do. I've also failed French and German O levels (old UK exam at age 15.) So, Latin generally had M, F and N. Modern French (Romance language du jour) ostensibly has M and F. Modern Germanic languages have ....…

> The article notes that proto-indo-european only had animate and inanimate and that is not the same as gender Grammatically, it is the same. Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex, but rather a categorization system of nouns and their associated inflection patterns. > Animate here is "alive". A human and a tree are animate but a rock is inanimate. Outside of words for humans (and even there there are ex…

[deleted]

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#15

Post by jgwil2 »

OnlyOneCannolo wrote: post #13
jgwil2 wrote: post #5

Surprised the article didn't mention the Spanish definite article lo , which can be paired with a masculine adjective to form a nominal phrase meaning the abstract notion of the adjective: lo mismo - the same [thing], lo bueno - the good, that which is good. My understanding is this derives from the Latin neuter as well. Edit: why on earth is this being downvoted? Seriously confused - is something here wrong or contr…

I can't down-vote, so I don't know. But what's the significance of that example? It's one instance of many remnants of the Latin neuter in modern languages.

Yeah okay, so I guess it's of zero interest to anybody who clicked on an article about the Latin neuter. Thanks for the feedback.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#16

Post by axtscz »

jgwil2 wrote: post #5

Surprised the article didn't mention the Spanish definite article lo , which can be paired with a masculine adjective to form a nominal phrase meaning the abstract notion of the adjective: lo mismo - the same [thing], lo bueno - the good, that which is good. My understanding is this derives from the Latin neuter as well. Edit: why on earth is this being downvoted? Seriously confused - is something here wrong or contr…

Yeah no idea why you're getting down voted. Lo is gender neutral, and can be used with nouns of either gender. However it is primarily used in conjunction with adjectives, not so much nouns.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#17

Post by bandie91 »

qsort wrote: post #3
irrational wrote: post #2

>The neuter gender is very old indeed, arguably older than the other two genders. Through the systematic comparison of ancient languages, we believe that Proto-Indo-European, in its oldest reconstructable state, had only two gender-like categories for its nouns: animate and inanimate (that is, for moving and not-moving things). It was the inanimate that became the neuter gender in its descendant languages, while the…

The grammatical gender of nouns is mostly arbitrary. A famous example is "key", which is feminine in Italian and Spanish but masculine in German. This is also the case in Latin with its neuter. My Latin is very rusty, but IIRC from high school, there are a lot of nouns that refer to "neuter" things, but are actually masculine or feminine, for example "vis" (= strength) is feminine.

well noun gender does seem disconnected from the nature of the thing only in modern languages, IMO. because of how each word evolved. in antique languages, grammatical gender is closely tied to the word's morphology, especially to the word's ending in Latin. in essence there is not really gender in languages, just some group of nouns which behaves very grammatically similarly. they just happened to be suspiciously congruent to the genders in words indicating things which do have gender in those languages which were studied when linguists invented the term of grammatical gender.

"Key" in Italian and Spanish comes more or less directly from Latin 'clavis' (fem), I guess, they are being romance languages; in German however it may have a different root (aber https://www.dwds.de/wb/Schl%C3%BCssel#etymwb-1 says something about Latin origin too). Most likely its form was more similar to other masculine words when its gender stabilized.

The arbitrarity is among naturally gender-less things, as I observed. People, professions, animals have the "right" grammatical gender overwhelmingly. There was also a process in Romance languages. Neuter words tended to become masculine because many of them behaves more like masc than fem in most cases. thats why some woman body parts are grammatically masculine.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#18

Post by falcor84 »

jgwil2 wrote: post #12
falcor84 wrote: post #10

I was surprised at the lack of mention of Russian there, currently being the 8th most spoken language in the world, in which neuter nouns are quite common. A quick glance at Wiktionary (for lack of a better source) shows that about 14% of the most common Russian words nouns are neuter[0]. [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Russian_nouns_by_gen...

Because the article is about Latin?

Touché :)

I know Russian isn't a Romance language, but it is Indo-European in origin, and I was wondering if maybe there was some parallel process that ended differently there.

But I suppose you're right, it's reasonably outside the scope of this article.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#19

Post by Swizec »

danans wrote: post #11
gerdesj wrote: post #9

English native speaker here (en_GB!) However, I have studied Latin, both classical: "Cicero sic in omnibus, Brutus aderat." and medieval: Erasmus, as he toddled around Europe, drank nearly as much red wine as I do. I've also failed French and German O levels (old UK exam at age 15.) So, Latin generally had M, F and N. Modern French (Romance language du jour) ostensibly has M and F. Modern Germanic languages have ....…

> The article notes that proto-indo-european only had animate and inanimate and that is not the same as gender Grammatically, it is the same. Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex, but rather a categorization system of nouns and their associated inflection patterns. > Animate here is "alive". A human and a tree are animate but a rock is inanimate. Outside of words for humans (and even there there are ex…

> Grammatically, it is the same. Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex, but rather a categorization system of nouns and their associated inflection patterns.

Yep, a chair is male in Slovenian, but tree is neuter. Cats are feminine, dogs are male.

Studying German and French I quickly learned that their categories are different. You have to memorize the gender together with noun. Often you can guess correctly based on the suffix.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#20

Post by ACow_Adonis »

danans wrote: post #11
gerdesj wrote: post #9

English native speaker here (en_GB!) However, I have studied Latin, both classical: "Cicero sic in omnibus, Brutus aderat." and medieval: Erasmus, as he toddled around Europe, drank nearly as much red wine as I do. I've also failed French and German O levels (old UK exam at age 15.) So, Latin generally had M, F and N. Modern French (Romance language du jour) ostensibly has M and F. Modern Germanic languages have ....…

> The article notes that proto-indo-european only had animate and inanimate and that is not the same as gender Grammatically, it is the same. Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex, but rather a categorization system of nouns and their associated inflection patterns. > Animate here is "alive". A human and a tree are animate but a rock is inanimate. Outside of words for humans (and even there there are ex…

> Grammatically, it is the same. Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex, but rather a categorization system of nouns and their associated inflection patterns.

Funny story: I've always remembered my german teacher getting flaberghasted at our inability to gender a table (as english speakers).

She was all: "Come on! what kind of qualities do you think a table has!"

And us high-schooler english speakers were just sitting there all :|

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