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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

#21

Post by tom_mellior »

bandie91 wrote: post #17
qsort wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

> aber https://www.dwds.de/wb/Schl%C3%BCssel#etymwb-1 says something about Latin origin too)

It doesn't say that "Schlüssel" has a Latin origin (see also https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Schl%C3%BCssel for an etymology). It says that some terms related to Latin "clavis" have corresponding German terms formed by somewhat analogous derivation from "Schlüssel". Most prominently "Schlüsselbein", literally "key bone", from "clavicula" (clavicle).

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#22

Post by OnlyOneCannolo »

jgwil2 wrote: post #15
OnlyOneCannolo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, my feedback is that it's not clear what you meant. I guess I wasn't very clear either.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#23

Post by bodhiandphysics »

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…

so the origin of masculine feminine in IE is weird. The issue is that Hittite, the oldest attested IE language has two genders animate and inanimate. These are very very conventional. The sea Aruna is animate, but a grindstone is inanimate! Tocharian also has evidence of the animate inanimate split, but tocharian is such a mess no one knows what to make of it. All other IE language families (besides the weirdos like Armenian) have or had 3 genders. The question is the relationship between Hittite and the rest of IE. Most indoeuropeanists think Hittite (and maybe tocharian) split before the rest of the IE languages, which after the split developed gender and other things that Hittite lacks, before splitting in turn. That said, it’s possible that masculine and feminine merged in Hittite, and the trigender system came first.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#24

Post by gerdesj »

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…

"Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex"

I'm quite aware of that, especially after an unfortunate encounter that never happened with a table. She claimed to be French but it turned out to be German.

That all sounds a bit crap in English. I don't really know how "gender" for nouns feels or works in languages that emphasise it. We do ascribe gender to some nouns in English, such as boats/ships: "she".

Why on earth is petra feminine? I've been to Petra (capital P) and it is an incredible place.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#25

Post by bodhiandphysics »

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.

Some languages do have non arbitrators genders. In Dravidian languages male and female nouns usually only refer to humans. In one dravian language, kvi, the feminine was lost and so the only masculine things were adult human males, leading to amusing fact that early ethnographers didn’t realize a major god was actually a goddess!

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#26

Post by jgwil2 »

OnlyOneCannolo wrote: post #22
jgwil2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, my feedback is that it's not clear what you meant. I guess I wasn't very clear either.

Sorry for the sarcasm. I just meant it as one additional data point on the subject of the article.

Not to get too off topic, but I got snippy because I just don't understand what standards comments are sometimes held to. Mine may not have been the most interesting comment in the world, but when I go to the trouble of making what I think is a reasonable contribution to the discussion, and then some people decide it's so bad I should do karmic penance, it hurts my feelings. I apologize once again for taking it out on you.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#28

Post by OnlyOneCannolo »

jgwil2 wrote: post #26
OnlyOneCannolo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, my feedback is that it's not clear what you meant. I guess I wasn't very clear either.

Sorry for the sarcasm. I just meant it as one additional data point on the subject of the article. Not to get too off topic, but I got snippy because I just don't understand what standards comments are sometimes held to. Mine may not have been the most interesting comment in the world, but when I go to the trouble of making what I think is a reasonable contribution to the discussion, and then some people decide it's…

It's karmic roulette - The rules are made up, and the points don't matter :-)

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#30

Post by patcon »

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 suspect it's because it struck some as the "but what about" that is a trope here. The "i can't believe they didn't mention this thing I know" sorta shtick that us tech ppl love to do :)
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