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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

#41

Post by dhosek »

falcor84 wrote: post #18
jgwil2 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Czech has essentially four grammatical genders: In addition to the masculine, feminine and neuter, there is also masculine inanimate which shares some characteristics with the neuter such as having identical forms for the nominative and accusative cases.

But Slavic languages are very much a different part of the Indo-European family with most of them having bucked the trend of dropping declension of nouns and adjectives (Bulgarian has largely lost its declensions).

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#42

Post by naringas »

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…

while the article is factually incorrect when claiming that Spanish has no neutral gender at all.

It's also true that "lo" is seldom used in Spanish and there are almost no neutral nouns (like in german).

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#43

Post by stevula »

trylfthsk wrote: post #34
dnautics wrote: post #31

One thing that fascinates me are latin 1st declension masculine occupational nouns: pirata, nauta, poeta... Both pirata and poeta at least, take "il" in italian. Nauta it seems, did not survive.

Is there a good explanation for how these came to develop? I've heard it explained by saying that "they're typically men's spheres" as rationale from my brief exposure to the language, but this seems deeply unsatisfying for a variety of reasons - id est, in comparison to something along the lines of loanword/archaism/evolution of root/evolution of grammatic gender.

There is no rule in Latin that 1st declension nouns (i.e most nouns ending in -a) like nauta, pirata, pirata, etc must be feminine —- morphology and gender are independent. There was merely a strong tendency for them to be feminine, but as you can see there are exceptions. In short, -a does not mean feminine.

Another factor is that all three of those nouns are loanwords from Ancient Greek, which had quite a few 1st declension nouns that are masculine. Agricola (“farmer”) is an example of a native Latin masculine noun ending in -a.

You are right that occupational words that were typically associated with men tend to be masculine. Generally, nouns that describe people do match the gender of the person, though there are some exceptions.

Note: you’ll also find some -o nouns in Italian and Spanish that are feminine (e.g. la mano “the hand”).

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#44

Post by dhosek »

dnautics wrote: post #35
trylfthsk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a good explanation for how these came to develop? I've heard it explained by saying that "they're typically men's spheres" as rationale from my brief exposure to the language, but this seems deeply unsatisfying for a variety of reasons - id est, in comparison to something along the lines of loanword/archaism/evolution of root/evolution of grammatic gender.

I was hoping someone here would be able to explain it to me!

No explanation, but Spanish has some similar things with the -ista suffix (e.g., jornalista = journalist, Zapatista = follower of Zapata, etc.).

In Latin, those nouns are grammatically feminine and would be referred to with feminine pronouns and modified with feminine adjectives. There are a handful of first-declension names that take masculine pronouns and adjectives, none of which spring to mind at the moment.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#45

Post by mannerheim »

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 ....…

Dutch in colloquial language, masculine and feminine are merged to the common gender

Danish and Swedish are both common/neuter

Norwegian depends on the dialect. The dialects with more Danish influence may drop the feminine (or they may use masculine adjectives/determiners with feminine nouns), but certain words will still more commonly be used with feminine determiners, even if it might be OK to use masculine. E.g., 'boka mi' ('my book') and 'kona mi' ('my wife') is more idiomatic than 'boken min' and 'konen min' (I'm not a native speaker, so I can't be entirely certain about this).

Icelandic has m/f/n, as does Faroese I believe.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#46

Post by pdonis »

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…

> I wonder how they defined moving versus non-moving things?

Their concept of "moving things" was what is often translated as "self-movers" in translations of works like those of Aristotle. The idea was that they were things that could move without anything else controlling them. Cars and boats don't move unless humans are controlling them. But animals do.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#47

Post by legulere »

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.

A lot of grammar is not arbitrary but just has a very rich history that is not apparent and sometimes not even traceable anymore.

Schlüssel basically is a combination of schließen (close) and the ending -el. Here this is the third meaning of -el listed on wiktionary: "suffix in agent and instrumental nouns". (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-el#German). As far as I can see all of the words that have this version of the -el suffix are masculine.

Languages are full of those rules that just are not apparent anymore, because they are so deeply layered and often apply to only a few words that they are not useful to learn.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#48

Post by stevula »

dhosek wrote: post #44
dnautics wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was hoping someone here would be able to explain it to me!

No explanation, but Spanish has some similar things with the -ista suffix (e.g., jornalista = journalist, Zapatista = follower of Zapata, etc.). In Latin, those nouns are grammatically feminine and would be referred to with feminine pronouns and modified with feminine adjectives. There are a handful of first-declension names that take masculine pronouns and adjectives, none of which spring to mind at the moment.

As with nauta, pirata, and poeta, the suffix -ista is also borrowed from Greek which is a source of many masculine 1st declension loanwords in Latin.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#49

Post by leephillips »

naringas wrote: post #42
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…

while the article is factually incorrect when claiming that Spanish has no neutral gender at all. It's also true that "lo" is seldom used in Spanish and there are almost no neutral nouns (like in german).

No, it is correct that there are no neuter nouns in Spanish. That’s all it says. And you are very incorrect about “lo”. You can’t read a page of Spanish without encountering it several times.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#50

Post by stevula »

naringas wrote: post #42
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…

while the article is factually incorrect when claiming that Spanish has no neutral gender at all. It's also true that "lo" is seldom used in Spanish and there are almost no neutral nouns (like in german).

I think the author would make the same argument that they did in reference to Romanian neuter:

> The issue is that these nouns do not behave like a fully-fledged gender. Importantly, there are no dedicated neuter endings for adjectives; instead, when a Romanian ‘neuter’ noun combines with an adjective, that adjective will be either masculine or feminine.

That is, “lo” is a remnant of the neuter but because it is accompanied by a masculine adjective (there is no such thing as a neuter adjective), it does not constitute a true gender.

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