Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

dannybate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 136 posts

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#61

Post by DavidSJ »

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #20
danans wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wer…

Teaching a foreigner one's native language is one of those situations where completely arbitrary conventions (including, by the way, how to segment and classify phonemes!) can misleadingly seem like "obvious" facts, and like the foreigner is just being weirdly obtuse by not having a built-in intuition for those arbitrary conventions.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#62

Post by thaumasiotes »

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…

> My understanding is this derives from the Latin neuter as well.

Does it? Spanish articles derive from Latin ille / illa / illud ["that", as contrasted with "this"]. The neuter (nominative) form is illud. It is not obvious how this would have resulted in the form lo. Wiktionary suggests ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lo#Spanish ) that it derives from the masculine form illum, which makes much more phonological sense. (-m was already so weak in Latin that a syllable ending in -m completely disappeared when followed by a vowel.)

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#63

Post by kleton »

TylerE wrote: post #58
ilammy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see the same thing in Russian and other slavic languages, for example, where you can use "-о" to convert an adjective into concept noun (of always neuter gender). For example, "добрый" (masculine adjective "good)" => "добро" (neuter noun "the good").

What would those sound like phonetically for those of us that can't read cryllic?

Like Greek alphabet from math class except for the ы closest to a short i. dobry, dobro

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#64

Post by School-Cotton »

Mlller wrote: post #40
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…

Yes, the expressions “moving” – “not-moving” are rather misleading. The actual distinction according to this theory (or to my favourite flavour of this theory) was: “able to act willfully” – “unable to act willfully”. The distinction was quite logical. Cp.: (A) “Susan runs down the hill.” (B) “Water runs down the hill.” (C) “Susan drinks water.” A speaker of Proto-Indo-European might have said, learning English: “Thi…

> all over the old IE languages, neuter nouns have the same form for the nominative and the accusative

The lack of distinction between neuter nominative and neuter accusative is not just true of nouns in old IE languages. It's true of all grammatical categories in virtually all modern IE languages too (with some very obscure exceptions). Consider German articles der/den vs. das/das. Or English pronouns she/her vs. it/it.

More info: https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/18/accusative-equa...

https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/9105/why-do-...

Apparently one of the obscure exceptions is the Russian word оно - but they are indeed quite rare.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#65

Post by coliveira »

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.

These masculine words of 1st declension are typically of greek origin. They follow the 1st dec. pattern, despite being of the masculine genre.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#66

Post by School-Cotton »

mattkrause wrote: post #52
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.

German will raise you the grammatically neuter “Mädchen”, meaning girl or maiden.

That's because of a systematic rule that all words ending in the "chen" morpheme are neuter.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#67

Post by stevula »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #62
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…

> My understanding is this derives from the Latin neuter as well. Does it? Spanish articles derive from Latin ille / illa / illud ["that", as contrasted with "this"]. The neuter (nominative) form is illud . It is not obvious how this would have resulted in the form lo . Wiktionary suggests ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lo#Spanish ) that it derives from the masculine form illum , which makes much more phonological…

The etymology you linked actually says something different:

> From a Vulgar Latin *lo, *illu. Masculine pronoun from Latin illum, singular masculine accusative of ille. Neuter article and pronoun form from Latin illud, neuter of ille. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lo#Spanish

That means some uses of "lo" are derived from masculine ille while others are indeed from neuter illud. To answer your phonological uncertainty, the entry shows derivation from illud > *illu > lo.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#68

Post by coliveira »

The latin neuter still lives in a few common words in romance languages. For example, in Portuguese the words for "this" can be este, esta, isto. The first two are masculine and feminine. The third one is neuter, and doesn't go with masculine or feminine words. For example, you can say "este homem" (this man), but "isto" (this) remains alone.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#69

Post by School-Cotton »

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.

In addition to Russian, there are many other Indo-European languages that retain the neuter. E.g.: Icelandic, German, modern Greek. And some others besides Latin have lost it: Old Persian had it but modern Persian doesn't; same for Sanskrit vs. modern Hindi.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#70

Post by School-Cotton »

dhosek wrote: post #41
falcor84 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 adjecti…

Icelandic also retains a complex system of noun declensions.
Post reply on HN