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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

#71

Post by jrumbut »

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…

I've learned that there's an element of randomness and momentum, and sometimes you just get a raw deal. What still kills me is when some post gets downvoted and someone replies "you're getting downvoted but actually that's a good post!" and they get upvoted.

It's not as though you can trade the upvotes for prizes anyway.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#72

Post by dasil003 »

coliveira wrote: post #68

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.

Sure but este/esse/esta/essa are demonstrative adjectives. Isso/isto are standalone nouns which don’t take adjectives themselves, so how do you distinguish their gender?

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#73

Post by msrenee »

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...

Russian is not a romance language. It having a neutral gender is not relevant to this article. There's lots of languages that have a neutral gender, just not really any currently spoken romance languages.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#74

Post by vram22 »

A few interesting language-related points:

Sanskrit and Hindi have no equivalent of the English word "the" (and, I think, of "a" either).

Sanskrit and Hindi have no concept of upper case vs. lower case letters, just a concept of letters.

Also, a vertical bar is the equivalent of the period or full stop of English.

Just realized (IIRC) that neither language has the concept of single or double quotation marks either :)

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#75

Post by tomcooks »

> For example, in some contexts, Roma ‘Rome’ will be pronounced Rroma in Neapolitan; to go ‘to Rome’ is to go a Rroma, with a doubled or ‘geminated’ consonant.

I believe it's to phonetically make it separate from "aroma".

You could say the same as "o libro" mentioned a paragraf below, which is spelled "o libbrõ" while libro is, and was, masculine

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#76

Post by tomcooks »

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.

(Jornalista is Portuguese, you're looking for periodista)

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#77

Post by Sniffnoy »

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 didn't downvote, but if it's being downvoted, it's probably because the article does mention "lo", although only in the context of Asturian, not standard Spanish.

> Distinct but unofficial Romance languages like [...] Asturian (spoken in Asturias, a part of Spain) seem to have definite articles (equivalent to English the) for three genders, not two. Asturian has el for masculine nouns, la for feminine and lo for those nouns termed ‘neuter’. [...] The key question is whether these supposed neuter definite articles demonstrate the existence of a neuter gender. Again, sadly, the answer is no. These definite articles and the nouns they are used with (no matter what their origins) seem not to constitute a neuter gender, but rather to signify that the noun is something abstract or a physical mass – that is, an indivisible substance, like water or gold. [...] Why does this contradict the existence of a neuter gender? Because we find this “mass gender” (Harmon 2007) used with nouns that were not neuter in Latin, and because nouns in these languages can appear both with and without the feature, according to whether they have a mass meaning or not. This is therefore not a grammatical feature on the same level as the masculine and feminine genders; instead, the mass gender is a feature of nouns determined by semantics – to what sort of thing the noun refers.

If you wanted to talk about "lo" in standard Spanish, it would make more sense to start from the starting point of what's discussed in the article -- e.g., "The 'lo' construction actually exists in standard Spanish as well, although it's more restricted than in Asturian; rather than being used with any mass noun, it's used to mean..."

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#78

Post by gregopet »

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…

Slovenian & a couple of other Slavic languages even still have the dual besides plural and singular :)

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#79

Post by alexaholic »

canjobear wrote: post #27

The article is wrong that all Romance languages lost the neuter. Romanian still has it. Edit: I just had to read further :) But I’m not convinced by the author’s argument that Romanian neuter is not a real gender.

In Latin, the neuter has a distinct form. In Romanian, it’s a combination: masculine in singular and feminine in plural. What the article does is it takes a look at these differences and merely states the obvious, that the Romanian neuter is ambigenous, thus the Latin neuter (as a third, distinct, form) didn’t make it.
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