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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

#101

Post by rurban »

You need to read the article before about the neuter gender in all indo-european languages.

And it needs to be discussed why german, greek and slavic kept it, and why the most modern, english, stripped all genders, but came from one of the most conservative family, german. In fact northern german is much more modern than the others. It did several radical simplifying transformations, leading to english in the end. (Simplifications = modern) Even leaving the modern roman languages behind. Which probably has Rumanian as it's most modern part. Simpler than french, italian, spanish.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#102

Post by thaumasiotes »

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 ....…

> English - nouns don't have a gender

Ordinary nouns might not appear to, but pronouns do; in fact, you can see two different gender distinctions in the English pronouns.

"Plain" pronouns have masculine, feminine, and neuter genders, he / she / it.

Interrogative/relative pronouns don't, but they do exhibit a gender distinction between who (for people) and what (for everything else). And since relative pronouns are applied to ordinary nouns, you can use relative who to identify which nouns belong to the people gender and, by implication, which don't.

(As a technical matter, you could also classify nouns into the masculine / feminine / neuter genders by looking at which pronouns substitute for them. This isn't really going to work in English. But the rules for who are strict enough to reflect a robust grammatical distinction in the language.)

The person/nonperson gender distinction is frequently read back into the plain pronouns, with it being reserved for nonpeople.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#103

Post by wolfi1 »

jhoechtl wrote: post #90

German is not a romance language yet had heavy influences from Latin. The neuter "das" is alive and kicking, no sign whatsoever of disappearance. It's das Haus (the house), das Kind (the child)

German is from another language family, I doubt that neuter was introduced from Latin

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#104

Post by euroderf »

vram22 wrote: post #74

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 :)

Finnish and Estonian also lack definite and indefinite articles (i.e. "the", "a"). Some of the work of articles is done by the use of the partitive. But in general, it's gonna take a new learner a while to get the hang of it.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#105

Post by dodobirdlord »

oytis wrote: post #95
vram22 wrote: post #74

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 :)

Latin also has no articles, neither definite or indefinite, they were later derived from personal pronouns in Romance languages. Same for lower/upper case and punctuation marks, it's all (relatively) late invention - after the Classical period at least.

In the Classical period Latin was so punctuation-free that words weren't even separated by spaces.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#106

Post by tom_mellior »

jhoechtl wrote: post #91
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.

If you take die Klaviatur you have it female in german as well. It's just that Schlüssel is of different semantic origin compared to clave

Klaviatur is feminine not because of the etymology of the root, but rather because of the ending -tur.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#107

Post by tom_mellior »

patcon wrote: post #33
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 found this passage really provocative as well! It got me wondering what sort of conceptualization and distinction these cultures and early humans had around gender when they didn't see gender as the original way to split themselves. It got me thinking about what sort of language a descendent of bonobos might develop, and even whether proto humans conceived of gender in a more fluid way during co-evolution of langua…

Why would they need to "split themselves"? What's good about creating divisions for divisions' sake? It's certainly not necessary for human languages to have gender distinctions.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#108

Post by Zanni »

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?

You can copy and paste unfamiliar words (or words in unfamiliar languages) into Google Translate and hit the speaker button to get a pronunciation.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#109

Post by ochrist »

lordnacho wrote: post #56
mannerheim wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.,…

Bornholmish retains three genders, in contrast to standard Danish.

It's a bit more complicated than that: https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danske_dialekter

Look at the map here: https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danske_dialekter#/media/Fil:De...

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#110

Post by bandie91 »

tom_mellior wrote: post #21
bandie91 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

danke for the interpretation. i hoped someone clarifies it for me :)
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