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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

#121

Post by tom_mellior »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #102
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 a…

This now makes me wonder if there are languages that do not make a who/what distinction.

Hungarian has no gender and doesn't even have distinct pronouns for he and she, but it does have a distinction between the pronoun ő (he/she/sentient animal/sometimes informally for inanimate objects) on the one hand and the determiners (?) ez/az (literally this/that, for inanimate objects) on the other hand. There is also a clear distinction between ki/mi (who/what). I've never heard of this being analyzed as a "gender" distinction, but I guess if the definition of gender is along the lines of "a group of words that behave in a distinct way", then it applies.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#122

Post by tom_mellior »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #105
oytis wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Weren't center dots common as word separators instead of spaces? For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome#/media/File:201...

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#123

Post by oytis »

stevula wrote: post #43
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.

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 d…

Greek, for one, also has 2nd declension feminine nouns, e.g. παρθένος.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#124

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

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 was wondering the same thing. I've been told that in Spanish, you use the neuter when you don't know what the correct gender for something should be. As in:

"Te deseo lo mejor"

"I want the best for you"

In that phrase, the speaker doesn't know what gender "the best" is, so neuter is used.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#125

Post by mattkrause »

School-Cotton wrote: post #66
mattkrause wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, there's a certain logic to it.

I just think it's an unimpeachable example of the disconnect between biological and grammatical gender.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#126

Post by dhosek »

gregopet wrote: post #78
dhosek wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Czech takes it a bit further and changes declensions for plurals greater than 4 (it actually just drops some cases and uses the genitive plural form instead—I forget the details). I suspect this is an odd variant of the dual rule from some proto-Slavic language.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#127

Post by vram22 »

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.

Wow, I had no idea of this. Interesting. My guess is that these points in common between Sanskrit, Hindi and Latin may be because of the PIE (Proto-Indo-European) ancestry of all three of them (and other European and Indian languages too).

There are many other points in common, such as similar-sounding everyday words like mother/ mata/mater, father/pitr/pita/pater, deci/dasha, brother/bhrata, deva/deus, and many more, although all may not have been derived through the common ancestry route; some can be loanwords or other,e.g. via Hindi -> Arabic -> European.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#128

Post by dnautics »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #87
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.

I'm even more interested in the fact that Latin tree names are second declension feminine. Pinus, quercus, etc. How did that work out?

I always ascribed that to be because the romans thought that nymphs inhabited trees. But are you sure those are second declension and not fourth declension?

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#129

Post by thaumasiotes »

tom_mellior wrote: post #121
thaumasiotes wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

This now makes me wonder if there are languages that do not make a who/what distinction. Hungarian has no gender and doesn't even have distinct pronouns for he and she, but it does have a distinction between the pronoun ő (he/she/sentient animal/sometimes informally for inanimate objects) on the one hand and the determiners (?) ez/az (literally this/that, for inanimate objects) on the other hand. There is also a clea…

The Latin interrogative pronouns are quis (masculine and feminine) and quid (neuter). I do not believe there is any distinction made between people and nonpeople. (Quis on its own will be translated as "who", and quid as "what", but this is just an example of the more general phenomenon that when modifiers appear alone in Latin, you supply an implicit "man", "woman", or "thing" as the noun to be modified. Thus dicta is common in the meaning "things that were said", without the need to explicitly say res [things] dictae or verba [words] dicta, and quis is common in the meaning "who?" without the need to explicitly say quis homo. If you wanted to ask "what sand...?", you'd say quis harena, not quid harena.)

The relative pronouns are qui (masculine) / quae (feminine) / quod (neuter); again I don't think any distinction is available to be made between people and nonpeople. You have to use the pronoun that matches m/f/n gender.

> I guess if the definition of gender is along the lines of "a group of words that behave in a distinct way"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender :

> In linguistics, grammatical gender is a specific form of noun class system in which the division of noun classes forms an agreement system with another aspect of the language, such as adjectives, articles, pronouns, or verbs.

In this case, we have an agreement system between nouns and pronouns.

There is another very significant division of noun classes in English, the division between mass nouns ("stuff"; "ice cream") and count nouns ("things"; "ice cube"). This has effects in several areas of the grammar (e.g. mass nouns do not have plural forms), and it does have some agreement effects also (you could analyze many and much as the same word in agreement with a count noun (for many) or a mass noun (for much)), but this distinction for whatever reason usually wouldn't be thought of as a "gender". The people/nonpeople distinction, which is reflected only in agreement effects, is much more typical of the terminology "gender".

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#130

Post by thaumasiotes »

dnautics wrote: post #128
thaumasiotes wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm even more interested in the fact that Latin tree names are second declension feminine. Pinus, quercus, etc. How did that work out?

I always ascribed that to be because the romans thought that nymphs inhabited trees. But are you sure those are second declension and not fourth declension?

> But are you sure those are second declension and not fourth declension?

No, I'm not sure. See the sibling subthread. They're not less weird in the fourth declension, which is itself overwhelmingly masculine or neuter.

That said, second declension forms do seem to be attested for nearly every case of pinus.

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