> In the fifth declension, the only word inherited as masculine is dies, “day” [...] Eventually, the feminine gender prevailed, and all Romance reflexes of dies are feminine.
What about "un día" or "el día" in Spanish?
Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take
91–100 of 203 posts
Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take
#92I dislike the term "gender" in linguistics. Many languages have grammatical gender that has nothing to do with masculine/feminine. "Noun class" gives the idea better. Noun classes in Indo-European and a couple other major language families happen to somewhat align with grammatical markers indicating animal/human sex. But it doesn't have to. Many languages make an animate/inanimate distinction. It is one of those myst…
Yet another aspect: In Latin, after the Republic, there's an increasing loss of punctuations and word separators in the written language, and with varying writing directions, as in verses, a distinctive word ending becomes really important. (Which may be a cause for the simplification mentioned in the article.) Now also take the rather free word order into account and it may become quite clear, why forming a relation…
[deleted]
Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take
#93I dislike the term "gender" in linguistics. Many languages have grammatical gender that has nothing to do with masculine/feminine. "Noun class" gives the idea better. Noun classes in Indo-European and a couple other major language families happen to somewhat align with grammatical markers indicating animal/human sex. But it doesn't have to. Many languages make an animate/inanimate distinction. It is one of those myst…
> I dislike the term "gender" in linguistics. Many languages have grammatical gender that has nothing to do with masculine/feminine. You realize that the use of gender for grammatical noun class is the original meaning of the word, correct? Gender comes from the Latin genus, generis (via Old French), which means type, kind, sort. The genders in Latin were called masculine, feminine, and neuter because one of the noun…
great rebuttal, i learned something new! i wonder, do you happen to know how this might impact the conversation between gender and sex being two different descriptors? i'm unsure of how to go about looking at the etymological origins of both words, so help in that regard could prove just as useful. thanks.
Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take
#94It's easy to look at these various grammatical gender systems and to think it's a bit of weird useless complexity. But systems like this are useful: you can see them as providing error-correcting parity bits on nouns which make information more robustly distributed through a sentence.
Same thing with verb agreement. While noun classes/gender are relatively rare and many language families do not have them, verbal agreement is much more common. Most though not all languages have verbs that agree with the subject, and quite a few with the object, too. Even English (which lost its Latin-style morphology long ago) retains a trace of this with its single verb inflection: "I run." vs "He runs." So in a p…
For what it’s worth, English still has some remnants of a case system, too. We still distinguish the genitive case of nouns (with a case ending usually written “‘s”), and personal pronouns have four cases (I, me, my, mine).
Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's worth pointing out that, in linguistics, grammatical gender can be seen as a specific type of noun class system. The term is mostly useful when talking about Indo-European languages where the feminine-masculine distinction is most prevalent It's also worth noting that grammatical gender evolves over time. Originally, most Indo-European languages had the three classes of feminine, masculine, and neuter. But, for…
One of my favorite stories about a neutral gender being preserved is in words like Spanish esto . Typically in comparing Latin with modern Romance, the merger of neuter into masculine is one of the loss of distinguishing suffices. You can't distinguish between bonus and bonum if the final constant is lost and they are both bonu (or bueno in Spanish). But some words didn't distinguish masculine from neuter by just a c…
[deleted]
Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take
#96This brings up a slightly tangential thought I occasionally have. Is there as much of a gender "confusion" (for lack of a better word) in parts of the world that use languages that have gendered nouns? Over the past 40 years at least it seems that in the USA all of these new labels and identifiers have evolved for people who perceived their gender as not "masculine" or "feminine" but are something different altogethe…
Old English has the same gender system as German. The reason English doesn't have gendered nouns now isn't because we are so progressive, but because language tends to lose all its excess features as it gets spoken and a LOT of people speak English. Basically, people can't be bothered to do grammar properly so eventually it just goes away (see: “whom”). Also, English is not the language of gender progressives. Many c…
English lost it’s gender and most of it’s verb declensions as a result of the Norse occupation. The Norse occupied around half of Britain for several hundreds of years. Both Norse and English had these linguistic forms, but the specifics did not match and were confusing to the adult Norse trying to learn English. They adopted a simplified version and that spread among the population.
The grammatical effect was stronger than the Norman influence because the Norse lived among the English unlike the Normans who were a ruling class.
The Norman influence was more in the vocabulary and spelling. Normans were the scribes, lawyers, etc. They introduced large numbers of Norman French words that trickled out into English. Their scribes used French spelling even when writing English words. That is part of why English spelling is so complex now.
Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like the fact that in most languages with 3 genders, the word kid is neuter: German "das Kind", Slavic "ditia", Greek "teknon". I guess that's because a child is not a fully developed man/woman, so it's assumed genderless.
This feels like cherry-picking. There are non-neuter ways to refer to kids, including in those languages. Also, the diminutive (at least in German) is neuter, and is often used with children. Some of these terms are specifically neutral (i.e. not "boy" or "girl"). So the reasons are much more likely linguistic than ..sociological.
It's not cherry-picking, it's a well-known fact in Indoeuropean studies, and this interpretation is supported by some linguists.
For example (Luraghi 2018): "More than simply indicating referential sex, Luraghi (2009b: 127 and 2011) makes the argument, with which Melchert (2014: 264) agrees, that an involvement in procreation may have played a role in gender assignment in PIE. It may have been a key factor motivating the split between masculine and feminine. Nouns that referred to male or female humans/animals were, for the most part, assigned to masculine and feminine, respectively (Lundquist and Yates 2018: 2095). For example, there was the masculine noun ph2tḗr ‘father’ beside feminine méh2tēr ‘mother’ and wĺ̥kwos ‘(he-)wolf’ beside wl̥kwíhxs ‘she-wolf’ (Lundquist and Yates 2018: 2095). However, words that indicated children and young animals were often neuter in the IE languages (Melchert 2014: 264), e.g. Gk. téknon, OHG kind, and OCS dětę (Lundquist and Yates 2018: 2095). The humans/animals to which those nouns refer are too young to procreate, so, despite being physically animate, they are grammatically neuter.
A questionnaire experiment determined that feminine anaphors were used more if Mädchen referred to, for example, an eighteen-year-old girl “as opposed to a two- or [twelve]-year-old one, where neuter pronouns were more frequent. These results show that speakers perceive biological sex as more important for adults than for children” (Corbett and Fedden 2016: 522). This supports Luraghi’s theory that involvement in procreation was a factor—alongside individuation—in gender assignment in PIE"
Words that refer to children and which aren't of neuter gender today may simply be of later origin, when the system stopped being productive. For example, the Russian word for "child" is rebenok, which today has masculine gender, but stems from earlier "rebia" which was neuter (a synonym of another word, "ditia", also neuter).
Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take
#98One really interesting case is the use of the English pronoun "she" to refer to ships (and sometimes countries). This is a rare situation in which English nouns for inanimate objects can still have gender. This usage seems to be in decline, though, and is sometimes seen as sexist. But it's still used, e.g., by the National Parks Service: > Construction began in 1794 and [the USS] Constitution launched on October 21,…
Is this rare?
My impression is that the majority of people no longer use it, but you see it often enough that I wouldn’t call it “rare”.
Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take
#99I didn't read the whole article but skimmed through it and didn't see a clear answer to the question "why does grammatical gender exist"? As a native English speaker, I've never understood why it was invented in the first place.
More importantly; why hasn't it been removed? Instead of Latin, can I please have a logical language intended for thinking about scientific and engineering processes invented that's similar to the idea of the Ancients in Star Gate (the TV series)?
Language is a human social phenomenon, so it’s unlikely that it will or even can ever be perfectly logical and free of redundancy.
Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take
#100This brings up a slightly tangential thought I occasionally have. Is there as much of a gender "confusion" (for lack of a better word) in parts of the world that use languages that have gendered nouns? Over the past 40 years at least it seems that in the USA all of these new labels and identifiers have evolved for people who perceived their gender as not "masculine" or "feminine" but are something different altogethe…
This would be an interesting exploration of a sort of Sapir-Whorf type question.
Why is Sapir-Whorf so appealing? No one has been able to show more than a trivial effect on cognition from the language influences that that paper was promoting. Human thought is not rigidly channeled by vocabulary in the way that they described.