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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

#91

Post by jhoechtl »

qsort wrote: post #3
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…

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

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#92

Post by arnsholt »

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?

Pinus and quercus are both fourth declination, not second, but there seem to be some elements of the second declination that have been included at some point (pini/pinorum/pinis and querci/quercorum) which muddy the waters a bit.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#93

Post by samatman »

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…

The reverse as well, the most common being el día, "the day"

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#94

Post by jhoechtl »

gerdesj wrote: post #24
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…

"Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex" I'm quite aware of that, especially after an unfortunate encounter that never happened with a table. She claimed to be French but it turned out to be German. That all sounds a bit crap in English. I don't really know how "gender" for nouns feels or works in languages that emphasise it. We do ascribe gender to some nouns in English, such as boats/ships: "she". Why…

Petra is the feminin to Petrus, that's why.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#95

Post by oytis »

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.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#96

Post by Grustaf »

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)

Presumably, neutrum in Germanic languages comes from Proto-Indoeuropean, just like in Slavic languages or indeed Latin itself. Is there any reason to believe that it came to modern German by way of Latin?

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#98

Post by _Microft »

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.

To expand on that: -chen is usually indicating a diminutive form of another word. Some examples (also observe how that affects the vowel in the first syllable):

die Wurst, das Würstchen (the sausage, the small sausage)

der Mann, das Männchen (the man, the little man)

der Becher, das Becherchen (the cup, the small cup; this is an example in which the first vowel is phonetically close enough to the following "e" in "-chen" that no vowel change occurs (we do not even have umlauts for "i" or "e" in german)).

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#99

Post by leonry »

kgwgk wrote: post #97
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)

And, interestingly, das Mädchen (the girl).

This is because it is a diminutive, cf. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminutiv#Grammatisches_Geschl...

Re: The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter

#100

Post by thaumasiotes »

arnsholt wrote: post #92
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?

Pinus and quercus are both fourth declination, not second, but there seem to be some elements of the second declination that have been included at some point (pini/pinorum/pinis and querci/quercorum) which muddy the waters a bit.

Huh. The Lewis and Short entry just makes me feel like I'm missing something - http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=pinus&la=la#lexi...

"abl. sing. only pinu; gen. and abl. plur. pinorum and pinis)", but then it goes on to cite the accusative plural pinos in Virgil. And that note implies a strict distinction between dative plural pinibus and ablative pinis, which seems weird. Not that the rest of it isn't weird, I guess.

(As an aside, the note for quercus that "dat. and abl. plural do not occur"... I can believe that a lack of genitive and dative forms for vis is a fact about the language. Dative and ablative plural forms existing for pine trees, but not oak trees, feels more like a coincidence of the historical record than a fact about the language.)

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