Why do some languages use gendered nouns? It seems to just add more complexity for no benefit.
Because languages aren’t constructed, they ‘evolved’ naturally from humans communicating with one another for many generations. As such, they aren’t intended to be as simple as possible. They aren’t intended in the first place. They’ve grown over time with no regard for whether the rules makes sense because nobody designed those rules, they just happened.
Okay, thank you. Anyway: is here somebody who actually knows WHY this happened? What was the underlying cause for our ansestors to start using it? What were they trying to achieve or solve? (UNINTENTIONALLY, okay, we got it.)
I’m just speculating, but I could imagine they personfied objects and maybe transfered gender to objects that way?
I think this is it. In Russian everything is gendered. A table is male and a plate is female. But the rule is simple. Any noun anding in a constant is a male, vowels are female except for nounds ending in “o” and “eh” (Э), those are “it”. But there doesn’t appear to be meaning behind which item is assigned which gender.
Interesting. I like that rule more than German’s “Whatever gender it FELT like to whoever decided”
That seems like the most likely reason for why it happened
While I don’t actually know a goddamn thing about the history of this, that doesn’t seem to work too well once you look at more languages. While a male/female or male/female/neuter system is common in Indo-European languages, other language groups use versions that have more distinctions and haven’t traditionally been associated with gender. Most languages in the Atlantic-Congo group that a lot of the southern half of Africa speaks have between ten and twenty different categories of noun in that sense. That’s why they’re more formally called “noun classes” rather than “grammatical genders”
We don’t have a lot of records of what speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language were thinking because they lived c. 4500-2500 BC and didn’t have their own writing. I think the for the earliest writing we have of an Indo-European language gendered nouns had already been invented.
I can say that having gendered nouns does add a little bit more information to communication. Like if we are talking about a man and a woman and we’re using pronouns, then “he spoke to her” is unambiguous as to who is doing what. Likewise, if all nouns have a gender, you encounter more situations where the gender adds some extra context and leads to marginally less ambiguity. So if you’re at a bakery and there are two adjacent items behind the counter, one with masculine gender and one with feminine gender, and you point and say “can I have her please”, there is no need for the baker to ask if you mean this one or that one, they know based on gender.
Not saying this makes gender “worth it”, but in an emergent system, small things like this might have given it enough of a foothold to exist.
Most things humans do are to solve things, but how they do that is a mix of trying to solve the thing and humans just latching on to random stuff and it sticking around. Especially when it comes to language.
Being able to communicate complex concepts made it easier for them to work together. Once the hominids became apex predators, their main adversaries were other hominids. Again, in that case, the better you can communicate, the better your chances for survival are.
These bits of grammar don’t always actually communicate any extra information about anything other than the grammar of the language you’re speaking, though. The “gender” of the thing in question can’t reliably be distinguished from grammar since even in the Indo-European languages where the noun classes are typically thought of as masculine or feminine, the word’s grammatical gender can contradict its actual gender. The Old English word for “woman”, back when English had grammatical gender, was masculine.
So is “das Mädchen” in German, it is a young female but it’s neutrally gendered.
Esperanto is designed, and so is C++.
I thought this was a discussion about languages people speak.
Esperanto is an interesting case though but it wasn’t designed to be as simple as a language can be (since that is highly subjective). It was designed to have as many similarities as possible to major European language in order to make it easier for speakers of those European languages to learn.
Esperanto is an interesting case though but it wasn’t designed to be as simple as a language can be
Maybe not literally the simplest possible, but simplicity was certainly an important guiding principle. The idea was just to not make it too taxing to learn, since natural languages have a lot of arbitrary complexity in them.
Not really. Your description fits Interlingua a lot better than Esperanto.
For example the word for “legalize” looks like legaliz- in lots of European languages, but in Esperanto it’s “laŭleĝigi” (laŭ = according to, leĝ = law, ig = cause to be, i = verb infinitive). There are many more examples like that, even the Internet is called Interreto in Esperanto.
How do you say “I’m very lonely” in C++?
throw NullPointerException;They’re lonely on purpose?
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C++ is perhaps a great example of a language that has evolved over time without people putting a lot thought in it.
Got ‘em!
It probably seems extra complexity for you, if your language does not use it. For native speakers it is just natural and not using it would be at least weird.
We could ask the same question about articles . Those ‘the’ and ‘a’, why use them? It only makes English language harder to use! ‘Apple is apple’ why add another meaningless word?
Of course after learning and using English for years I see the meaning of ‘a’ and ‘the’ and thy feel quite natural for me to (though sometimes they still make little sense to me – all the fights whether ‘The’ can be used with some proper name or not). The point is: a lot of features of a foreign language will fill alien and unnecessary.
Maybe more on topic, that is how/why gendered words work in Polish: noun gender is usually linked to how it ends (but do not confuse that with suffixes of grammatical cases). Virtually all Polish women names end with ‘a’, so any other noun ending in ‘a’ sounds feminine and would be used in similar way. And sometimes it just ‘rhymes’ – like in ‘to jabkło’ (‘this apple’ – neuter), ‘ta gruszka’ (‘this pear’ – feminine), ‘ten banan’ (‘this banana’ – masculine). Of course thing get much more complicated than that (like in every language, just in different parts of the language).
People were just talking in the way that it was convenient for them. And thousands years later scholars called this feature of particular set of languages ‘gender’ because words used seem to be related to genders.
Side note. The evolves out of this and that. Over time the romance languages just cut the old Latin words up. Most of the time you can sub this or that for the. The other times we use is kund of as a topic marker.
Man if fucking only gender endings rhymed with the direct article being used to refer to them, that would have made learning french so much easier if all masculine nouns ended in e as in le and all feminine nouns ended in a as in la
It’s a thing that can happen as more complex case ending systems like Latin lose audible distinctions over time.
You might think that’d just result in linguistic gender being skipped in favor of no case endings altogether like English, but that’s not why English is theorized to have nixed gender.
Linguists have started to theorize that the Danelaw is what killed english grammatical gender, as old English and Old Norse were similar-ish languages at the time with a decent level of mutual intelligibility, but the big sticking point would have been disagreements on grammatical gender between the two languages. So the theory goes that inhabitants of the Danelaw just kinda stopped using it to facilitate less confusing mutual conversation when interacting with a speaker of the other language, and eventually that innovation spread south with the unification of the seven kingdoms into England.
What this tells us is that given a language with grammatical gender, it takes a very narrow set of circumstances to facilitate the conditions where a group might naturally innovate genderless communication.
What’s actually kinda interesting is that Esperanto is having a moment like this, while technically you are to use the pronouns Li and Sxi, for he and her, Duolingo has a lot of the use of Si, which is a singular they, and since a lot of esperanto’s modern speakers are duolingo users, a lot of folks are just using si.
Awesome answer.
I came here for NoStupidQuestions, but was blessed with AskLinguists! Haha
it takes a very narrow set of circumstances to facilitate the conditions where a group might naturally innovate genderless communication.
Do you know more about how does that work with languages that have had no gender to begin with? Hungarian for example has had no gendered nouns or pronouns for the past millennia.
If other Uralic languages are genderless I’d imagine it’s just always been that way as far as can be reconstructed, otherwise I’d need to know more about the development of the Hungarian language from before the conquest of the Pannonian basin, because I’d imagine that you’d find the answers there if at all.
I also don’t presume that genderless language has to evolve from gendered language, I was just pointing out that that’s how it happened with English, a lot of east asian languages don’t have grammatical gender for example and I’m like 99% sure that happened without a Danelaw scenario necessitating it to avoid fights breaking out over misgendering the nice silk everyone was admiring.
oftentimes grammatical gender actually makes the language easier, paradoxically, and I’m sure there’s a really good explanation out there
I don’t have the source with me, but I recall a paper about listening to various languages under different signal/ noise thresholds. If I recall correctly, languages like German that have multiple declensions were about to better able to parse noisy samples because of the redundant information. Sorry for not having the source off hand though.
Are you able to provide an example as to how greater complexity makes it easier
Edit: Thanks for the explanations. I get that multiple languages use gendered nouns to mean something that is clearly not ‘gender’ in the biological sense but key to understanding context. Seems strange as an English speaker where noun gender is vestigial if it even exists at all and even then it doesn’t matter if someone gets it wrong
For example, you hear a word that sounds (exactly/a bit) like another word, and can tell it’s not that other word, because the other word has a different gender. Or you only really need to learn one word because both are very similar. Some examples:
Spanish : La Nina/La Nino. Both basically the same world (female/male child) and sound the same, unlike boy/girl in English.
Dutch : Het jacht = the boat / yacht, de jacht = the hunt. No need to guess the meaning of the word from the context, you can go by gender.
Spanish: El Capital = Capital as in money, La Capital = Capital as in Capital City.
French: Un Livre = a book. La livre = pound sterling.
This is an off the cuff example. Yes you can rephrase to get around this. It’s just an example.
The chair and the table don’t go together because it’s made of wood.
The chair and the table don’t go together because it’s made(female version) of wood.
Since you ‘know’ tables get female articles and such, you know the speaker is talking about the table and not the chair. This is how Romanian works.
Yes, I am aware that singular chairs are male and plural chairs are female in Romanian which wouldn’t clarify anything if the sentence was “The chairs and the tables don’t go together because they’re made(female version) of wood.”
try making a really simple language, and figure out that it gets really difficult to speak because you start confusing shit. excessive complexity isn’t good either but some complexity is needed, and gender gives some of that. I have nothing to back this up though
German.
Gerwoman.
How do they make things easier? (Asking as a German).
It’s a mouthful, but concise. (Telling as a non-german).
I agree that German is concise. I just don’t see what the gendered nouns are contributing to that quality or any other one.
Who said anything about gendered nouns? The question was about greater complexity making things easier.
In my eyes, the German language achieves that.Who said anything about gendered nouns?
The title of this post is “Why do some languages use gendered nouns?” …
Sometimes more specific (sometimes. Verbs carry some widely different meaning and depend on propositions to differentiate), but not always more concise. If you’ve done or compared German-English translations, you see the English is always shorter, both in word and—especially in—character counts. My experience has been usually about 20, up to 30, percent.
Deutsch ist total einfach. Weiß doch jeder.
Supposedly it helps understanding what would otherwise be considered vague statements in an ungendered language, and with being able to understand what’s being said even in a loud environment.
Personally I think 90% of the drama around it comes from the bad decision of calling it gender instead of something else, because now english media has put the concept on blast for the silliness of assuming the moon has a penis and the sun has a vagina, when the purpose it’s supposed to serve doesn’t actually have anything to do with clarifying that specifically as much as clarifying which of two or more similar sounding words that sound like “sun” or “moon” you’re trying to actually refer to.
Maybe clarifier classes? Call it CC (X) where X is the indicator that tells you which class it’s in in that specific language. So CC(O) for masculines in Spanish, or CC(T) for feminines in Arabic
The simple answer I’m seeing on a quick review is that it is a way to simplify the complexity of the many possible nouns that could be uttered.
“LA pap”
“LE pep”These are imaginary words but the articles will help distinguish them from each other for a native speaker. They sound similar but I know it was “pap” and not “pep” because I also heard “la”.
Also, gender is just ONE of the many possible dimensions used by noun classes in language. There are also things like size and animate/inanimate that are used by languages.
Because everyone knows the sun has a penis and the moon has a fanny
In German it’s the opposite.
Not in lotr world. There its the opposite, with the male moon chasing the ‘flaming hot’ female sun across the skies.
Flaming hot is my addition but its kinda remarkably fitting : )
- Ten (he) mesiac (moon)
- To (it) slnko (sun)
We got neutral genders in Slovak as well.
For example
- Tá žena (that (she) woman)
- To dievča (that (it) girl)
- Ten chlap (that (he) man)
It all depends on how the word sounds and changes when you say it in different ways (skloňovanie / bending the word).
And we also got 4 patterns for each gender based on which how the word changes so you get over 20 combinations on how to say word in each gender.
pop nob in fanny
There is benefit to complexity. When you say “Mike and Susan went back home because he forgot his suitcase”, you don’t have to repeat Mike three times because the gendered pronouns carry that information, but you also know who the suitcase belongs to and who forgot it.
Pretty sure that OP is referring to noun class systems. English doesn’t use one, but most other European languages do and English used to. Like German’s three equivalents to English’s “the”: der, die, and das, which German changes depending on the noun class (“grammatical gender”) of the noun in question regardless of its actual gender or whether it even has one
Zehzins example is also true for objects. “After the cat jumped on the table with the glass and the bowl it pushed it down.” Did the cat push down the glass or the bowl? In german for example it’s “Nachdem die Katze auf den Tisch mit dem Glas und der Schüssel gesprungen ist, hat sie sie heruntergestoßen.” (In this case the bowl) or “Nachdem die Katze auf den Tisch mit dem Glas und der Schüssel gesprungen ist, hat sie es heruntergestoßen.” (In this case the glass).
Your cat example works because it shows an example that is ambiguous in English but not in German. Zezhin’s example was showing something that wasn’t ambiguous in English, a language with no noun class distinctions outside of referring to things by their actual gender, so there’s no benefit to having more general noun classes in that example
He was showing how gendered words can resolve ambiguity in an example were this also applies in english, so that you can extrapolate to situations like the one I (or the other replies) showed.
Same thing applies. For instance, you could say “I like drinking tea, but I’d rather drink beer, but “she” 's bad for you”.
Granted, in this case it’s not at all necessary because you don’t even need a pronoun here to get the information but I’m not great at examples lol
The post above you talks about the same. In English, if you say “I see a door and a window. It is open”, it is not quite clear what “it” is. But if door is male gender and window is neutral gender, then it becomes clear that “it” refers to window in that sentence.
I am quite disappointed. I also think same exact question as my native language is not gender based. I expect to see answers based on studies or research. Much that I see here are opinions. Lemmy doesn’t seem to have subject matter experts.
Takes time. Reddit took a decade or more to get to that point.
Languages don’t care about complexity. Look at Polish. It’s like it makes things complex on purpose. Language evolution is not only about simplifying thing. It’s also about conveying meaning and will adapt to the culture that uses it.
Ok it strange thing that we call them gender. It goes back ancient greek.
Really what Spanish does is put all nouns into 2 groups, the A group and the O group. Then you have rules like el goes on o nouns and la goes on a nouns.
these evolve out of more complex classifier sysyems with many more categories. There is a podcast called lexicon vally that goes over this more details.
Robwords has an interesting video on this subject.
That was interesting, but I think this explains it a bit better.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ljrtQtj4BOM&pp=ygUbTGluZ3Vpc3RpY3MgbGFuZ3VhZ2UgZ2VuZGVy
ETA: Good wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender
ETA: Lots more info, including interesting papers:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=linguistics+grammatical+gender&ia=web
Quick Question (to OP and beyond) - the English language has wording for the gender of a person who acts - actor/actress.
Yet, these days, most people in the movie or theatre industry call themselves “actors”. They’ve dropped the word “actress”.
Do we know why?
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part of a wider trend eg “waitstaff” or “server” instead of “waiter”/“waitress”
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due to traditional heirarchies, most job descriptions ending in -ess (or worse, starlet instead of star) are a devalued or less respected title
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easier to just have one plural
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if i’m not mistaken, the explanation fpr portuguese is that latin didn’t had gendered nouns, you had it, she, he, basically, but in the evolution it and he got merged, so we have she and he, i can be totally wrong tho
Él, ella, elle Yes now there’s 3 of them
Complexity is a benefit when it comes to language, as it allows greater or more robust transfer of information. There’s a good comment downthread about how gender makes a language more robust: you know which object a pronoun refers to.
I’ll point out that English is not free of gendered nouns, either: Ships, cities, and most nations are feminine, for example.
Ships, cities, and most nations are feminine, for example.
Ships maybe but the other two are only feminine to old people. Even the stodgiest newspaper isn’t saying things like “The US sends her ambassador”.
Super interesting perspective. As a person with a complicated relationship with gender it’s always seemed purely like a nuisance to me: that it would just further complicate the conversations about gender that are already so semantically tedious and fatiguing in English.
I appreciate you broadening my perspective to include more than one way of looking at the subject
It’s just a strange name for a more or less arbitrary way to group words together. It has close to nothing to do with gender as identity.
Those are just esoteric or poetic uses. It’s perfectly fine to just say “it” in all those cases, but there is still a distinction for people. It’s worth considering the possibilities of that disappearing as well. In any case, we don’t conjugate differently for genders
