the mystery of gender

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Frank Antonson

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There has been an amazing discussion on this forum of morphemes in various languages. That discussion is continuing, and I hope it doesn't stop soon.

I would love to see a similar discussion of the phenomenon of gender. WHY does it exist in so many languages? WHY did English move to thing class vs person class in lieu of the masculine/feminine thing?

WHY is "sun" masculine in the Romance languages but feminine in German whereas "moon" is the opposite in both languages?

If there is an easy, established answer to these questions, I would love to hear it. Rather, I have always assumed that I would not live long enough to find that this mystery has been solved.
 

chester_100

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Sure, we'll certainly talk about it.
 

Frank Antonson

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I have to wonder if you observers of this thread are avoiding commenting because gender truly is a mystery.

This should be a great chance to enlighten a fairly wide audience on this subject. Where I teach there is a Latin and French teacher who is very ready to see what you have to say.

WHY is it there in so many languages? What is its history? Is it decaying (mutating) elsewhere as it has in English?
 

chester_100

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This should be a great chance to enlighten a fairly wide audience on this subject.
I' agree.

Usually when the reader feels he has to dissect an undefined bulk of information, he is discouraged.
The word ''mystery'' introduces something untraceable. So personally, I observe some factors involved in the evolution of linguistic gender; the readers, depending on their interests and the language they speak, may write about their view on any of the suggested factors or just anything they find effective:
Historical, biological, psychological, cultural, tribal, cognitive, mythological, linguistic, racial ... .
 

chester_100

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Biological Source

First of all we have to trace the possible connection between biological gender and linguistic gender.

It's argued that we can't find an immediate relation between what we know as a biological fact in a living creature and the linguistic application of that fact to refer to inanimate objects. In other words, classifying the entities under 'masculine' or 'feminine' in a particular language will not give any actual information to a person about the true nature of the entities.

Furthermore, we can't guess to which class a word like 'ciel' belongs. That is, regardless of physical disorders, we can be certain of a person's biological gender, but we can never be so sure of the linguistic gender of a word in a special language. For instance, we know that a girl is a female; accordingly, we expect the word 'girl' to be linguistically feminine in a language, but surprisingly enough, it's not feminine in a language: mädchen.

One could say there are some factors that can't be explained by a merely biological analysis.
 

Frank Antonson

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Thank you for responding. I am full of questions.

I know about "das Mädchen" and always assumed that it had something to do with the diminutive on the end of the root. In French "le lait" -- Now, WHAT is masculine about milk?

Is there something way deep in the human mind that wants to divide the world by gender? I have never been hard-working enough to study and understand Chomsky, but surely he had something to say about this.

Gender makes agreement (or concordance) so much more complicated! Maybe that is a GOOD thing. And yet, the English language seems to do okay without it. (Actually I have my suspicions that English is "missing the boat" here and that our language would be richer if gender, as in Old English, had survived.)
 

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I can contribute to the discussion as far as my knowledge extends.
Explaining why 'milk' is masculine in a language like French is pretty much like explaining why we call the area above the Earth 'sky', or why we use 'l', 'a', 'i', and 't' as sounds to make up 'lait', or many other questions like these.

Is it necessary to keep linguistic gender?

I. Let's see what an Aristotelian deduction would look like considering the already given information in the post:

· Major Premise: Anything void of actual (sensible or cognitive) information is not contributive to perception and can be eliminated.
· Minor Premise: Linguistic gender is void of actual information.
· Logical Conclusion: Linguistic gender is not contributive to perception and can be eliminated.

II. The above argument may be acceptable, but we need something that can be empirically observed. Surmising the future development of a phenomenon is not as reliable as observing what the phenomenon has already undergone, or is undergoing.

· Persian: the possibility of the elimination of linguistic gender is evidenced by the total evaporation of this aspect in Middle Persian.

· English: is going through the same process, and we have witnessed the decline of gender in the language.


Edit: the grammar of the above sentence.
 
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Frank Antonson

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Dear Chester,

Are you TRYING to be obtuse? I am not brilliant, but I am also not completely stupid. Yet I barely understand what you are saying.

"Le lait" in French simply cannot be explained -- is that what you mean?

It is Saturday night, and I am thinking that maybe on Sunday morning you might be better able to explain to me what you mean.

Having read your post, I don't feel any closer to having an understanding of the mystery of gender.

I hope you do not take offense at this. I genuinely would like to understand this phenomenon. Perhaps, if you would think of me as an eight-year-old and try again to explain it, I might understand.

In any case, I appreciate your comment. Could you be less brilliant? I am not worth impressing, but I am very much wanting to learn.

Frank
 

chester_100

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Here are your basic questions:



WHY is it there in so many languages?

I defined some variables so that we could get a clearer picture of the problem, breaking it into some elemental components.
Then, I described one of the possibly effective variables which is the biological source.
I clarified that other members might express their views about any of the factors they're interested in.


What is its history?

I can't answer this one. I told you that my knowledge is limited.
I can't really place the source, but I remember having read something quoted by or originally written by the founder of psychoanalysis - I hope somebody guides me. There, it was stated that outward or outstanding objects are usually masculine.
Anyway, there's certainly a primitive element involved. And it dates back to prehistoric origins of language - that should be explained by a historian, archeologist, or a linguist who has done research in the field.

Is it decaying (mutating) elsewhere as it has in English?

My #7 post is immediately concerned with this question. It's about the present and naturally the future. So our treatment should be predictive here. A careful reader would understand that I've made a prediction: in the future there will be more languages that lose their language gender. Still, I can't figure out what's so vague about it. That's the classical logical argumentation backed up with empirical data. If there is any other way of extrapolating the future development of the phenomenon, I would appreciate it most if you introduced it to me.

That's all I can contribute for now.

C
 

Frank Antonson

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Chester,

You are very impressive.

Did you mean Sigmund Freud for the founder of psycho-analysis?

From your perspective it seems to me that gender remains quite a mystery.

Of course, if there were some easy way to predict the gender of a newly acquired vocabulary word for the learner of a foreign language it would be EXTREMELY useful.

Nouns ending in "-a" in the Romance languages are usually feminine, as I am sure that you know. But then certain nouns like "mapa" or "dia" or "ideia" break that pattern. I believe that THAT is predictable from their etymology -- coming from Greek.

I believe that virtually ALL nouns ending with "-ion" are feminine in French (and probably "-cion" in Spanish and "-ção" in Portuguese.) regardless of what they mean. Of course "-o" tends to predict masculine in the Romance languages -- e.g. people's names. Julio vs Julia.

I don't know. It certainly remains a mystery to me.

Regarding the future, I suppose that you are right. Here where I live the English spoken is just archaic enough that trees or logs are treated as masculine by the older farmers. "I cut HIM down and drug HIM out of the woods." Cars are feminine. "SHE won't start."
 

Frank Antonson

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"Is it necessary to keep linguistic gender?

I. Let's see what an Aristotelian deduction would look like considering the already given information in the post:

· Major Premise: Anything void of actual (sensible or cognitive) information is not contributive to perception and can be eliminated.
· Minor Premise: Linguistic gender is void of actual information.
· Logical Conclusion: Linguistic gender is not contributive to perception and can be eliminated."

I guess that I don't completely accept either of your premises. Linguistic gender is certainly contributive within the personal pronouns in English. And in other languages the contribution that gender makes to agreement serves to clarify meanings. I think it is one of the reasons that word order is not so important in Latin.

Could the decline of gender be related to the increased importance of word order?

Is there some historical linguist out there who can contribute to solving this mystery?


 

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Mind you, the rise of they as an non-gender specific pronoun suggests that things are afoot there.
 

Frank Antonson

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Yes, Tidol.

Isn't that interesting that gender is present in the singular but not the plural -- unlike Spanish or French etc. ?

And within my lifetime I have noticed that "they" has begun to take the place of "he or she" when the gender is not known -- this as opposed to using the masculine singular. At the moment I can't think of an example, but I probably will.

At a personal level, I would like to add that when I, a native English speaker, became fluent in Portuguese, I found the more prevalent occurrence of gender very satisfying.

Another example of what I am trying to say about that satisfaction occurred when I found that in Portuguese there was a second person plural pronoun. I regard it as a flaw in English that there doesn't exist a word like we use here in Pennsylvania as part of what is deemed substandard English -- "you'uns" or "yuns" (spell it however you want) -- and in the South of the USA "yall" (presumably a contraction of "you all"), In standard English the plural has to be achieved periphrastically as in "you guys" or "all of you". There is even a second person plural possessive form -- "you'unziz"!

I honestly wonder if English has not lost something with the decay of gender. I guess THAT is what I most would like to know. Does gender show the record of an older relationship with the world?

Here I am just speculating, but surely there are some linguists who have made this kind of question their life's work.
 

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I guess that I don't completely accept either of your premises. Linguistic gender is certainly contributive within the personal pronouns in English. And in other languages the contribution that gender makes to agreement serves to clarify meanings.

Now, let's make another subdivision:

1. Gender for inanimate objects or abstract concepts:
2. Gender for animate creatures including human beings and animals: my premises don't include this category.

I was not talking about personal pronouns. This is a different feature. When I say 'ACTUAL INFORMATION' I'm not talking about grammar whatsoever. I mean something that can be true materially in the world.
As you can see, I wrote 'contributive to perception'. As another example, consider 'schmerz'; you find out that it's masculine, but what does this piece of information give us about the experience of 'pain'? So 'masculine' is just a label. Ignoring its functions in grammar, such a label can be removed without any loss of information.
It even imposes some unnecessary 'information load' on grammar.

Policy makers of Modern English must have been keenly wise. They knew how to remove complex things to make the language universal, encouraging (or forcing) all people around the world to learn it!
So my premises are still correct.

I think it is one of the reasons that word order is not so important in Latin.

Could the decline of gender be related to the increased importance of word order?

You mean there's some directional relation? Maybe!
Word order in Polish isn't as important as it is in English, and gender is going so strong in that language.
We don't have gender in Persian and Modern English, and word order is an important syntactic factor in the two languages.
But, what does connect these two linguistic aspects?
Our sample (including 4 languages) isn't comprehensive enough. It may turn out to be just an accident. Yet it's a perfect subject for research.

/********/

And, yes, I meant Freud.

About predicting the gender in another language there are some conventions is German too - nouns that end in -e, -ung... .
Apparently, gender for inanimate things is used only (?) in spoken English. For example, one may use 'she' to refer to a 'twister' when he speaks, but not when he writes?



.
C
 

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I honestly wonder if English has not lost something with the decay of gender.
I don't think it has. Not much at least. We have grammatical genders in Polish and I don't think it gives us anything. "Wall" is feminine in Polish. Why? Probably several people can tell. To us a wall is no more feminine than a carpet. But a carpet is grammatically masculine. Do we get any information from this fact? No, I don't and probably nobody I know does. Probably some linguists do. The only thing it means to us is how we should inflect words around it.
 

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It can probably help clarify meanings of some unclear phrases but only accidentally. Let's say two words sound similarly and we're not sure which one's been said. But we know one is masculine and the other is neuter. Then, when we hear a masculine verb after it, we can easily tell what the word was. But I think it's clear that such a situation doesn't in any way convince that the grammatical gender is essential to language.
 

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I think it is one of the reasons that word order is not so important in Latin.

Could the decline of gender be related to the increased importance of word order?
I don't think the decline of gender specifically but the decline of inflexion in general. I would agree with it. I think that's where languages go. They make their rules less difficult to understand and remember by giving up some flexibility and maybe the small number of sounds needed to produce a sentence.

PS: I'll post it here, although it doesn't have much to do with the rest of this post.
There are words in Polish that have not a specified gender. "Rodzynka" and "rodzynek" both mean raisin and there's not a slightest difference in meaning or usage. Some people use feminine form "rodzynka" and some use the masculine "rodzynek". Some, like me, use both and which one we pick at the moment depends on nothing special. Just what comes out...
 
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Nouns ending in "-a" in the Romance languages are usually feminine, as I am sure that you know. But then certain nouns like "mapa" or "dia" or "ideia" break that pattern.
Yes, that is certainly true in Portuguese. "O Mapa" and "o dia" are indeed exceptions to the rule, but "a ideia" is feminine in Portuguese, following the standard rule.

I believe that virtually ALL nouns ending with "-ion" are feminine in French (and probably "-cion" in Spanish and "-ção" in Portuguese.) regardless of what they mean.
Again regarding Portuguese, I can't think of an exception right now:
"a atenção", "a marcação", "a exploração", "a veneração", "a extração".


Here I am just speculating, but surely there are some linguists who have made this kind of question their life's work.

You are more than speculating Frank Antonson, you are giving us important material to think about.
Your questions and comments are indeed deep and important - thank you.
 

Frank Antonson

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Sorry about "a ideia". But "o idiota" would be another example.

Very clearly words continue to carry their gender along with them when they become part of another language that uses gender. That might explain the difference between "carpet" and "wall" in Polish. I don't know.

But HOW and WHY did it start? Simplifying rules may seem to be a good thing, but I suspect that back when language was developing in humans there were not a lot of frills, embellishments, and unnecessary aspects. Probably there was something critical about gender for it to have had the selective advantage to develop and survive in the first place.

This morning I picked up a little kitten that we have and I spontaneously sniffed it and said "Cheirousa!" the way I we used to in Brazil all the time with babies etc. I realized that I had put an "-a" on the end of the word because it was a little female. I had not said that in any conscious way, but after I had said it, I realized that if I had said "Cheirouso" (I am not sure that I am spelling this right) something would have been out of joint. Now, granted that the kitten is an animate entity, but I am still left wondering if English isn't missing something in only having available "Ah, sweet-smelling" whether it be a little female or male.

Girls can be "pretty" but not usually "handsome" in English, and vice versa for boys. I use that to try to explain gender agreement to my students. It is a vestige, I think.

I assume that the languages of primitive people had much smaller vocabularies than English, but I still find myself wondering if their grammar may not have been richer. I believe all linguists grant that there is no such thing as a "primitive language" -- at least not extant.
 

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I assume that the languages of primitive people had much smaller vocabularies than English, but I still find myself wondering if their grammar may not have been richer.
What do you mean by richer? I think they were more complicated. When I read about the grammar of Old Polish (which is known only to some extent) I I get to wonder how those people could use such a difficult language.
 
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