As a kid trying (failing dismally) to learn French, I never got my head around the gendering of nouns. Coming from a language that doesn't have that it just seemed rather bizarre. However it seems to be a very common practice in languages and I wonder if anyone can tell me if 'most' languages have gendered nouns or whether (like English) they don't?
[#]linguistics #askfedi
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@nigelharpur
John McWhorter is a professor of linguistics at Columbia and a great resource for popular understanding of linguistics. He has written many books, has a number of Great Courses series, and has a podcast called Lexicon Valley. I can’t give you a specific reference for your question, but I’m certain he has covered the topic of variations in the handling of gender in many languages. Spanish has masculine and feminine; German has masculine, feminine, and nueter; and other languages have many more variations of gender based on such things as shape and position.
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@allanwolfe thanks Allan, for someone that was so hopeless at learning other languages as a kid I now find myself fascinated by them in my dotage!
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@nigelharpur You could ask @cleobleo.bsky.social about how common gendered nouns are in languages. They might know. (I don't.)
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@nigelharpur
When my daughters started learning english, they learned about he and she and found quite odd that there was a "third gender", it, for neutral. Funny how we have different perspectives on different languages.
I don't know about each language, but all roman langages (french, spanish, italian, catalan, romanian and portuguese) do have genders.
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@MichelPatrice yes of course! I was just thinking that it must be just as 'odd' for folk coming from a noun gendered language to a non.
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@nigelharpur
A language being non gendered makes it easier to start with.
But I find the anecdote about my daughters interesting because english speakers will say that english is non gendered but my then young daughters would say that english has three genders and that it is uselessly complicated. Which would make an english speaker scratch his head.
(I forgot to say it, I am a native french speaker.)
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@MichelPatrice yes, I was reading about the way inanimate and animate classes are effectively another two 'genders' grammatically. In English, inanimate nouns (table, house, door etc) are non gendered and get a neutral 'the' or 'it' etc. Sometimes machines, like cars or ships, are referred to as 'she' but that's an affectation. With animals 'it' can always be used but if the gender is known then he or she is far more likely.... languages are complex!!!
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@nigelharpur
If you are interested in languages and don't speak any other than english, take a look at esperanto.
Getting interested in esperanto, I learned a lot about languages in general. And a lot by reading and listening to late Claude Piron's stuff. (http://claudepiron.free.fr/articles.htm, scroll down to find the english articles.)
Yes, languages are complicated.
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@nigelharpur
About differing perspectives again.
One of my brothers in law is a native english speaker. When learning russian, he was telling me that russian alphabet is quite odd since, for instance, they have a short i and a long i.
Just like the long an short e sound in ship and sheep I told him. And he just then realised that english has the exact same thing and it never occured to him.
And to a non english speaker, ship and sheep sound the same and it is quite annoying.
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@nigelharpur It will be hard to produce a quantitative result because of the sheer number of languages (and their demarcation sometimes being a mess, see Croatian and Serbian), and naming of these systems (is the system used in a specific language a "gender system" or a "noun class system"?).
[Wiki article] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender?wprov=sfla) "A typological survey of 174 languages revealed that over one fourth of them had grammatical gender.". Cursory but but gives you a feeling for the situation :)
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@ilookloud spookily I had just been reading through that and the whole, (lengthy!) Wikipedia article.
Yes indeed a very complicated subject and I suppose understandably so. Fascinating to learn that some languages (like Bangla / Bengali) are without noun/pronoun gender at all. Hence "I saw her" and "I saw him" are both "আমি তাকে দেখেছি". This may be a great piece of information to mention the next time I encounter the red necked 'outraged' folk with regard to others preferring 'different' pronouns! 😁
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@nigelharpur to add to what has been already said, there’s no real logic to gender attribution in French, you just have to learn that table is feminine and couch is masculine etc. And even native speakers aren’t always sure of the proper gender of rarer words. Even worse, in rare cases, some words, like « orgue » (the instrument) have a different gender when singular and plural.
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@sknob @nigelharpur
And the fun part of learning French as a German is when you find out that it's a female moon in France and a male sun and vice versa in Germany.
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@nigelharpur Of the 257 languages surveyed in the World Atlas of Language Structures, 145 have no noun gender, 53 have a gender system that can be described according to semantic feature, and 59 have some degree of arbitrariness in assigning nouns to gender categories.
https://wals.info/feature/32A#2/26.7/149.2
https://wals.info/chapter/32
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@ergative thanks! Fascinating stuff.
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@nigelharpur Korean, Finnish and Georgian don't have genders. The minus is that Korean verbs and adjectives are conjugated for levels of politeness, Finnish has an extremely complicated noun declension system and Georgian has an equally complicated verb system.
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