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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