Ancestors

Written by Nigel on 2024-12-04 at 08:22

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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Written by Dolls Against Gravity on 2024-12-04 at 09:59

@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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Toot

Written by Nigel on 2024-12-04 at 10:21

@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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Descendants