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 Michel Patrice on 2024-12-04 at 09:28

@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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Written by Nigel on 2024-12-04 at 10:23

@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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Written by Michel Patrice on 2024-12-04 at 12:33

@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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Toot

Written by Nigel on 2024-12-04 at 12:50

@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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Descendants

Written by Michel Patrice on 2024-12-04 at 12:57

@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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