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Gendered nouns
2

Gendered nouns

Gendered nouns

(OP)
Somebody mentioned gendered nouns in the Learning languages thread and I thought they deserve a thread of their own.

I think they're fascinating. In my mother language, Dutch as spoken in the Netherlands, the genders exist only on paper (in the dictionary, that is). Nobody except a few enlightened people distinguishes between male and female any more. The Dutch speaking Flemish (Belgium) do, though. What is funny is that (apart from trivial cases as the father, the mother etc) there is no logic at all. The table in French is la table, i.e. female, whereas in German it's male: der Tisch.

Just like men and women usually wear different clothes, the adjectives around male and female objects are different, and (at least in French) sometimes even verbs related to objects (gerund, past participle - only when placed AFTER the object, yeah yeah nobody said french is logical)... If you replace one noun by a synonym you often have to revise the whole sentence.

I guess it all came from the Romans, although I'm not sure if genders didn't exist already in ancient Greek. And I'm fascinated by the question why, why would anybody see a need to connect a gender to an object?

RE: Gendered nouns

Ancient Greek also had genders.  I believe the proto-Indo-European language originated with genders, as evidenced by gender specific noun declensions in Sanskrit, Persian, and the other more modern Indo-European languages.

English also, being of Germanic form, originally had gender specific nouns.  I don't know when English dropped them.  They are in Beowulf (c.9th century) and have mostly dropped out by the time of Chaucer (c.14th century).

Gender appears to have been much more important (in general) in ancient people's understanding of the world.  Apart from the battle between patriarchal and matriarchal societies, objects, processes, and eventually even abstract ideas were consistently anthropomorphized as humanlike creatures.

As societies separated into different cultures, different people's ideas about what qualities or objects were masculine or feminine entered the language which would originally become French, German, etc.  French itself is tied to the southern European (i.e. Latin) evolution of language, while German is tied to the northern European evolution.  Although these countries share a boundary, their ancient cultural histories were very different.

RE: Gendered nouns

Gendered nouns: the bane of all German language students.  Even my native German cousins have trouble with this.

Now I'm taking Mandarin.  No articles, no plurals, no conjugating (so far).  I like it.

RE: Gendered nouns

(OP)
I'd rather learn genders than Mandarin characters! As soon as you know the gender, the rest becomes a matter of logic (except, of course, for such glorious cases like words that change gender as they go from singular to plural! i love it i love it).
Any idea how many characters you master?

RE: Gendered nouns

Swahili has about 8 noun classes ("gender" no longer appropriate since that would cover maximum 3).

Hg

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