2645: Hittite Gender: Animate & Inanimate Mar 15, 2022

Hittite, like many Indo-European languages has two grammatical genders, though most linguistics used to refer to this not with 'masculine' and 'feminine' but as 'masculine' and 'neuter'. This might sound strange to people who have encountered a neuter in languages like Latin, German, Icelandic, or Greek, it is usually presented as a third option, but this doesn't have to be so. First of all, nothing is inherently related to human sex when it comes to grammatical gender. In the case of Hittite, the genders are now sometimes referred to as animate and inanimate, or common and neuter. Basically, one category in Hittite contains the words for male and female beings, while the other does not. That said, plenty of words exist in this masculine/animate gender that are neither living nor sexed, like 𒃾𒅖 (wiyanis) meaning 'wine'.

2329: Née & Né May 4, 2021

Often for biographical information, previous names, especially ones used before marriage, are listed after 'née'. This is a French participle meaning 'born' and as such takes grammatical gender (here, feminine) that it wouldn't if it were acting as a verb. Rarer, there is also therefore a masculine 'né' which can be used in used in cases where men replace their last-names after marriage such as for Jack White (né Gillis) or sometimes for professional reasons such Sting (né Gordon Sumner). The latter might be more common with legal name changes even when professional, like Teller's mononym those this was once his last name.

2271: Zwei...Zwene, & Zwo? Mar 5, 2021

The German word for 2, 'zwei' is not declined like a regular adjective in German. Historically, all three grammatical genders were used, including 'zwene' or 'zween' for the masculine which has entirely dropped out, and the feminine 'zwo' which is a variant sometimes used for clarity with 'drei' (three), such as in military radio transmissions. This loss of gender in cardinal numbers is not universal in German with 'eins' (one) declined normally; moreover, Luxembourgish and certain Swiss German dialects still feature variants like 'zwou' and 'zwéin' [Luxembourgish]. It does elucidate the connection to the English 'twain'—also historically the masculine form of 'twā' [feminine]—but in the case of 'twain' this was later used more broadly before certain types of words such as nouns as to disambiguate between it and 'to' or 'too', thus outlasting the general breakdown of English's grammatical gender.

2162: Deponent Verbs Nov 15, 2020

Latin, a language whose grammar is notoriously simple to learn (...) has passive-voice deponents: verbs which are passive in form but active in meaning. For instance, the normal active ending for 1st person singular is -o (present tense) or -āvī (perfect aspect) but these do not exist for verbs like 'loquī' (to speak), 'verērī' (to fear), or 'blandīrī' (to flatter) and so on. In these cases, it would look like:

'loquor' (I speak) or 'hortātus sum' (I have exhorted) which would normally indicate the passive. These verbs have lost their active forms to history, and so given there is only one form, there is no way to use them to indicate the passive; one would need to opt for a synonym. It is not the only one to feature these verbs of course, but the list of these others is not too long either, including North Germanic languages like Danish, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit.

2158: Pronunciation of 'Woman' Nov 11, 2020

The spelling of ‘woman’ is sometimes controversial due to its assumed relation to the word ‘man’, but even just for how it represents pronunciation it should ring a few bells. For the singular, this is fairly straightforward insofar as the ‘-man’ pronunciation is consistent with other unstressed forms of this like in ‘foreman’, as /mən/. In the first vowel of the singular (woman), this actually began as /i/ (as in ‘wee’) due to the origin with the word ‘wif’ (woman; wife). This got gradually rounded, referring to the posture of the lips and pronounced further back, referring to the posture of the tongue: wʊmən. Regarding the plural form furthermore (women), while it is spelt like the plural of ‘men’, it is not the latter vowel that changes, but that the first vowel becomes [ɪ] (as in ‘in’): thus wɪmən. A nonstandard variant of this, particularly in parts of America does actually change the latter vowel: wʊmiːn; this distinction may however actually be less clear due to the stress of the word.

1006: Indication of Gender (g.w. 7) Sep 10, 2017

Only nouns have grammatical gender, insofar as adjectives, articles, and pronouns are either modified or selected in order to agree with the nouns they modify. Not all genders have to be distinct from each other in every word however; in German, masculine and neuter forms for possessive pronouns are often identical, and there are only two Dutch articles: one for neuter, 'het', and a common form for masculine and feminine words, 'de'. So long as there is a fairly consistent manner in which words are distinguished in such as way, however, grammatical gender can be said to exist. If people stopped using different forms for adjectives, articles, and pronouns to modify nouns with which they agree, there would be no gender, because, though the gender is determined by the noun, it is indicated by those other aforementioned lexical classes. It is partly for this reason that certain languages will include articles where there would not be one in English, which has no grammatical gender. For instance, there is no article used for unspecified referents, meaning that "cats are smart" and "the cats are smart" convey two different messages, the latter of which would only refer to cats that had been previously identified. The same sentence in Spanish however, "los gatos son inteligentes", uses an article to show the gender, but does not refer to preciously specified, in this case, cats.

This is the last day of Word Facts' Gender Week, and though there may still be posts concerning grammatical gender in the future, if you have any remaining questions, please write a comment or send a message.

1002: Inanimate Genders (g.w.3) Sep 6, 2017

As mentioned yesterday, grammatical gender does not have to relate to men and woman, or at least if it does, people do not have to be the sole focus or foundation for gender. For instance, like kiSwalhili, Ganda has many noun classes—ten classes in this case—that are simply numbered as such. The noun classes are based upon sound—not meaning—but some people still assign names to the semantic groups, including 'long objects', 'large objects and liquids', 'small objects' and 'pejoratives', as well as 'people', 'animals', though all of these groupings are pretty general and full of exceptions. Many languages divide words by 'animate' and 'inanimate' either instead of or along with 'masculine' and 'feminine', or in other cases such as with Chechen there will be a 'masculine' and 'feminine' that appears alongside classes that are simply considered miscellaneous. Moreover, Czech, Polish, and some other languages also have multiple varieties of a gender, such as in this case 'masculine animate' and 'masculine inanimate'. While a few languages spoken by many like Spanish or German have gender-systems that relate only or mostly to 'masculine' and 'feminine', there is a lot of variety in systems that do not follow that same pattern.

1001: Noun Classes (g.w.2) Sep 5, 2017

About a quarter of the world's languages have grammatical gender, but while some of the ones with which people familiar, including mostly Indo-European languages, may only break up nouns into the categories of masculine feminine, and sometimes neuter, this is not how grammatical gender appears in all languages. Some languages have more than 3 genders, but when this happens the terminology switches from 'genders' to 'noun classes' and so there is no longer an association with ideas of maleness and femaleness that there might have been before, even though there is always some arbitrariness. In kiSwahili for example, there are 18 noun classes. In the same way that Latin nouns are divided into genders by the way that the suffixes sound, and change to indicate syntax or pluralization, the noun classes of kiSwahili are divided by prefixes, but these are numbered rather than named. Still, some noun classes can be called "semantic groups", because they tend to contain certain types of words, such as class 14 which tends to have concepts, like 'upendo' ('love'), or noun class 1 which concerns words for people, like 'mtu' ('person'), 'mtoto' ('child'), and 'mwanafunzi' ('student'). Unlike what typically happens with Indo-European gendered words which often follow biological associations when possible, such as the French "l'homme" ('man') in the masculine and 'la femme' ('woman') in the feminine, the words for ''man' and 'woman' in kiSwahili—'mwanaume' and 'mwanamke' respectively—are both in the same noun class, because divisions in grammatical gender are almost entirely due to how a word sounds rather than what a word means.