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.
1005: Loss of Gender (g.w.6) Sep 9, 2017
It is easy to look at languages like Latin or Old English—now no longer used—that were heavily inflected and each had three genders, and assume that because modern descendants thereof have either lost all or most of those attributes, languages have a tendency to lose gender, or other morphological (or morphophonological) features. Indeed, looking at the way that Indo-European languages have evolved over time, that trend is fairly consistent. Most linguist assume, however, that Proto-Indo-European was both gendered and heavily inflected, so realistically the most likely way it could have evolved was to lose some of that. This did not happen all at one time though, and the loss of gender in English took several centuries, starting in the north of England around the tenth century. At the time of the Norman invasions, many English speaking communities still had gender, which would often be influenced by the Norman French, such as the gender of 'se mona' ('the moon') which started as masculine but became feminine due to the influence of the Norman French 'lune' ('the moon'), before gender was eventually lost. It is theoretically possible that English could regain gender, perhaps on its own, or with influences from other languages like Spanish, which has already had a noticeable impact on certain American dialects, but there is no real way to predict any of this.
1004: Difficulties with Gender in L2 (g.w.5) Sep 8, 2017
While there are some potential benefits of grammatical gender in terms of the speed of recognition of words, gender can make it harder to learn a language, even if one is somewhat familiar with it. Grammatical gender requires extra memorization, in addition to the vocabulary and other features that someone needs to know when learning another language. Even in languages that are closely related, there is no guarantee that cognates will share the same gender. For instance, in Italian and Portuguese, the word for 'milk', 'il latte and 'o leite' respectively is masculine, but in Spanish 'la leche' is feminine. At best this is only something else to remember, but could also be a source of confusion for interlocutors. Furthermore, while some languages like kiSwahili base their system of noun classes on sound alone, in other languages like French or Spanish where gender is mostly arbitrary, the usual gender of the word can appear to change because its sound. For example, in those two languages, a noun starting with a stressed 'a-', regardless of its gender, would take a masculine article. In Spanish, 'agua' is considered feminine because it is modified by feminine adjectives, but it takes the masculine article 'el' to avoid the more cumbersome sounding 'la agua'. Likewise, the French 'amie' is feminine, and would take the feminine 'ma' in 'ma chère amie' ('my dear friend') when the article is separated from the noun, but when the article and noun appear adjacent it appears as 'mon amie'. Nevertheless, if you ever thought that learning French or Spanish with their two genders, Latin or German with their three genders, or even kiSwahili with its eighteen noun classes would be difficult, keep in mind that the South American language Tuyuca has somewhere between 50-140 noun classes.
1003: Benefits of Gender (g.w.4) Sep 7, 2017
If, as has been said in the last few days here, that gender is fairly arbitrary and also has the potential to complicate things, there may not seem to be any use for it. That is not to say every aspect of every grammar has to be reasonable—there is not a reason why some languages rely on word-order to indicate syntax while others use inflection—but at least in that case there needs to be some way to show how the words relate to each other, whereas there does not need to be gender: three quarters of the world's languages do not have it at all. Still, at least one of the possible benefits to grammatical gender is recognition of words. In the paper, Young Children Learning Spanish Make Rapid Use of Grammatical Gender in Spoken Word Recognition [1] written by Casey Lew-Williams and Anne Fernald, it was discussed that children learning Spanish were better able to identify referents when they were given the morphosyntactic cue, and native-speaking adults showed similar results as well. They said "studies show that adults respond more rapidly to nouns preceded by valid cues to grammatical gender than without such cues" [1]. Although it is not necessary to have gender to identify words—otherwise all languages would have gender—there are advantages when it comes to recognition at least.
[1] Lew-Williams, Casey, and Anne Fernald. “Young Children Learning Spanish Make Rapid Use of Grammatical Gender in Spoken Word Recognition.” Psychological Science, vol. 18, no. 3, 2007, pp. 193–198. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40064714.
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.
1000: Arbitrariness of Gender (g.w.1) Sep 4, 2017
In languages that have grammatical gender, a noun can be masculine or feminine (or neuter if there is a third gender), but this does not mean that it can be classified as 'male' or 'female' in the way that some people may make it seem. In general, words that relate to biology, such as terms for 'man', 'woman', 'penis', 'vagina' etc. correspond to the grammatical gender of masculine or feminine, but there are some issues with generalization. There is no guarantee that this convention will always be followed, so while the German 'Frau' ('woman') is feminine, the word 'Weib' ('wife' or 'female') is neuter, and likewise 'Eierstock' ('ovary') is masculine. This may appear strange but the reason for this is fairly logical: the terms 'masculine' and 'feminine' were only created to describe trends that were already in use. While there are certainly some patterns in terms of how words related to one idea may belong to one gender or another, once one starts looking at the relationship between grammatical gender and the meaning of certain words, there is no more reason that, in German, most alcohols are masculine, or most words relating to a house are neuter than there is a reason 'Weib' is not feminine. These ideas and more will be explained here in more depth over the next six days.
This is part one out of seven of Word Facts' Gender Week to celebrate the 1000th post. Remember to like, share, and stay tuned for the next six.