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'.

2337: get, nascent, and a word family of birth May 12, 2021

The words 'beget' and 'nascent' both relate to birth (as of course do a great many other words) but these can be proven to be related by a common root. The word 'get' is related to a root *ghend- meaning 'to take; to grab; to hold' is also related to *ǵenh₁- and *gene- both meaning 'to give birth' or 'produce' leading to the Latin gnāscor (hence 'nascent') and 'get' along with 'generate' and all its derivatives, also 'gene', 'genealogy', 'pregnant', ‘beget‘, 'kind', 'naive', 'indigenous', 'gonad', and so many more.

2108: Mixed Origins for Yiddish Gender Terminology Sep 22, 2020

Yiddish vocabulary is at least 80% Germanic but the more technical or academic terms tend to come from Hebrew. The words for gender come from Hebrew, but Hebrew only has 2 grammatical genders whereas Yiddish has 3. In Yiddish, the word for 'masculine' is זכר (zokher); 'feminine' is נקבה (nekeyve), both of which are Semitic, whereas the term for the neuter gender is נײטראַל (neytral). Someone familiar with this alphabet could tell this without even needing to know Yiddish or Hebrew because Yiddish adopts the spelling for Hebrew loanwords, whereas for any other word, such as with נײטראַל, the vowels are included.

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