When I studied French in High School, I learned that the gender of a noun was arbitrary. Le livre (book) is masculine. Das Buch (German) is neutral. Knyga (Lithuanian) is feminine.
Is there any headway into how gender is attributed in languages that recognise Gender? Statistically, if you look at 100 languages, does a particular object have a predictable gender? ???
As a first exercise, you could try the Search function at the top, and enter Sophia and 400 days. You’ll find threads where, for example, gender for sun and moon, and the first words of the Gospel of John are discussed.
Here, I just add that, apart from natural gender, in several languages noun gender is fairly automatic: if a word ends in a certain letter, you know its gender in the overwhelming majority of cases.
In Russian, a noun in ‘-i’ will normally be masculine, one in ‘-a’ feminine, and ‘-o’ neuter. In Hindi, ‘-i’ tends to belong to feminine, and ‘-a’ to masculine nouns.
Then, there are languages dividing reality into animate and non-animate nouns rather than applying (random?) gender to lifeless things.
I know little of African languages, but some of them have lots of noun "classes". Swahili has a total of 15 noun classes. I’m not sure if they are separated by the meaning of the nouns or their shape, but regardless of any priciple, the number of them suggests to me that there is no system in word gender.
Evidence from the Romance languages indicates that the gender that a noun has is sometimes arbitrary . For example , "The valley" is masculine in Spanish El valle, but feminine in French La vallée, Italian La valle and Romanian Valea. "The day" is El Día(masculine) in Spanish but Ziua (feminine) in Romanian. The Juadaeo-Spanish for "new songs" kantikas nuevas is feminine but its equivalent in Romanian cântecele noi is neuter. Yet, the Romance languages all descend from a common ancestor, Latin.
One interesting factor complicating the gender question concerns words that intrude on the territories of other languages. There is a word for ‘book’ in Hindi, pustak, which is inherited from older Indian languages. It is feminine. With the Arabic invaders, the "western" type of book was introduced, and the Arabic word for it, kitâb. That’s a masculine word in Arabic, but influenced by pustak, kitâb is feminine in Hindi today. I think that many gender dissimilarities in European languages can be explained by influences from early indigenous languages.
[quote author=anders link=board=translate;num=1110461889;start=0#1 date=03/10/05 at 13:20:32].
Here, I just add that, apart from natural gender, in several languages noun gender is fairly automatic: if a word ends in a certain letter, you know its gender in the overwhelming majority of cases.
In Russian, a noun in ‘-i’ will normally be masculine, one in ‘-a’ feminine, and ‘-o’ neuter.
Russian words on -i are usually plurals. Masculine words generally end in consonants.
It correctly illustrated my point, but if you can find an example that you think is better for showing different views on m/f endings, I’d like to see it.
I may not give you much insight into any other languages but I can give you a good reference for the Spanish language and the gender of words.
A book I have found very useful and informative in regards to the Spanish language is:
Barron’s 1001 Pitfalls in Spanish
...specifically pages 64-73, which talk about gender of words.
Unfortunately, the list of rules is not a very small one.
But at least there should always be some sort of list. ;D
As far as any other language is concerned, I would say you have to seek out similar references in each respective language.
Experience has shown me that languages with masculine and feminine (I’m not including neuter here) tend to consider masculine the default gender and assign feminine a specific ending: a for Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Italian and for most parts Latin. This unfortunately doesn’t work all the time.
As said before, many african languages have ‘gender’ but much more than two. fifteen or twenty, it just depends on the sound of the word and what sounds right. It’s the same in European languages, but simplified. The meaning of the word has nothing to do with its gender, it’s just what sounds right. If any two languages agree, it’s because they are closely related.
[quote author=melissa link=board=translate;num=1110461889;start=0#11 date=05/04/05 at 03:42:07]As said before, many african languages have ‘gender’ but much more than two. fifteen or twenty, it just depends on the sound of the word and what sounds right.
I have been carefully avoiding African languages, save Arabic, Afrikaans and a smattering of Ancient Egyptian, but I’m quite fond of referring to the "classes" of words as "genders", to open up a discussion
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It’s the same in European languages, but simplified. The meaning of the word has nothing to do with its gender, it’s just what sounds right. If any two languages agree, it’s because they are closely related.
Perhaps. Perhaps even probable. But I think that those relations are so hard to grasp that few if any have dared to publish an opinion.
Melissa wrote: The meaning of the word has nothing to do with its gender, it’s just what sounds right.
An excellent example of this is the Ancient Greek word ‘thumos’ which roughly translated means "guts, courage or power shown by a girl or a woman", yet it is a masculine noun.
If I understand Anders correctly, however, he is saying that linguists simply don’t know why oddities like this occur; that there is still no testable theory and this seems to be true for the time being. :(
I appreciate all of the responses about how the gender of nouns is determined. It does vary from language to language, but I am convinced that it is not random. There is order, but I need to keep looking.
Sorry about that, yes, there is a difference between ‘class’ and ‘gender’, in language and in the real world. In the African languages that have many classes, I have no idea why a word belongs to a particular class. And in French there are clues both in terms of how a word sounds and what it means. But I think ‘gender’ is just a surviving distinction, because if I’m trading a cow for a bull, I don’t care as much if it’s a spotted cow as if it is a cow. But gender and class are related in my opinion, because they are useful grammatically, and if I’m borrowing ‘el mapa’ for ‘un dia’ and it’s ‘un problema’ with ‘la moto’, I want to know which is which.
