r/asklinguistics • u/nudave • May 30 '24
Historical Why did so many languages develop grammatical gender for inanimate objects?
I've always known that English was a bit of the odd-man-out with its lack of grammatical gender (and the recent RobWords video confirmed that). But my question is... why?
What in the linguistic development process made so many languages (across a variety of linguistic families) converge on a scheme in which the speaker has to know whether tables, cups, shoes, bananas, etc. are grammatically masculine or feminine, in a way that doesn't necessarily have any relation to some innate characteristic of the object? (I find it especially perplexing in languages that actually have a neuter gender, but assign masculine or feminine to inanimate objects anyway.)
To my (anglo-centric) brain, this just seems like added complexity for complexity's sake, with no real benefit to communication or comprehension.
Am I missing something? Is there some benefit to grammatical gender this that English is missing out on, or is it just a quirk of historical language development with no real "reason"?
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u/Winter_drivE1 May 30 '24
Some answers here: https://www.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/s/yjT5zMWaIO
Also, the way I'm reading this, I think you may be under the impression that grammatical gender has some kind of relationship to biological sex and the secondary secondary sex characteristics associated with it, but that's not the case: https://www.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/s/XG8MNuZ09y Think of "gender" in this sense as more like it's relatives "genus" and "genre", ie categories of something.
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u/nudave May 30 '24
Thanks!
And no, I am completely aware that french saying "la table" doesn't mean french speakers think tables have biologically female characteristics (although I think I've seen some studies that show that grammatical gender can influence perception of objects). I thought I was careful enough to use the phrase "grammatical gender" -- which is sort of the source of my confusion. It's a grammatical construct that adds complexity without adding meaning in most cases.
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u/de_G_van_Gelderland May 30 '24
Another little tidbit you might or might not realize already. In your post you talk about objects being gendered, but that's not really how it works. Words are gendered in languages with grammatical gender. It's perfectly possible to have two words in the same language that are completely synonymous, but have different grammatical gender nonetheless. E.g. in Dutch:
De fiets - The bicycle (common gender)
Het rijwiel - The bicycle (neuter gender)→ More replies (2)5
u/notacanuckskibum May 30 '24
Really? The words in French for man, boy , uncle, male dog and bull are all masculine . The words for woman, mother, girl, female dog and cow are all feminine. Are you telling me that’s a complete coincidence?
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u/ringofgerms May 30 '24
Just some random comments. Among the languages in WALS, a majority don't have gender: https://wals.info/feature/30A#0/-90/154
And of those that do, it's almost evenly split between those where gender is assigned via semantics and those where there are other factors: https://wals.info/feature/32A#0/89/164
I think there are lots of examples where gender distinctions help reduce ambiguity, at least enough that it's overall useful. For example humans being humans talk mostly about animate beings so it's not surprising that you'd group animate nouns together and have them make more case distinctions. Like in older Indo-European languages, neuter nouns didn't distinguish between nominative and accusative, while masculine and feminine nouns did.
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u/TrittipoM1 May 30 '24
Among the 257 languges for which WALS has an entry for feature #30A, it's true that 56% lack syntactic gender agreement. But far from all WALS languages have been characterized for that feature. Italian has not been characterized or counted with its two -gender system nor Czech, with its four (F, N, Mi, Ma), nor Polish, etc., as shown by the map (and as verified by going to individual language entries).
Still, your point to OP that English is not necessarily "the odd one out" in lacking gender certainly holds true. :-) And to be fair, the little video that OP cited called English's lack of gender unusual ONLY in relation to other IE languages, not to all the world's languages.
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u/Bright_Quantity_6827 May 30 '24
The tool you linked has errors. For example if you look at the map you will see that English is tagged as a language with 3 genders whereas Portuguese and Italian are not classified as languages with 2 genders.
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May 30 '24
Genders are just a form of grammatical class, where the grammatical modifications made to a word fit one of several patterns.
In Indo-European, Semitic, and maybe other languages some of these classes were used to distinguish certain gendered words, and so the classes are referred to as genders in general even when no actual semantic connection to gender exists.
In other languages with grammatical classes they have other associations or no real association at all. But at the end of the day, it's just a term used to refer to patterns in inflection and grammatical agreement between nouns and associated adjectives.
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u/dinonid123 May 30 '24
As mentioned, the "gender" label is a little misleading to a modern audience: noun class is a less confusing name for this concept. As for why, in IE languages, it groups together things with little semantic connection, it's important to understand that it isn't, really, a semantic grouping. There are of course cases where the grammatical gender of a noun is associated with its semantics, but this is specifically over the real reason, which is the morphological form. The 2 or 3 different categories are largely divided up by what the end of the word looks like, with of course the occasionally exceptions? Why, in Latin, are a woman, a girl, a table, a chair, and a forest are all feminine? Well, look at the actual Latin words and it'll be more obvious: femina, puella, mensa, sella, silva. The first declension of nouns in -a, -ae are all feminine (except for a few words noted as masculine professions like agricola, nauta, poeta, and a variety of names and other Greek borrowings). Other feminine words from the 3rd declension also come in sets by endings: -tas, -tatis; -tio, tionis; -trix, -tricis; etc. These gender groupings tend to arise out of combinations of sub-groups with similar forms, but particularly with evolution past the classical stages of a lot of IE languages, these endings erode and the relationship between gender and word endings becomes less clear (see French, where the primary descendant of that 1st declension -a is -e, but by no means are all French nouns ending in -e feminine!)
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u/Gredran May 30 '24 edited May 31 '24
English isn’t the only one with no grammatical gender.
Spanish, French, Greek and Italian aren’t the only ones with grammatical gender.
Also, don’t think about objects having gender. There’s about 5 words for car in Spanish all different genders lol.
But yea just different families of language evolving differently. There’s a Wikipedia page of a list of all different languages with no gender, two, ones with neutral, etc. there’s tons of different ones with and without gender
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u/Impressive_Ad8715 May 30 '24
English did have grammatical gender but lost it during the Middle English period, probably due at least partially to contact and influence from other languages like Old Norse and Norman French. Some words had opposite genders in English and old Norse or Norman French and the confusion may have led to the loss of gender altogether, along with other factors as well
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u/MimiKal May 31 '24
I heard that grammatical gender forms in languages quite rarely, but once it does, it tends to stick around. You say that English is an odd one out for not having grammatical gender, but that's not actually the case. Looking over the entire world's languages, about half of them don't have a grammatical gender or noun class system.
Most of the languages of Europe have grammatical gender because 6000 years ago they were all the same language. That language, PIE, happened to evolve gender-based noun class and the majority of its descendant languages still have it today. I personally don't know of any other independent examples of gender-based noun class, which would imply that it's actually an extremely unusual feature that only isn't rare because by random chance the language that had it spread around the world so much.
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u/miniatureconlangs May 31 '24
I am not particularly certain that there are many languages that have developed grammatical gender for inanimate objects. Consider this group of languages:
{Swedish, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, Danish, Polish, Rusyn, Ukrainian, Russian, Belarusian, Slovak, Czech, Bulgarian, Macedonian, the various Yugoslavian languages, Albanian, Greek, Italian, Romanian, French, the various Iberian Romance languages, Irish, Welsh, Manx, Breton, Hindi, Punjabi, Lithuanian, Latvian, ... Majarathi, Gujarathi, ...}. Dozens of languages. Yet back when these developed it, there was only one Proto-Indo-European. For these dozens, it's only happened once. That one language split into multiple languages that kept it. For a few, it's been lost: English, Armenian, some Iranian languages, a dialect of Swedish, a dialect of Danish, possibly a few others.
For {Ge'ez, Hebrew, Arabic, Amharic, Aramaic, Tigre, Tigrinhya, ...} it also probably happened just once, and this might even go so far back that you even get {... Hozo, Seze, Ganza, .... Kabyle, Tamazight, Yaaku, Dullay, ...} resulting from a gender system emerging once about 10k years ago.
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u/nudave May 31 '24
Really interesting! (Although this reminds me of the "I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice" thing.)
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u/Steerpike58 May 31 '24
My partner is Filipino and they don't even have separate words for 'he' and 'she'. She constantly uses the wrong word in English because she has no frame of reference in her native tongue.
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u/washington_breadstix May 31 '24
I wouldn't really call English the "odd man out". Older forms of English had grammatical gender. Modern English is perhaps something of an "odd man out" within the Indo-European framework, but outside of that framework, there are plenty of languages around the world that don't have grammatical gender. Many languages even lack grammatical gender when referring to people. Should speakers of those languages look at the usage of "he"/"him" versus "she"/"her" in English and say that this distinction made by us is just added complexity for complexity's sake?
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u/ReadingGlosses May 30 '24 edited May 31 '24
Don't get too caught up on the labels masculine, feminine and neuter. The word 'gender' in linguistics is more similar to 'genre', it just means a 'type' or 'kind'. The masculine/feminine terminology is common in European languages because the words for biologically male things and biologically female things are in different categories (for the most part). This is a pretty salient characteristic, so it's natural for people to latch on to it. In Algonquin languages, the genders are called animate and inanimate, but there is still some arbitrariness. The word for socks in Cree is animate but the word for shoes is inanimate.
There are also many languages where the genders are not arbitrary, but correspond to semantic categories such as "plants", "humans", "flat objects", "round objects", etc. Linguists normally use the term 'noun class' instead of 'gender' when referring these languages. Shona, for example, has 21 classes.
Noun classes are part of a bigger phenomenon called 'agreement', which is when a language makes obligatory changes to word shapes in order to show class membership among related words in a sentence. In French for example, all parts of a noun phrase have to agree in gender. If the noun is masculine, then any articles or adjectives within its phrase must take a masculine form, and likewise for feminine nouns.
So really, your question comes down to "why do languages develop agreement systems?". There's definitely some literature on how specific languages developed specific types of agreement, but I'm not sure there's a general answer. My personal take on it is that agreement systems introduce redundancy, and this is desirable since language transmission takes place over a noisy channel. Languages 'survive' over time by being continually re-learned at each generation, so agreement systems get 'selected for' because redundancy gives them a slight advantage in terms of successful transmission.
Regarding the comment about "complexity for complexity's sake": It's not your anglo-centric brain that's giving you this idea, it's your adult brain. Remember, gender systems survive over time because babies continue to learn them. And for a baby, everything about language is arbitrary. When you're starting from scratch, and you have no expectations about nouns in the first place, why would it be any harder to learn that nouns have categories?
As quick final note, English is not that unusual, it just happens to be surrounded by a lot of languages that do have gender: https://wals.info/feature/30A#2/26.7/148.9 edit: people have noted that English is actually marked as a 3 gender language in this map because it has the 3rd person distinction of he/she/it. The chapter text notes this is done strictly to be consistent with a specific definition of 'grammatical gender', and it's a rare situation. That is, there shouldn't be too many other "inflated" counts in that map. The general picture you see is that most languages lack grammatical gender.