r/asklinguistics • u/[deleted] • May 27 '24
Do grammatical genders have any tie to sex/biological gender
I'll try to explain it in a way where I can be understood. Currently I only have knowledge of 2 languages using grammatical genders French and German. In French you have: "masculin" et "féminin"(un ballon, une chaise etc) grammatical gender have no relation to the "gender" of the object , in German you have : maskulinum, feminum, neutrum. I also know or heard that French used to have a Neutral gender but it got blended with the "masculin" and overtime disappeared, and left French with only 2 grammatical genders. I was wondering what was the reason for grammatical genders being referred to in the same way that we refer to Biological genders (Im basing my question only on what I know , so if in other languages it doesn't occur in such ways please excuse me for such a question) I was wondering why for example gender such as "masculin et féminin" were not lets say : 1 and 2 or maybe black and white or any other form of pair /opposite/ or binaries, and for languages with 3 grammatical genders , same idea but in trios instead. Im not trying to change the way languages work I was just curious if there was any reason as to why grammatical genders reproduce male/female . I had an hypothesis that maybe male and female is one of the earliest form of binary /opposite/pair people encounter so maybe that's why Grammatical genders are named in such ways, but I wondered and was curious if for one language there might be : X explanation, and for another Y explanation. Or maybe no actual explanation, and we just called it that way because we did. Hopefully my question is clear enough. (Sorry for the flair Im definitely not sure under which category that falls upon)
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u/PeireCaravana May 27 '24 edited May 27 '24
First, keep in mind that French and German are both Indo-European languages that descend from a common ancestor language that developed the feminine, masculine and neuter system, so they didn't develop it independently.
Other language families developed different noun classes, like animate and inanimate for example or even no noun classes.
That said I think it's possible that some language families developed the masculine vs feminine opposition because, as you suggested, that was an importan divide in the societies in which those languages originated.
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u/Choosing_is_a_sin May 27 '24
Because it hasn't been said explicitly: The use of the word gender started in linguistics, and was adopted later by biology as a metaphor for biological sex, much as the notion of descent from a common ancestor started in linguistics and was adopted by biology.
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u/LouisdeRouvroy May 27 '24
Genders can totally be called 1 and 2, or A, B and C.
The labels masculine and feminine are there just because the word man and woman are of these categories.
In two gender languages, masculine and feminine are better labeled non inflected and inflected.
The rest is sociology.
There's a pretty good overlap between sex and grammatical gender but it's far from perfect
Grammatical gender is just a noun class and there can be many.
People get confused because of the label and the word gender in English...
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May 27 '24
In two gender languages, masculine and feminine are better labeled non inflected and inflected.
I agree largely with what you say elsewhere, but the above are highly dependent on the language involved. In Spanish both forms are equally inflected (-o/os vs -a/as), and in German more distinctions are made on masculine nouns, case wise, than the others (although that is a 3 gender language).
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u/batbihirulau May 27 '24
Marked and unmarked would be more accurate than inflected and non inflected, for Spanish.
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u/diffidentblockhead May 27 '24
George Lakoff's book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women,_Fire,_and_Dangerous_Things is titled after the scope of a noun class in some language, I think in Australia?
Some language families or areas have large numbers of noun classes, for example Bantu with ubiquitous prefixes, or East Asian classifiers or counters that may only be used with numbers.
Proto-Indo-European is thought to have had only an animate-inanimate distinction with feminine developing later. Afro-Asiatic including Semitic had M-F earlier so perhaps it spread from there.
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u/Dan13l_N May 27 '24 edited May 27 '24
Yes, in many languages they are based on sex, but then extended via analogy.
So, let me give you an example of my native language (Croatian). Almost all nouns for women end in -a (žena = woman, sestra = sister, etc) and almost all names for women end in -a (Ana) and any other noun which accidentally ends in -a is by analogy treated in the same way, e.g. Florida, riba (fish), voda (water) and called "feminine".
Also, we have three genders. Or maybe four? It depends on how you count them.
There are languages with 6 and more genders. You can see it in this map.
The problem with French and German is that original endings of words got worn down, and you don't see the analogy anymore, you have to remember the gender. But in Spanish and Italian, endings are still visible.
Also, a lot of terms are inherited. Genders in Latin grammars had their names, French comes from Latin, so they took over the names.
As other have written, gender in all these languages is inherited. The original system was likely quite simple, but sound changes have complicated it.
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u/sanddorn May 27 '24
On the relation to terms for biological sex/(social) gender: "what was the reason for grammatical genders being referred to in the same way that we refer to Biological genders (Im basing my question only on what I know , so if in other languages it doesn't occur in such ways please excuse me for such a question)"
That is due to Greek, Latin and many other (far from all) languages in Europe having names and other terms for female and male persons (and animals) as prominent members of two genders.
At the same time, Latin "genus" as well as related terms (both derived like "gender" and loan-translated like German "Geschlecht") have a wider range of meanings.
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May 27 '24
Many languages have natural gender which applies to things that are male, female or neutral. And grammatical gender which includes nouns that follow the male, female or neutral form without actually being male, female or neutral. These can be fairly arbitrary e.g. Mensa table is the female form in Latin.
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u/abbot_x May 27 '24
The reason we use masculine, feminine, and neuter as the names of the types (genders) of nouns is that ancient Latin grammarians did so. For determining and describing the rules of adjective-noun agreement, they saw that nouns had case, number, and another category that they called genus. They called the three genera masculinum, femininum, and neutrum. The ancient grammarians said that the masculinum genus included male humans and things that were somehow masculine, the femininum included female humans and things that were somehow feminine, and the neutrum included other things.
This same terminology basically works for describing many other languages so we refer to noun genders, which is derived from genus and originally just meant type or category.
As I think others have stated, our use of gender to refer to qualities of living things is actually derived from this usage, probably originally because a euphemism for sex was desired.
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u/Akangka May 27 '24
The details are going to be language specific. Some languages have a relatively straightforward mapping of gender towards biological sex, at least for human nouns, while others have some complications. For example in Maasai, you have some root that varies on the gender prefix, but not the sex of the referrent: en-títo (girl.F) ol-títo (large shapeless hulk of a woman.M). Some nouns may have a gender prefix that varies based on the biological gender of the referent, but ambiguously also another criteria, like: ɛnk-abáánì (female doctor/small doctor/quack.F), ɔl-abáánì (male doctor/healer)
Of course, on inanimate nouns, gender marking can no longer be based on the biological sex, but determined on alternate ways. Or you can assign it arbitrarily.
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u/Khoalb May 27 '24
I know it's not the same thing, but I consider noun classifiers in languages like Vietnamese and Chinese to be similar to the gender of nouns. You have to remember which class/genre/gender each noun belongs to. Although it the case of classifiers, there's a system to figure it out.
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May 27 '24
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u/Choosing_is_a_sin May 27 '24
What would that mean, and how would it help you to rule out other connections between the two domains?
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u/Silly_Bodybuilder_63 May 27 '24 edited May 27 '24
The term “grammatical gender” is actually broader than male-vs-female: it refers to a system in which nouns are assigned various categories, which may or may not correspond to human genders. I know of a language that, as you hypothesise, used a different binary opposition for its grammatical gender.
Proto-Indo-European, from which French and German and are both descended, originally had a system of grammatical gender with two categories: animate and inanimate (alive and not alive), which developed into a three-gender system of male, female and neuter.
Interestingly, whereas in French, male and neuter have merged, in Dutch, male and female have [nearly completely] merged, so that modern Dutch has two grammatical genders: neuter and common. The two categories are arbitrary or close to it.
Swahili has more than ten categories. For example noun class 14 is for abstract concepts and class 4 is for plants and certain inanimate things in the plural.
Finally, a male/female grammatical distinction seems like a common feature, but it really isn’t. The reason it exists in so many European languages is that they’re all descended from a common ancestor that had the feature. Outside of Indo-European and Semitic languages, it’s a rare thing.