On language and gender
So, with my new-found skills in asking for an ashtray in Italian, I’ve been pondering something that I haven’t thought about since days at school learning French and German. What’s the point in having words in different genders? I mean, frankly all it does is make a language harder to learn for no reason that I can see. To take a parallel example, I understand that some countries (memory tells me that it’s the Swedes, but I might be wrong) have abandoned the difference between the formal and informal “you” forms (“tu” and “vous” in French), deciding that it’s old-fashioned and pointless and that everyone should address everyone else informally. Sounds like a good idea to me. Similarly, why not abandon the idea of gendered words? This would be easier for the Germans, who could just unilaterally declare everything as neuter; the French might have more of a problem, since you might ignite the ire of feminists if you declared all words masculine and vice versa for feminine, but…why not do it? What advantage does having gendered words bring to the language? It’s possible, I suppose, that a language might have two identical words with different meanings that differ only in gender, but firstly that’s a bit dim, and secondly English manages, with words like “set“, which has got about forty different meanings, to distinguish word meanings based solely on context. That has to be a pretty rare case anyway, I suspect, so: is there any reason why it shouldn’t be abandoned? I’ll be honest, I can’t see the Academie Française going for it, but I can’t see why they shouldn’t.
The one thing I remember from French lessions is that the word for ‘shirt’ and the word for ‘blouse’ differ only in gender.
7 hours later
Why can’t they do? Because a language is not made to be logic. There have been thousands of years of history and the tongues have evolved by the contribution of so many generations you can’t find WHY a word has this gender or another.
IIRC, there is a “indian american” tongue where the genders of names are not based on the female / male / neutral distinction, but the alive (animals, humans) / almost alive (plants) / not alive (objects), and all their grammar is based on this. Is this distinction more or less logical than the indo-european one?
Senji:
The usual translation of shirt is “chemise“, and I think that “blouse” is “blouse“. They’re both feminine.
7 hours later
Ah, kNo‘, I don’t mean “why does word X have gender Y“, I mean “why bother with gender at all?” What stops the Academie Française from just declaring, tomorrow, that all French nouns are now masculine, and the words “une” and “la” are now no longer required? Would this harm the language or its understandability in any way?
8 hours later
Weirdly, I think that France probably both the most able to do it, with the Academie, and the least likely to do it…..
9 hours later
That’s a funny one. How about abolishing articles from English altogether – any Russian would tell you that it is possible to do without them. Or a number of tenses in English, for that matter, is too high for at least my tastes!
9 hours later
>“Would this harm the language or its understandability in any way?”
We would all speak French like English or American people.
And I really think that because our tongue is the result of a long-time evolution, it has some huge inertia, and you can’t wipe out these centuries of feminine / masculine (bad?) habits.
And I suspect we like our tongue to be complicated, so we can laugh at someone (matt, for example) mixing fem/masc. nouns. ;)
9 hours later
Grrr: not a totally unreasonable point, that, actually. That’s quite a good idea. I certainly wouldn’t be massively in opposition to it were it proposed.
kNo’: I agree that it wouldn’t happen because of inertia (although see the note about the Swedes above); what I was asking was whether there was any real reason, other than inertia, why it wouldn’t work; I take it that there isn’t?
Keeping them in just so you can laugh at Matt seems a bit extreme, as in favour as I am of laughing at Matt ;)
10 hours later
English, of course, went through exactly the same process of unifying the informal and formal second person pronouns, except that bizarrely we picked the formal “you” for routine use and kept “thou” for special occasions.
Swedish has two “genders” which aren’t really genders in the familiar Romance/Germanic style: neuter is usual enough, but instead of masculine and feminine they have “common” which apparently fused from m/f at some point in the past. This doesn’t wind up being quite so simple as an animate/inanimate distinction, but from what little I remember that can at least provide a useful starting point in trying to remember which noun is which. (And, speaking of articles, the indefinite article just gets fused onto the end of the noun.)
I have to say that it sounds like you’re ultimately looking for an artificial language, though; attempts to impose retroactive regularity on natural languages generally seem to be doomed to failure simply through inertia.
13 hours later
Colin: oh, I don’t know about imposition of regularity being impossible; take, say, spelling in English, which is now regular and not as carefree and laissez-faire as once it was.
I knew about English, naturally, but someone (who I’m still not sure are the Swedes, and I now think not since you didn’t confirm it) fused formal and informal forms recently rather than two hundred years ago :-) Moreover, it was an imposed change rather than everyone just deciding to do it over time like it was with English.
18 hours later
Bring back Esperanto.
20 hours later
People get confused about gender because of the names that get given to them in two- or three-gender languages (masculine, femenine, neuter). A gender is just a fancy linguistics word for a class of things: some languages have an awful lot of them (up to twenty or so). The reason they exist is, ahem, unclear (linguist speak for ‘we don’t know, it was just the way it turned out‘): having gender (and associated agreement between chains of pronouns, nouns and adjectives) is one way of solving the ‘how do I know what word goes with what’ problem, but there are other ways, too: English does it with (very) restrictive word ordering. There’s no way that’s objectively more sensible than any other.
When you’re talking about ‘abandoing the idea of gendered’ words, do of course remember than English still has gendered pronouns.
Grrrr: ‘The number of tenses in English is too high‘> English has two tenses (syntactically and morphologically speaking).
21 hours later
Nick: thought you’d weigh in on this at some point :)
I get the impression from all this that there’s no real reason why you couldn’t just abandon gender; it’s just that no-one is going to.
I take the point about gendered pronouns; they seem to me to be useful in a way that having arbitrary nouns gendered is not, although that could just be English cultural imperialism that makes me say that.
21 hours later
sil: Indeed. There’s nothing lexical that gender does that can’t be done some other way (as the existence of languages without grammatical gender effectively proves). However, you might as well ask why we shouldn’t impose a gender structure on English nouns.
The reason, I suspect, that the idea of gendered personal pronouns makes more sense to us than the idea of gendered nouns is that gendered pronouns reflect natural gender whereas most gendered nouns merely reflect (essentially arbitrary) lexical gender.
If you are interested in the way language and the human mind does categorisation, I heartily recommend the fantastic book ‘Women, Fire and Dangerous Things’ by George Lakoff, which in addition to having the best title of a linguistics book ever is also very readable.
21 hours later
“However, you might as well ask why we shouldn’t impose a gender structure on English nouns.”
Because it wouldn’t provide any benefit (would it? that was my original question), whereas abandoning gender would provide a benefit (more easy learning). Plus, surely actual real French people forget the gender of a French noun from time to time? So it’d help them too.
22 hours later
sil: re recent regularization: in Danish, which has a similar genders system to the one in Swedish, all new nouns become “en words” (I don’t remember whether such belong to a “common” or “neuter” gender). On the other hand, a great number of the most frequently used nouns are “et words“, and that just plainly not going to be changed, at least not “from above“.
The same goes for verbs: all new ones get the -ede suffix in the past tense and -et suffix in “foernutid“, while a number of more frequently used ones have -te and -t suffixes, and the most frequently used ones are plain irregular.
22 hours later
No, it wouldn’t provide any benefit, as our language already achieves the things that a noun classification system does in other ways.
However, removing noun classification systems from languages that have them would have unpredictable consequences. It might make it easier for us as speakers of a non-gendered language to learn French. (But, starting from nothing, no language is more difficult to learn than any other (hence why babies all learn to talk at about the same ages regardless of which language they end up speaking).) However, complexity taken away from one bit of a language tends to result in you having to put additional complexity in elsewhere. It’s ‘no such thing as a free lunch‘, I’m afraid.
No, I don’t think speakers of gendered-noun languages commonly forget what gender things are, because for them a word and its gender aren’t things that need to be separately memorised.
23 hours later
I always found the concept of things having a gender in French very confusing at school, and as such I never bothered to remember or learn them. Problem solved (in my head at least!). I can still be understood, and at the end of the day that’s all that really matters.
24 hours later
As an A-Level French student I am presented almost daily with the problem of deciding what gender a noun is. Most of them I just seem to know—I can’t really explain it but I seem to have been indoctrinated with the patterns and variations thereof.
For example, all nouns ending in -tion are feminine (_information_, distribution, etc). Still, the majority of French nouns don’t follow a pattern at all and it’s just a question of learning them. As long as you learn them at the same time as the noun, as part of the noun itself and not as a separate word, you should be ok.
2 days later
I am so disappointed that someone beat me to the Danish gender question (and was rather more eloquent than I would have been). To employ the vernacular, mr l, READ ONE STEVEN PINKER: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140175296/qid=1118183981/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl/202-8899929-8603013 (I have 2 copies- give you it next time I see you)
2 days later
I think Nick has already pointed out the problem—it would impact negatively for the native speakers and only have advantages for foreigners. Personally I’m completely bilingual (English/Afrikaans) and there are grammar constructs in English that do not appear in Afrikaans and vice versa. Each language has its little vagaries and would be less rich were they to be removed.
I remember when I learn German & Latin that it was a pain in the arse to remember all the articles—but equally similar things in my home languages are no problem to me at all. It wouldn’t make it less confusing for native speakers if genders were unified and I imagine many would feel this detracted from the beauty of their language.
5 days later
i think that esperanto was good, but other than that why not just make nouns ‘l’ rather than ‘le’ or ‘la’? it would be easier. (however no i don’t think it’s ever going to change, or if it did maybe another twohundred years?)
30 weeks later