I know a lot of languages have some aspects that probably seem a bit strange to non-native speakers…in the case of gendered words is there a point other than “just the way its always been” that explains it a bit better?
I don’t have gendered words in my native language, and from the outside looking in I’m not sure what gendered words actually provide in terms of context? Is there more to it that I’m not quite following?
Speaking one language that is mildly gendered (English), two that are strongly (and in the case of the second bizarrely!) gendered (French, German) and one that is almost entirely ungendered (Mandarin), I have not found any utility whatsoever in grammatical gender.
I suspect that grammatical gender is just an ur-form of grammatical classifiers that has stuck around for non-useful amounts of time. I suspect this because one of the grammatical “gender” divisions that’s in use in many languages isn’t masculine/feminine(/neuter) but rather animate/inanimate. So I suspect that grammatical gender was a classification mechanism whose system and utility was distorted into uselessness over the thousands of years of spread and development.
So why do we have classification mechanisms? Well, in Mandarin there’s classifier words. (In English too: “a sheet of paper”, not “a paper”, but it’s waaaaaaaaaaaaay stricter in Mandarin.) The classifiers in Mandarin, given the sheer amount of punning potential in oral language, are likely a redundant piece of information to help nail down which specific word you mean in contexts where it might be unclear. For example in a noisy environment, or if someone is speaking unclearly, “paper” (纸张[zhǐ zhāng]) might be confused with “spider” (蜘蛛 [zhī zhū]). But if I say 一只蜘蛛 [yī zhī zhī zhū]—a spider—it’s harder to confuse that with 一张纸张 [yī zhāng zhǐ zhāng]—a piece of paper.
So I’m positing that perhaps at some point grammatical gender was used as a primitive form of classification for disambiguation that some languages just never grew out of. Which is why in German men are masculine, women are feminine, boys are masculine, and girls are neuter. It has nothing to do with actual physical gender and is just a weird, atrophied, and somewhat useless remnant of language.
Thanks for the explanation!
If I may, what do you mean by English being mildly gendered?
English has gendered pronouns, for example. There’s also some gender divides in nouns: actor/actress, for example. (These are slowly being replaced, however.)
Languages like Farsi and Mandarin and such don’t. The only difference in pronouns, in fact, with Farsi is “courteous” vs. “common”. And even that isn’t happening as much as it used to. And the only time nouns are gendered is if the item they’re talking about has an actual physical gender. Like “man” or “woman”. There are no gendered declensions of any kind, in fact.
It’s more complicated in Chinese. In oral Chinese there’s no gendered pronouns. It’s pronounced [tā] whether you mean man, woman, or other.1 As with Farsi, however, there are no gendered nouns outside of those describing literal physically-gendered things. And unlike Farsi, not only are there no gendered declensions of any kind, there are hardly any declensions of any kind2.
1 In written Chinese, for complicated reasons, there are three different pronouns in common usage: 他 for masculine (he), 她 for feminine (she), and 它 for everything else (it). This “modernization” was first proposed in the very late 19th century and came into its final form sometime in the 1920s. It was a deliberate attempt to make Chinese easier to translate into western languages (and since at the time the Chinese had somewhat of an inferiority complex it was also couched as making Chinese a “modern” language). (There were a couple of others added, including one for deities and one for animals, but those never caught on and are hardly ever seen in modern Chinese.)
But they’re all pronounced the same: [tā].
And now, full circle, Chinese is “modernizing” again. While official laws, forms, scholarly papers, regulations, etc. use that three-way split in pronouns, increasingly in commercial settings (like the world’s largest digital souq: Taobao) all pronouns are being replaced with “TA”. Yes. Latin letters. Uppercased.
This I find completely hilarious: Chinese developed gendered pronouns (in writing only!) to soothe western tastes … only to pick up an ungendered pronoun again … to match western tastes. And before westerners have solved the problem themselves in their own languages!
2 Chinese does not decline for number except for a tiny handful of cases you can learn completely in 30 minutes. (And even here it’s not quite ‘declension’ like that word applies in the Indo-European family of languages.) There’s no “car” vs. “cars”. They’re both 汽车. If you want to specify that you mean more than one car, you would modify it by saying “some” or “three” or whatever in front of it: 一些汽车 [yī xiē qì chē], literally “one (small number) car” or “some cars”.
I never knew they’re using TA again, that’s so funny. Do you know how they used to write it? Why not just return to that? I’m sure written standard pronouns existed before “modernization”.
The original form is the current “he”, so returning to that would be problematical.
Thanks for the very educational reply! If you have some blogs or something i’d love to hear more analyses on languages like these
gender in English
Oh, I forgot there are ways of gendering that aren’t limited to nouns having gender like Spanish. Thanks for explaining!
I dont know as many languages as OP, but I can compare german to english. English is “technically” gendered, but compared to german, basically everything exept the things where it makes sense are neutral. German is complicated. Everything is gendered, and exept for some very obvious stuff (man is male, woman is female) it just is random. Shoulder is female, arm is male but hand is female again. House is neutral, wall is female, floor is male. So in comparison, english is slightly gendered and german is completly and randomly gendered.
I guess I didn’t associate the English “man”/"woman“ with grammatical gender in the way that grammatical gender is often so arbitrary, like “wall” being female in Gernan. Thanks for the perspective.
“Man/woman” are entirely separate nouns, I don’t think they’re even as closely related as one’d think. Different pronouns aren’t the same thing, either.
Basically, this has nothing to do with gender as a social or biological phenomenon. It is just a property of a noun that has an unintuitive name. Similarly to how English arbitrarily decides that you can’t say “swimmed” because “swim” is “not that kind of verb”, German arbitrarily divides nouns into three classes.
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Is it? How? Compared to German (something is masculine, feminine or neuter), French, Spanish (masc., fem.) that “gender” is a property of a noun, that English doesn’t really have or care about.
Regarding the paper analogy,
Paper is a material, not a discrete object. A sheet is an object, but is ambiguous until you quantify what is it a sheet of.
You could have a sheet of paper, or metal, or pasta.
A page would be a way to say a sheet of paper as an object.
I’m sorry that the Chinese classify things differently from you. I’ll get right on asking them to change it to suit your thoughts. (As it so happens, the classifier 张 is, in fact, “flat objects”. Fancy that! Perhaps reading what I actually wrote instead of what you wanted me to write so you could “well akshually” me might be an advantage.)
I’m reporting what is, not recommending.
All good man,
I was just talking about your analogy using the English language, and how it seem like a false comparison. I wasn’t commenting on the Chinese. No need to be rude.
What. Fucking. Analogy?
There are a lot of things in German that make far more sense than English (the pronunciation of ie vs ei for example), but nobody needs that many words for you or the.
I love German’s case structure! Except that the gender system slices through what could be an elegant way of piecing sentences together in any order without ambiguity and turns it into a muddled mess that requires you to memorize the silly gender of every damned noun in the language. ☹