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What are gendered words for? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4029 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 17 of 21 01 August 2014 at 5:50am | IP Logged |
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I've come back to add to what I wrote. Sometimes after gender lines blur, they reorganize after enough shuffling via
analogy and more, this is how African noun classes, which are far more predictable based on semantics, were born from some sort of shuffling and further splits. Gender in German for example is grammatical yet semantics exist in slight amounts, I don't know whether they are remnants of some time when gender may have been more semantic or recent innovations into organizing gender. Possibly both, breakdown then reorganization, does anyone have an answer? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4665 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 18 of 21 01 August 2014 at 11:15pm | IP Logged |
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Gender is a weird thing, for example, in Norwegian
bokmål, "the island" or "the hut" are feminine ("øya" and "hytta" respectively), but "the woman" is masculine ("kvinnen"). Edited by Medulin on 01 August 2014 at 11:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5056 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 19 of 21 02 August 2014 at 4:19am | IP Logged |
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Other than disambiguating the referent of a pronoun, I can think of one more incidental function of gender: It can
be used to distinguish what would otherwise be homonyms. Ex: Portuguese: O grama foi inventado pelos franceses "The gram was invented by the French" versus A grama foi inventada pelos franceses "Lawns were invented by the French." In principle, you could cram twice as many words into the same phonetic space without increasing ambiguity, at least in sentence structures with gender agreement. Edited by robarb on 02 August 2014 at 4:22am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4665 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 20 of 21 04 August 2014 at 11:00pm | IP Logged |
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Colloquial Brazilian Portuguese: ''Moça, me vê duzentas gramas desse queijo, por favor.''
(200 g [f.] of this cheese, please) No one would interpret it as [200 lawns of this cheese, please] Edited by Medulin on 04 August 2014 at 11:01pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5056 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 21 of 21 12 August 2014 at 9:27pm | IP Logged |
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That's true, in BP grama 'gram' can actually be either gender depending on the speaker. Books say masculine but it's
commonly spoken either way. On the other hand, grama 'lawn' is always feminine. And in most cases the context is enough to be clear which meaning is meant. In principle it could work but in this case, the disambiguating function is quite negligible at best ;) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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