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Lack of Noun Gender in English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4669 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 73 of 126 20 December 2013 at 1:53am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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It probably also helps for French <-> Spanish that the two languages mostly share genders for the huge number of words that they have in common.
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| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6601 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 74 of 126 20 December 2013 at 3:48am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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s_allard, have you ever learned about the theoretical English grammar though? not just the practical, which obviously doesn't focus on the gender? (I don't think ESL textbooks even bother to point out that English has separate words for he and she, assuming everyone knows this already)
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5434 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 75 of 126 20 December 2013 at 6:14am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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On the disappearance of grammatical gender, people don't have to take my word for it. You only have to look up
gender in English, as in this quote from Wikipedia: "Gender in Old English[ Old English had a system of grammatical gender similar to that of modern German, with three genders: masculine, feminine, neuter. Determiners and attributive adjectives showed gender inflection in agreement with the noun they modified. Also the nouns themselves followed different declension patterns depending on their gender. Moreover the third-person personal pronouns, as well as interrogative and relative pronouns, were chosen according to the grammatical gender of their antecedent. For details of the declension patterns and pronoun systems, see Old English grammar. Decline of grammatical gender[edit] By the 11th century, the role of grammatical gender in Old English was beginning to decline.[1] The Middle English of the 13th century was in transition to the loss of a gender system.[2][3] One element of this process was the change in the functions of the words the and that (then spelt þe and þat; see also Old English determiners): previously these had been non-neuter and neuter forms respectively of a single determiner, but in this period the came to be used generally as a definite article and that as a demonstrative; both thus ceased to manifest any gender differentiation.[4] The loss of gender classes was part of a general decay of inflectional endings and declensional classes by the end of the 14th century.[5] While inflectional reduction seems to have been incipient in the English language itself, some theories suggest that it was accelerated by contact with Old Norse, especially in midland and northern dialects.[6] Gender loss began in the north of England; the south-east and the south-west Midlands were the most linguistically conservative regions, and Kent retained traces of gender in the 1340s.[2] Late 14th-century London English had almost completed the shift away from grammatical gender,[2] and Modern English retains no morphological agreement of words with grammatical gender.[5]" Note the last sentence: ...and Modern English retains no morphological agreement of words with grammatical gender. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7160 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 76 of 126 20 December 2013 at 8:15am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I genuinely don't get how one can confound natural gender (or "semantic gender"?) and grammatical gender considering that the latter implies morphological marking whereas the former need not do so. It's clear enough to me, and what s_allard posts about the difference in this area between English and French (and Spanish and German) is uncontroversial.
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| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5060 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 77 of 126 20 December 2013 at 10:46am | IP Logged | ||||||||
And when I see Latin "liber", how is the masculine gender marked?
It doesn't have a sex, thus it is neutre.
Oh, really?! If it is the case, Russians speak a genderless language. What a discovery! And let's recall Latin "eius": uxor ejus, maritus ejus... Latin does not have genders, you know? 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4711 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 78 of 126 20 December 2013 at 11:52am | IP Logged | ||||||||
You know as well as I do that not all languages mark gender through the article, but through noun suffixes. I'm not sure about the Latin adjectives, it's too long ago, but taking Russian as an example: the -ый suffix indicates masculinity. And many Russian words (masculine ones) have a null ending which means masculinity. In English the article is always the same, but the noun can have gender that is attributed based on sex. It is the same in Hebrew, where the article is bound to the noun, but it is always -H(a). However in Hebrew nouns do have masculine or feminine gender which is indicated by suffixes, not by the article. In Dutch, nouns have gender, but the possessives agree with the owner, not with the noun being referred to; Zijn boek, haar boek (not zijn boek because het boek is neuter). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5434 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 79 of 126 20 December 2013 at 2:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
The question isn't whether Russian, Latin or English is genderless but what is the nature of gender in these languages. The key concept here is grammatical gender. Everybody agrees that English, (and probably all or most languages) acknowledges biological or, as Chung pointed out, semantic gender. This is manifested primarily in the pronouns and possessive adjectives. There are some rare remnants in certain noun suffixes as in actress and aviatrix but even these are dying out. What is true --and probably the source of the confusion here -- is that certain words are associated with male or female biological gender: man, woman, mother, father, etc. The names of certain professions have also been associated with genders. Historically, nurse in English was associated with women and engineer with men. This of course has been changing. It is also interesting to note that the suffix -man as in chairman, policeman, fisherman and fireman is disappearing because of the evolution towards non-sexist language as in chairperson or chair, police officer, fisher and firefighter. That is how gender works in English. As I stated before, one can make quite easily make English relatively gender neutral by modifying the pronouns and the possessive adjectives. On the other hand--and I'm sorry to repeat this--grammamtical gender refers to a system of morphological markings of various words based on the classification of the referent or antecedent into what has been historically --and unfortunately--called gender. I say unfortunately because it should really be called noun class because that is what it is. I prefer to say for example that French has two noun classes. LE words and LA words and eschew completely the words feminine and masculine. What complicates things of course and has provoked endless debate is the fact that in languages with grammatical genter, semantic gender is grammatically manifested by the determiner article and often a noun suffix. For example, in French a nurse is either "un infirmier" or "une infirmière." I should note in passing that English used "male nurse" to differentiate the men from the women in that profession but even that is dying out where I live. If I may repeat myself, grammatical gender refers to the whole system of morphologiical or syntactic constraints on the entire phrase and based on the category of the key word. I can't comment on Russian but anybody who has studied any Romance language knows that one of the biggest complications is mastering the system of grammatical agreement. Why is mastering grammatical gender in other languages a nightmare for speakers of English? Unlike English where one only has to keep track of the odd "he" :she: :his" and "her," in a language like French you have to continuously adjust word endings or even use different words to maintain agreement. If I look at these paragraphs that I have just written, I have not once had to think about gender-related morphology. Had I written the same thing in French every sentence would have required that I choose the proper form for articles, adjectives and participles. This is probably the number one reason why English is such an easy language for people coming from a language with grammatical gender. English has its complications of course, but I would think that from the point of view of grammar, Russian grammar with with its gender and cases is far more daunting for the English speaker than English grammar is for the Russian speaker. English isn't genderless. It has semantic gender with some grammatical implications. But this is not the same as grammatical gender and is totally unlike anything found in languages with true grammatical gender. Edited by s_allard on 20 December 2013 at 2:10pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6601 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 80 of 126 20 December 2013 at 3:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
s_allard, do you think that English also has no cases? It has the common and the possessive ones. And some remnants of the old dative. Edited by Serpent on 20 December 2013 at 3:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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