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Gender in languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| ancientweird Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6753 days ago 9 posts - 10 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 1 of 27 08 January 2009 at 5:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have a question for those of you who've learned several languages from the same family that use gender classifications for nouns.
Are the genders for specific words the same across the board? For example: in Germanic languages is the word for "dog" the same gender in all Germanic languages. I am just curious as to whether or not gender is only an issue with the first learned language in a set. Edited by ancientweird on 08 January 2009 at 5:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6443 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 27 08 January 2009 at 5:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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No, no such luck.
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| Lindsay19 Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5825 days ago 183 posts - 214 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC1 Studies: Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic | Message 3 of 27 08 January 2009 at 8:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm not sure what you mean by words being the same gender in all Germanic languages...
In German "dog" is masculine (the other genders being feminine and neuter), while in Swedish it is a neuter word (while the other gender is called common gender) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| multilingual Bilingual Diglot Newbie Canada Joined 5844 days ago 28 posts - 29 votes Speaks: French*, English* Studies: German Studies: Russian, Portuguese | Message 4 of 27 08 January 2009 at 11:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, unfortunately, I do not know enough languages from any one family to tell you that, but, for those wishing
to answer, "dog" is probably not a good example. This is because most languages have two words for "dog" or "cat" just as English makes the distinction between "man" and "woman". Of course, English also makes this distinction for dog, but not so much anymore given then connotation bitch has taken. I suggest a word representing an inanimate object such as "table" or "chair" if people want to compare. Gender is really just a grammatical construction and some languages can tend to feminize or masculinize certain words. This can even be observed in modern French where the French tend to use the masculine for words brought into the language, such as "un jeans", whereas in Québec and throughout Canada, it is common to use the feminine "une jeans". This characterizes a very large portion of imported words. Also, some languages, if you are lucky, allow you to guess the gender of a noun by it's ending. German comes to mind where "Mädchen", "little girl" is a neuter noun because of the diminutive "chen" at the end of it. What I'm trying to get at here is I doubt there is much overlap. Regardless, gender does not tend to be a huge hurdle; with most languages, you must simply learn the gender with the noun, reinforce it through reading, watching television and eventually by being corrected by a native speaker (who gets it all so easily). What I'm trying to get at here is that it is hardly the end of the world. You should expect to butcher the gender of nouns for quite a while beginning in most languages. This is a problem that does a good job at fixing itself. Take the time to look up the gender of a noun that you are not sure about every now and then. Next thing you know, you'll notice that some words sound wrong if you add the wrong gender of adjective or pronoun in front of it. 1 person has 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 5 of 27 08 January 2009 at 11:51pm | IP Logged | ||
In general, determining grammatical gender in Slavonic languages is MUCH easier than in modern Romance or Germanic languages. Slavonic languages determine grammatical gender in most cases using the ending of the noun in nominative singular. This also means that obvious cognates within the Slavonic family tend to share grammatical gender. In your example with "dog", all of the cognates of a widespread word meaning "dog" in Slavonic languages (i.e. pes, pies, pas, пес, пëc) are masculine (see the examples under masculine nouns in the middle of this post if you don't believe me. ;-)) Nouns in singular that end in consonants (except for some historically "soft" consonants) are often masculine. Nouns in singular that end in -a or historically soft consonants are often feminine. Nouns in singular that end in -e, -i, -í, -o or sounds that are descended from nasal vowels are often neuter. When talking about human adults, Slavonic languages also use natural gender as in English (children and young animals are grammatically neuter in Slavonic languages, but let's not complicate things). Therefore words that denote human men are considered masculine regardless of the ending. Words that denote human women are considered feminine regardless of the ending. This idea of natural gender also applies to names. For example, a woman named "Cheryl" would be declined as a feminine noun and have associated verbs and adjectives in feminine form. Slavs recognize that Cheryl is female despite her name having the form of a grammatically "masculine" noun in isolation. Examples: - kolega = "[male] friend" (Polish - it looks like a feminine word because of the ending "a" and in singular it declines as a feminine noun. In plural it declines as a masculine noun) - mati = "mother" (Serbo-Croatian - it is feminine even if it looks like a plural or neuter word because of the ending "i". N.B. A more "intuitive" and common word for "mother" in Serbo-Croatian is "majka" whose grammatical gender would be interpreted by a native speaker of any Slavonic language as feminine.) - тато = "dad" (Ukrainian - it looks like a neuter word because of the ending "o" but it declines as a masculine noun) Outside humans, the rules of thumb for determining grammatical gender based on a noun's ending apply. MASCULINE (normally a noun that ends in a consonant) - pes = "dog" (Czech, Slovak, Slovenian); pies (Polish); pas (Serbo-Croatian); пес (Bulgarian, Ukrainian); пёс (Russian - archaic) - człowiek = "person" (Polish), človek (Slovak, Slovenian); čov(j)ek (Serbo-Croatian) человек (Russian) - most = "bridge" (Czech, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian); мост (Bulgarian, Belorussian, Russian, Ukrainian) FEMININE (normally a noun that ends with "a") - žena = "woman" (Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak); жена (Bulgarian); жінка (Ukrainian) - hlava = "head" (Czech, Slovak); głowa (Polish); glava (Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian); голова (Russian) - voda = "water" (Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian); woda (Polish); вода (Bulgarian, Russian, Ukrainian) NEUTER (normally ends in "e", "i", "í", "o" or a nasal vowel) - moře = "sea" (Czech); morze (Polish); more (Serbo-Croatian, Slovak); море (Bulgarian, Russian, Ukrainian) - oko = "eye" (Czech, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Slovak); око (Bulgarian, Ukrainian) - pero = "feather" (Czech, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Slovak); pióro (Polish); перо (Bulgarian, Russian, Ukrainian) - jméno = "name" (Czech); meno (Slovak); imię (Polish); ime (Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian); имя (Russian); ім’я (Ukrainian) [Apparent exception "я" in имя/ім’я is pronounced "ya" and looks feminine but "я" in the Russian and Ukrainian words for "name" are modern continuations of the old nasal vowel "ę" which was neuter. It's still retained most closely by the Polish nasal vowel "ę"] Because of sound changes in Slavonic languages over time, the modern Slavonic languages appear to show other exceptions in addition to the one above for the word "name". However, these apparent exceptions are understandable if you are aware of older forms from these languages or study comparative Slavonic linguistics. Here are two examples of other exceptions using Czech and Serbo-Croatian. a) Modern Czech may seem to break a lot of these rules because of sound changes that happened during the Middle Ages. The ancestors of the Czechs for some reason started to pronounce some feminine words that originally ended in -a as ones that would end in -e. However these words remained feminine despite showing an ending ("-e") that one normally associates with the neuter. b) Earlier forms of Czech and Serbo-Croatian (and Slovenian) went through a sound change where words that used to end in "soft t" (t') turned into ones that would end in "t". Normally a noun that ends in "t" in a Slavonic language is masculine but because of this sound change it's now possible to see modern nouns that end in "t" that have feminine gender because that "t" was originally a "soft t" that was characteristic of feminine nouns. Some examples. - duše = "soul" (Czech); dusza (Polish); duša (Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian) душа (Belorussian, Bulgarian, Russian, Ukrainian) [Some Czech feminine words end in "e" because of a change from "a" to "e" that didn't affect the other Slavonic languages] - ulice = "street" (Czech); ulica (Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian); улица (Russian); вулиця (Ukrainian) [The explanation is the same as in Czech "duše" of the previous example. In other Slavonic languages the word for street has a "typical" feminine form since it ends in "a" or "ya" (я)] - kost = "bone" (Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian); kość (Polish); kosť (Slovak) кость (Russian); кістка (Ukrainian) [The word is feminine in Slavonic languages because of the historical "soft t" which is still retained in Russian and Slovak. "Soft t" in Czech, Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian has merged with "normal t". Polish ć in "kość" is the Polish development of "soft t" and at the end of a Polish noun it denotes feminine gender. You can see that modern Ukrainian makes the gender very obvious now since its word for "bone" now ends in "a" like a "normal" feminine word.] In conclusion, most "close" cognates within Slavonic languages do share the same gender as their principle for determining grammatical gender is more mechanistic than in modern Romance or Germanic languages. Note: I use the term "Serbo-Croatian" because the differences between the variants (i.e. "Bosnian", "Croatian", "Montengerin", "Serbian") are irrelevant when discussing grammatical gender of cognates within the Slavonic family and are only relevant when dealing with sociolinguistics or Balkan identity politics. 1 person has 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 6 of 27 09 January 2009 at 12:13am | IP Logged | ||
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As far as I can tell, there is one word off the top of my head whose gender seems to be the same in Romance, Germanic and Slavonic sub-families. The word is "night"
E.g. (La) nuit (French) (Die) Nacht (German) (Tá) noc (Slovak - N.B. Slovak doesn't have articles so I'm using an appropriate demonstrative pronoun for illustrative purposes. "Tá noc" means "that night" instead of "the night") "Good night!" (English) "Bonne nuit!" (French) "Gute Nacht!" (German) "Dobrú noc!" (Slovak) In French, German and Slovak, the adjective for "good" must be declined into a feminine form. I suspect that the reconstructed ancestor of "night" in Proto-Indo-European was also feminine and that its grammatical gender has carried through into the cognates in modern Indo-European languages. Does anyone know the gender (where applicable) of the cognates of "night" in other Indo-European languages? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Alkeides Senior Member Bhutan Joined 6152 days ago 636 posts - 644 votes | Message 7 of 27 09 January 2009 at 1:49am | IP Logged | ||
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"nox" in Latin is feminine. The cognates in Ancient Greek, Sanskrit and Old English are also all feminine - which leads us to the reconstructed feminione form *nókʷts.
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| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6038 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 8 of 27 09 January 2009 at 2:36am | IP Logged | ||
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Nyx is a Greek goddess of the night, maybe this is is the origin of the word; It is feminine in Bulgarian too ( Нощ /nosht/.) Edited by Sennin on 09 January 2009 at 2:39am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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