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Gender in languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Alkeides Senior Member Bhutan Joined 6152 days ago 636 posts - 644 votes  | Message 25 of 27 15 January 2009 at 10:36am | IP Logged | ||
That's not quite true really. Firstly, the neuter gender was mostly lost (with a few odd words) in all the Romance languages; the daughter languages differ in how the formerly neuter nouns were assigned genders. Some of these transformations are quite unpredictable - like how gaudium -i n. turned to joie fem in French. The aforementioned "milk" was neuter in Latin, lac -is, n. Secondly, common Slavic is considerably closer to PIE than common Romance and is slightly more recent; proto-Slavic only broke up around the sixth century AD and the Slavic languages today are still all considerably more conservative than even Latin in noun morphology. IMO, the more conservative an Indo-European language is (in terms of noun morphology), the easier the gender will be to predict if you know another conservative Indo-European language - regardless of family. 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 26 of 27 15 January 2009 at 12:07pm | IP Logged | ||
Which cognates of Croatian and Slovenian have different gender? (and I assume that you're talking about cognates that have identical or near-identical forms. Cognates which exist now in significantly different forms may not make for even comparison as we could end up with differing gender just because of the mechanistic principles of gender determination in the Slavonic sub-family). There's nothing as irregular in Slavonic languages as there is in Romance languages, is there? For example "milk" (mléko, mlieko, малако, молоко, mleko, etc.) is neuter throughout the Slavonic sub-family, but it can be masculine or feminine depending on which Romance language we're dealing with. I'm aware that what I've described with Slavonic languages doesn't apply at all times with cognates in the contemporary languages but the apparent exceptions that I've encountered so far are understandable or explainable using evidence from comparative or historical Slavonic linguistics (BTW: I doubt that this is of much interest to non-linguists or people who intend to learn how to use only one Slavonic language). Apart from the apparent exceptions noted previously with Slavonic cognates meaning "name" or "bone", I also recall another apparent exception with Serbian "sto" (table) versus Croatian "stol" (table). That's explainable by the fact that within antecedents of Serbo-Croatian, the old final "-l" changed into "o" or dropped altogether from some words but the original gender was retained. In the case of Serbian, "sto" (table) is still masculine as it is in other Slavonic languages. "Sto" isn't neuter even though it appears to be so strictly on the basis of its modern ending "-o". The Serbs tend to have been more affected by the change of final "-l" than the Croats but it's a matter of degree and not a neat or regular demarcation between the speech of Croats and Serbs as the next two examples below are used by both ethnic groups and prescribed as correct by the language-academies of Croatia and Serbia. "posao" (work) and "bio [sam/si/je]" ([I/you/he] was/were/was) Again the change with final "-l" explains why "posao" (work) or "bio [sam/si/je]" (I was / you were / he was) are treated as masculine even though they look neuter, The antecedents of "posao" and "bio" resembled "posal" and "bil" respectively and are consistent with the form of masculine words. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Toufik18 Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Algeria Joined 5748 days ago 188 posts - 202 votes Speaks: Arabic (Written)*, Arabic (classical)*, French, English | Message 27 of 27 05 March 2009 at 1:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think htat the best way to learn the gender is to memorize it with the new words
BEcause you can't gess when it comes to gender, and i've learnd The grammatical gender in french this way ;) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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