Gender articles for nouns - why? (Philological Room) Language Learning Forum

Gender articles for nouns - why?
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translator2
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Message 34 of 55

26 February 2011 at 4:14pm | IP Logged

Phonology of German Gender

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Cainntear
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Message 36 of 55

26 February 2011 at 5:35pm | IP Logged

minaaret wrote:

Languages are metaphorical, the soul of any language. Anyone who has ever read poetry in say Polish or Russian (three grammatical genders, case systems) will know and appreciate their flexibility and beauty. How poorly they sound when translated into English!

Languages are metaphorical, the soul of any language. Anyone who has ever read poetry in say English (one grammatical gender, no case system) will know and appreciate their flexibility and beauty. How poorly they sound when translated into Polish!

Edited by Cainntear on 26 February 2011 at 5:35pm
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Cainntear
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Message 37 of 55

26 February 2011 at 5:42pm | IP Logged

minaaret wrote:

As far as I remember, both Love and Death are 'He' in English. Pilots refer to planes as ‘She’ so do the sailors when talking about ships. The gender seems to be arbitrarily chosen, unless there are some historical reasons. In Polish and Russian (and it seems in German?) every noun has its gender. I don’t see anything extraordinary in it. For me it is natural and beautiful.

As I understand it Death is "he" when personified in terms of the riders of the apocalypse (from the Book of Revelation in the New Testament). I've never seen "love" described as "he", but the most commonly used mythological figure tied to love is Cupid, who was "he".

The distiction is that when we personify an abstract idea (ie when we treat it as though it is a human person, body and soul), the gender depends on that personification. If all we do is anthopomorphise either an idea or a concrete object (ie treat it as though it has human motivation, but don't imply it is physically human), we use "she".
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Raчraч Ŋuɲa
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Message 39 of 55

27 February 2011 at 3:17am | IP Logged

spirit splice wrote:

Learning German and looking at the different articles for nouns based on their gender (I believe other languages use this though English does not) I am left wondering what purpose could this serve. I find no useful utility for a noun having a gender. English gets along fine without it and all it seems to do is muddy the water and complicate things. Is there a historical usefulness for this or is it just an oddity of language?

I think you just have to accept this as a feature of these languages.

If your criteria is that one language can go along without it, then tense (past, present, future) would count as a useless feature of English. Other languages are fine without tense affixes, like Mandarin and even Tagalog. Its also confusing since you can use the different tenses for what they are not supposed to be used, like present tense to talk about the future, or use of past tense for future.. According to this, there are 6 tenses to talk about the past. How is that for muddying English waters?
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Kartof
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Message 40 of 55

27 February 2011 at 6:31am | IP Logged

Cainntear wrote:

Kartof wrote:

I once read in a book about Spanish that you shouldn't think of
grammatical gender as giving objects male or
female characteristics but rather as just another grammatical category to apply to the language. I wonder why
the
categories are associated with gender though.

You've got that the wrong way round.

Traditionally, category was synonymous with gender.

In Modern English, the word "gender" has lost its meaning in everyday use, and has now become synonymous
with only one type of categorisation -- classification by biological sex.

But the term "gender" in grammar predates that change in meaning. It's a shame we didn't stop using it,
because it has caused a lot of confusion to a lot of people.

So we have "categories" in language, not "sexes". It just so happens that we often reuse these categories to
denote sex, and the obvious label for these categories then becomes sex -- hence we call a French beer
feminine, not because it is feminine, but because it is in the same category as women are.

Yes, that's a really good point that you make in which the link to gender may be because of the category the
word that denotes the sex is in. However, why is it then that in most languages the article is based on gender
and not on some other arbitrary category like its color or its shape? It'd be interesting if languages were
reorganized in such way.

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