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What are gendered words for? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Tyrion101 Senior Member United States Joined 3693 days ago 153 posts - 174 votes  Speaks: French | Message 1 of 21 12 April 2014 at 5:08am | IP Logged | ||
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I've often wondered if there is a rhyme behind the madness that is gendered words, and I had a thought while I was looking at Mandarin. In Mandarin it seems sometimes that you say things differently depending on if you are talking about a person or an object. Is that the case? Is it also the case in languages with gendered words?
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| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6985 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 2 of 21 12 April 2014 at 5:53am | IP Logged | ||
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In the words of Edwin Starr absolutely nothing.
I just wanted to link to that great song to expand culture. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| renaissancemedi Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Greece Joined 4138 days ago 941 posts - 1309 votes Speaks: Greek*, Ancient Greek*, EnglishC2 Studies: French, Russian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew | Message 3 of 21 12 April 2014 at 8:22am | IP Logged | ||
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Not in greek. Of course, if you talk about a person you take into cosideration the actual gender, but there are exeptions: the girl/ boy are "it" words for example. So, in the end, no.
Why did you call it madness? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5379 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 4 of 21 12 April 2014 at 9:39am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, one function is easier back reference:
Die Vase stieß gegen den Teller. Jetzt ist er kaputt. The vase bumped against the plate. Now it is broken. In the gendered language you know now, that it is the plate, not the vase that is broken. 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4033 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 5 of 21 12 April 2014 at 9:52am | IP Logged | ||
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The Indo-European gender system stems from an animate-inanimate divide present in early Proto-Indo-European that changed into the three-way gender system we all know (hate/love) (likely due to grammaticalization of some conjugational paradigms, but I can't remember right now). Many IE-languages, like Icelandic, still mirror the old system's logic in them; the "inanimate" class didn't have an accusative that was different from the nominative, but the animate ones did. In Icelandic masculine and feminine are (often) distinct from the nominative (only masculine also in plural) but the neuter never gets a distinct accusative separate from the nominative. This is why some age-old words like "tree" are neuter in almost all IE-languages (that still have neuter, usually it merged with the masculine where two-way distinction is present).
To wrap it up, yes, there used to be a logic behind it, but since it has collapsed into a more or less arbitrary (with the Romance languages entirely arbitrary [opinion]) system and we just have to live with it (sigh.) Edited by Henkkles on 12 April 2014 at 12:37pm 16 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6377 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 6 of 21 12 April 2014 at 3:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5689 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 7 of 21 14 April 2014 at 1:29am | IP Logged | ||
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As far as most native speakers are concerned, the genders just are the way they are, there's no reason or sense involved :-) And some of them are counterintuitive anyway. Most people don't look for patterns. We just learn them, and later on we thank our lucky stars that English doesn't have noun genders for us to memorise...
But it's helpful in some ways because it lets you know which noun "it" might be referring to, even a paragraph later. If you're talking about a person instead of an object, the pronouns change, but the rest stays the same. Liz 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 3879 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 8 of 21 14 April 2014 at 10:51am | IP Logged | ||
And some languages treat animate and inanimate objects differently, within a two- or three-way gender system structure, or have two words for the same object. At least I've always assumed that this is a remnant of the PIE animate/inanimate divide. Breton, for example, has a two-gender system, but plurals do not follow gender. Instead they follow the inanimate/animate divide (some notable exceptions exist). Some plural fun: both animate and inanimate plurals of "god" can be found in a dictionary, and also trees take the animate plural. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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