Talk:Grammatical gender

Why does this article say English doesn't have grammatical genders? It seems to me that it has three genders based on biology. Example: He takes her hand (English). Er greift ihre Hand (German). "He" and "her" clearly show gender. Is it because "her" isn't inflected to show the gender of "hand" as it is in German? Or because the articles of English don't show gender?

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It might be worth mentioning that some Indo-European languages (notably the Scandinavian languages and Dutch) have in the course of their history merged the masculine and feminine genders into a single gender, known as "common". Thus these languages have two genders, "common" and "neuter", neither of which bears any relationship to maleness or femaleness!

Obviously it's worth it! I attempted it, but be bold in updating pages :)

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Chinese doesn't have a large number of personal pronouns. Maybe thinking of Japanese?

The diversity of Japanese personal pronouns has no relation to grammatical gender. That's a problem of honorific varaeties.

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What in the world is grammatical gender for? What function does it serve, outside the case of natural gender? Ortolan88 13:45 Jul 24, 2002 (PDT)

not much really. It's not even terribly desirable to segregate humans into two sets of pronouns: it's just another gender straightjacket. It can sometimes help disambiguate sentences -- if two nouns are of differering gender then it's clear which one a pronoun refers to, but that's pure fluke. languages that don't have it get round that with no problems. --- Tarquin 13:59 Jul 24, 2002 (PDT)

In Spanish you can get two words by changing the gender, la colera (anger) and el colera (cholera), and a few dozen more, but Spanish speakers don't always get them right, certainly not me. Would you feel confident in adding something about the uselessness of gender to the article? It's why I came here, actually to look something up but it wasn't there! Having explained that, where do you suppose it came from? Ortolan88 16:57 Jul 24, 2002 (PDT)

Who says, anyway, that it has to be useful? What's the use of having three different classes of verbs in Spanish, plus exceptions? It's just there, it's not something that people voted on. - Montréalais

While it may not have to be useful (I was responding to Tarquin's statement that it didn't have much use), I still want to know what gender's function is. I'm fairly taken with the answer below, and I think I may add it to the article if there are no objections. For my money, there is no analogy between the three forms of verb (some things just are) and the presence of gender in a language. Finnish has nine cases, but they make up for it by having no prepositions, thus, the function of the nine cases. Delighted to be continuing this conversation so many months later, I remain, that masculine guy, Ortolan88 04:37 Nov 19, 2002 (UTC)

I agree with the comment above about disambiguation. Loads of languages have grammatical genders of various types, and in evolutionary terms, the main advantage for a language featuring natural gender types is disambiguation. Dividing objects into two/three classes means that when you say 'he smells', the number of possible referents is divided into two or three. That may still sound pretty ambiguous, but when uttered in a context, there are usually only a few possible referents, so this division can really help. Of course, there are other ways of disambiguating... But acquring a language with grammatical genders (as your first language) is no more difficult than any language without, and so this slight advantage comes at no real cost (other than to adult learners!)

Hm... le fif but la tapette... French hasn't quite made up its mind about me yet ;) (Maybe das Schwülchen?) -Montréalais

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Gender is handy for many things, but primarily for adding clarity while minimizing verbosity. Things like adjective agreement and gendered pronouns make it easy to figure out the structure of a sentence with fewer words and with less reliance on things like word order and extra particles. --LDC

This can perhaps be made a little more concrete with an example. Spanish has two genders, and this allows you to say things like this: "Maria gave Jorge a guitar and a book. He put it under his bed and it on the table." In Spanish, you can make it clear that the first it ("la") refers to the guitar ("la guitarra"), while the second it ("lo") refers to the book ("el libro"). This is a silly example; this is mostly handy for long, complicated sentences. --Ryguasu 06:58 Nov 19, 2002 (UTC)

I might be wrong, but if I remember things correctly from my Spanish classes, "lo" is only used for the abstract it, like for instance "it's sunny", "it's raining" etc. In this sense, I think "el" would be used for the book.

Way wrong. Lo is a direct object pronoun. There is no direct object pronoun "el." Lo amo: I love him.

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There's a need to link subject-object problem from this article, and vice versa, since many aspects of that problem relate to grammatical gender and its arbitrary assignment by a culture. For instance the most obvious example is "God" being referred as "He", along with whatever else is masculine in the language, while say "Earth" is "She" (rarely or never "he" although often "it") along with whatever else is feminine. This puts a pretty obvious slant on what is associated with what, and is an obvious example of gender being assigned to things that don't sexually reproduce...

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How about a list of languages according to gender type? 1) two genders (masc and fem); 2) two genders (animate and inanimate); 3) three genders (masc, fem, neut). I came here looking for that but I'm not sure how to do it. Mjklin 03:35, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Hm, isn't this a bit pointless? Of course it would be valuable to make note of the gender system in each language's article. But with this approach, carrying it through to its bitter conclusion, you will end up with a list of 6000 entries that will not readily yield useful information. It's certainly useful to list a few examples for each type, but beyond that, it would make more sense just to say things like isolating languages by definition have no gender, or finno-ugric languages have no gender, than to list each and every language, thereby obscuring such regularities.... Dbachmann 12:46, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Just because isolating languages don't take suffixes doesn't mean they have no gender. If I understand it correctly, in Mandarin counting you have to use certain classifiers depending upon the characteristics of the noun you're counting, and if you use the wrong classifier, the meaning can be different (I don't know any examples, but it's like the el colera/la colera in Spanish). That's still gender: just because the defining characteristics comply with real-world distinctions doesn't make it any less so.thefamouseccles 11:17, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

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Two or three genders in Dutch language?

I too thought Dutch had only two genders as stated in this article, partly because foregin-language-teaching books in English say so. But native Dutch speakers have corrected me. Dutch has only two definite articles: "de" (common), and "het" (neuter). But it has separate pronouns for masculine, feminine, and neuter; and these pronouns must agree with the gender of the noun - this makes it harder to see the gender for a non-speaker, and Dutch bilingual dictionares don't seem to include gender information very often. — Hippietrail 12:58, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Sorry, but it has two nominal genders. I'm rather loath to count pronominal ones. Otherwise, Spanish has three genders(Masculine, Feminine, Neuter/Abstract), as does English (he/she/it). In German, pronouns often agree with natural(rather than grammatical) gender, for instance, 'Ich sah das Maedchen, und sie war sehr klein'(I saw the girl, and she was very small) is perfectly grammatical, even though the nominal and pronominal genders disagree.User:BovineBeast

You misunderstand me. I'm talking about grammatical gender, not real gender. English pronouns work on real gender where "he" and "she" refer only to humans and higher animals, depending on their sex; "it" refers to everything else. Spanish pronouns work on grammatical gender for most things: "el" and "ella" refer even to inanimate objects though Spanish also has "lo" for referring to ideas rather than nouns. Dutch has 3 grammatical genders as applied to nouns, but it has only two definite articles and no gender is indicated in adjectives. But you cannot arbitrarily choose any pronoun for "it" when referring to inanimate objects - you must use a masculine pronoun for masculine nouns, a feminine pronoun for feminine nouns, and a neuter pronoun for neuter nouns. — Hippietrail 00:54, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Real gender can correspond to grammatical gender. Have a look at Navajo or Mandarin, where the shape, size or geometry of an object may be the defining factor in what classifiers, verbs or pronouns are used. English does have three pronominal genders; the system just doesn't include nouns. Ubykh is the same, its pronominal prefixes distinguish feminine gender in the second person, but not on nouns or free pronouns. "Real gender" is just one way of forming genders or noun classes. thefamouseccles 11:21, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Dutch grammar

www.speakdutch.nl

The conversation which convinced me on Wiktionary

Hmm, yes, but I would have though(and I admit I'm basing most of this on my knowledge of German), that one could use 'het' for all inanimate objects, and 'hij' or 'zij' for animate objects, depending on natural gender. Also, Gender is(I believe) indicated in adjectives, as in 'een goed huis', but 'een goede stad'. But you do have a point.

Ok, I ought to have commented here first before putting Dutch back in the two gender category, my bad. However:

• This site says there were 3 genders in Dutch, but now only common and neuter.
• This one again says that there was a feminine in Middle Dutch (implies there is none now?)
• And this says that most Dutch people can't tell the difference between masculine and feminine.

I confess I am a student of Dutch and not (yet) a fluent speaker, but in all the formal lessons I've taken the article for common gender words is 'hij' or 'hem', I've never seen 'zij' or 'haar'. Dutch-English dictionaries list Dutch words as either noun or neuter-noun, I haven't seen one yet that lists masculine feminine and neuter. I realise that some speakers are fortunate to know exactly which words are/were masculine, feminine or neuter, or that some dialects preserve the 'zij/haar' article but does this reflect the majority of speakers or how the language is spoken today? If someone would like to list Dutch under 3 genders, very strictly speaking in linguistic terms this true. But this also gives the false impression that Dutch is like German, strictly delineated into male, female and neuter when this is not the case, especially when many native speakers don't know the difference themselves. Perhaps Dutch should be listed under both common/neuter and 3 genders. --kudz75 02:20, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Norwegian

I notice somebody has just improved the classification of the various forms of Norwegian. I was under the impression, however, that the feminine forms were optional in Nynorsk meaning that any speaker/writer could choose to use it as either a m/f/n language or a c/n language. Or does this only apply to the use of the definite article? ("en" masc and optionally "ei" fem I think)? — Hippietrail 09:26, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Feminine gender is obligatory in Nynorsk. Bokmål is a bit more complicated -- the feminine forms are usually mandatory, but using forms like "hytten" (the cabin) instead of "hytta" would by many be considered Riksmål (which is consequent in having two genders). On the other hand, "dronninga" (the queen) is considered a very "radical" form in Bokmål (but normal in Nynorsk), although the word is indisputabely of feminine gender. Officially Bokmål is considered to have three genders (see Norwegian language). contrapuncti

Should we talk about pronoun classes?

Isn't there a vast and lush field of such? English and French would go under the more-than-two-or-three category: he/she/it/one/such/so and roughly il/elle/ça/on/ce/ci for guyly/gally/thingly/ally/thoughtly/wayly. (Oh, I'm goading English-speakers to dump Latin.) lysdexia 18:43, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Yes I think we should. One thing which has interested me lately is how English and Spanish both have gender in 3rd person possessive pronouns (his, hers; su, sua) but that the gender relates to different things. In English to the gender of the possessor, in Spanish to the gender of the thing possesed. Same goes for number though that's more blurred. Are there some grammatical terms to disambiguate these phenomena? — Hippietrail 02:59, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

English Gender

Aren't countries also feminine in English? Spain allied herself, Russia mobilized her, etc.?

You can refer to both ships and countries with either feminine or neuter third person singular pronouns, practically. Stylistically, I'd say that using feminine in this case would be a bit old-fashioned for today, but you still definitely use such. 146.151.47.17, 16:14, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

• I would also argue that English retains a remnant of the old grammatical gender system in the usage "Man", referring to the human species. We usually refer back to that with the pronouns he/him/his, after all, even though it means people of both sexes.---------Kelisi 2005/2/4

"Actually, "man" for human in general is an older meaning, than the meaning "masculine person", so it isn't applicable. I wondered whether "a" and "an" would count as gender, or if they're phonological rather than grammatical? @@ (They are the same word, originally..., but in "a", the final -n got lost.)

The distinction of a and an is of course only phonological. Compare a happy girl and an unhappy girl. - TAKASUGI Shinji 08:17, 2005 Apr 18 (UTC)

I was shocked to see that English is included in the list of languages with a two-fold gender distinction between masculine and feminine. I should think that a) either English shouldn't be included in neither the 2-gender languages nor in the 3-gender languages because it has already included in the list of languages with no grammatical gender inflection; b) or English should be included in the list of languages with a three-gender distinction (masc, fem and neuter), as English pronoms can take three forms (he for natural masculine, she for natural feminine and it for inanimate).Xinelo 19:56, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

German Gender

Now, German is listed as a language "without gender on the nouns, but only visible in the adjectives, determiners". This statement is not in accordance with e.g. Hockett's definition, i.e. not in accordance with the standard view within the field. What is "visible on the nouns", be it on the stem or in the declension, is an eventual declension class membership. Gender is, per definition, a classification of nouns as seen in the behaviour of determiners and adjectives. Since this is a situation where we do not (yet) have consensus, I bring it up here on the discussion page, before (or: rather than just) changing the paragraph in the article. Trondtr 20:56, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC).

Swahili

I see that the article claims that Swahili has 15 noun classes. I'd always thought that it only had 8...how do we get 15? By counting plurals separately? That hardly seems reasonable. For the record, the classes I'm aware of are

• WA (mtu/watu)
• VI (kitabu/vitabu)
• MA (jiwe/mawe)
• MI (mti/miti)
• N (ndizi)
• U (umoja)
• PA (mahali)
• MU (locatives such as pembeni)

Am I missing something? --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 22:34, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

OK, maybe I'm missing one more class: KU (verbal nouns such as kuimba). But that's still only 9 classes, not 15. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 15:31, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Since no one has been able to answer this question in over four months, I am editing the article to reflect the revised count. If anyone has more info, please share it. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 00:03, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I gave a belated answer at Talk:Swahili language; didn't check out the present state of the article yet. — mark ✎ 14:07, 19 May 2005 (UTC)

Real vs Grammatical Gender

Hi. Does anyone know of any more examples of words where the real gender is different from grammatical gender? Mädchen and Fräulein from German (which describe females but have neuter grammatical gender) are good examples, but I need to find more... Please post here or e-mail frankie [at] frankieroberto.com if you have any possible examples! --Frankie Roberto 00:20, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Well you could consider the large bulk of nouns in the male and female genders in languages which also have a neuter gender - these would all be examples. — Hippietrail 08:56, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Those examples aren't quite so useful. The best example would be a word which has male or female natural gender and the opposite grammatical gender. However, I expect these examples are rare if not non-existant. Examples where male/female objects have neutral gender would also be welcome. --Frankie Roberto 20:58, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The ancient Greek word παις young boy is neuter gender. thefamouseccles 01:00, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Irish cailín "girl" is masculine, while stail "stallion" is feminine. Go figure. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 04:52, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

two new papers

I hope it isn't inappropriate to use this discussion forum to draw attention to two new papers (by me) on the topic of grammatical gender:

One will appear in print in Lingua, and is currently published electronically on the Lingua website; the paper is entitled "Optimizing gender" and may be downloaded from

http://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S0024384105000252

The other paper is entitled "Optimizing Russian gender: A preliminary analysis" and has just been published in FASL 13. This paper can be downloaded from

http://www.hum.uit.no/a/rice/v2/writing/OptRussGendPrelimRice.pdf

Both of these papers advocate an approach to gender assignment built on the basic insights of Steinmetz (1986, et seq.) and represent the approach within the formalism of Optimality Theory. The paper claims that conflicts in gender assignment invite such a treatment, and suggests that the treatment of gender assignment provides an example of crucial equal ranking in OT.

I hope you'll enjoy these papers, and would of course welcome any feedback or debate on the questions addressed here.

Curt Rice University of Tromsø

Tamil doesn't have gender?

Was surprised to see Tamil listed in languages without a grammatical gender. I'm a native speaker and I know that we differentiate gender, rationality, number and person in nouns and these and more in verbs. Can someone clarify? You may want to look at the Tamil language#Grammar and Tamil language#Examples sections. -- Sundar (talk · contribs) 05:14, Apr 11, 2005 (UTC)

I'm removing Tamil from the list until someone clarifies. -- Sundar (talk · contribs) 04:05, Apr 12, 2005 (UTC)

Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu use a system similar to Tamil, so they should go too. I think the confusion is between grammatical gender in the Indo-European sense (which Tamil and the other south and central Dravidian languages do not have) and noun classes (which they do). --Arvind 00:33, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

And what, really, is the difference between those two concepts? --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 14:47, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The term gender should be used only for a subset of noun class systems that distinguish nouns mainly or historically based on biological sex.

Unfortunately, making that distinction is easier said than done. Look at the Australian systems mentioned in the article. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 00:48, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

They don't have to be distinguished. Always use noun class, because genders are noun classes anyway. - TAKASUGI Shinji 01:05, 2005 Apr 26 (UTC)

I don't know about Dravidian languages, but there seems to be confusion between noun classes (genders) and noun classifiers in the Wikipedia articles. Noun classifiers are not noun classes. The current version of grammatical gender mentions languages with noun classifiers such as Chinese and Japanese, which is misleading. At least, the following sentence is wrong:

If one agrees that classifiers such as measure words also express noun class, then some Sino-Tibetan languages have even more.

The following is a good site:

SIL Glossary of linguistic terms - What is a noun class?

In a language with noun classes, each noun belongs to one and only one class, which is usually shown by a word form or an accompanying article and functions grammatically. The same referent can be referred by nouns with different noun classes, such as die Frau (f.) and das Weib (n.) in German. A language has at most 20 noun classes or so.

In a language with noun classifiers, a noun may or may not be accompanied by a noun classifier, which shows a conceptual classification of the referent of a noun and is commonly used when you count the referents. Noun classifiers are not grammatical but lexical items, and a language may have hundreds of noun classifiers. For instance, in Japanese, the noun classifier for humans is nin, which is used to count humans, whatever noun you use for them. E.g.:

3-nin no seito (lit. 3 people of student = 3 students)

3-nin no sensei (lit. 3 people of teacher = 3 teachers)

As you see, the noun classifier agrees with the referent of a noun, not the noun itself. Since noun classifiers are words, not grammatical functions, it is not uncommon to import noun classifiers from other languages. They are very much like measure words — when you count cups of coffee, you don't care what noun you use for coffee, such as two cups of Mocha and three cups of Java. See also Talk:Measure word.

Noun classifiers are more appropriately contrasted with grammatical number. Grammatical number and noun classifiers usually don't coexist in a language. English and other European languages are languages with number; Chinese and Japanese are languages without number. A language with noun classes always has number. - TAKASUGI Shinji 00:31, 2005 Apr 26 (UTC)

Tolkien

Is it really worth it to note some made-up languages by J.R.R. Tolkein in these lists? I'm sorry but it strikes me as really ridiculous.

If you feel a change is needed, feel free to make it yourself! Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone (yourself included) can edit any article by following the Edit this page link. You don't even need to log in, although there are several reasons why you might want to. Wikipedia convention is to be bold and not be afraid of making mistakes. If you're not sure how editing works, have a look at How to edit a page, or try out the Sandbox to test your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome. — mark ✎ 21:26, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

It probably isn't as ridiculous as one might think. Tolkien's languages have attracted a great deal of interest and study among those who like languages and linguistics. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 14:46, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)

English

I notice English is listed in the "two gender: masculine and feminine" section, while at the same time it is also listed in the section "languages without grammatical genders/noun classes." This is clearly a mistake.

The stylistical uses of "she" for countries and ships does not justify including English in the category of languages with grammatical gender, nor does the gender-specific pronouns "he"/"she." Grammatical gender requires each and every noun to be assigned a gender as an intrinsic property, and this is definitely not the case for English.