My original question had to do with whether languages from the same family tend to give the same genders to nouns (not always), but found deep rabbit holes when I left Indo-European: noun classifiers in Chinese etc (which includes some "counting" classifiers) and the more general noun class which seems to be a generalization of gender.
Oh joy. How are these assigned; and whodunit? From the "noun class" article:
- according to similarities in their meaning (semantic criterion)
- by grouping them with other nouns that have similar form (morphology)
- through an arbitrary convention.
I get the impression that some of the rules can arise or change when two different languages meet. Old English had three genders, as German does, but modern English has only a handful of relic gendered nouns. Maybe the parallel language use played some role--though I can't quite visualize (auralize?) how.
Why would these arise in the first place? All I can think of is that somehow, at some time, a word just sounded more pleasant or more appropriate with a le instead of a la, and the nouns that sounded better got the characteristic. Of course animate/inanimate seems pretty clear.
This is my wheelhouse, and I recommend The History of English podcast or John McWhorter's writings on the subject. Gender, a term we use because the first linguists were English and German and knew few languages that were not Indo-European, is something of an accident. Linguists are starting to prefer the term class instead because of the confusion "gender" causes politically. The other distinctions animate/inanimate, countable/uncountable, strong/weak are the same thing. Using endings and affixes is a shortcut, an efficiency, so that one does not have to use many words. It gives a shading of what the object is like, so that another word does not have to be added. When genders/classes go away, as is common when a language is learned by many adults because of trade, invasion, or intermarriage, the are usually soon replaced by new rigidity of word-order, additional words, or synonyms becoming more distinct in meaning.
ReplyDeleteThere have been recent studies about how much the Der/Die/Das words in German, even those that have no obvious relationship to either sex, capture what we would call a gender stereotype, especially a demeaning one. There is a weak trend of that.
Thanks, I'll look into those.
ReplyDeletePart of what brought this on was remembering that, years ago when it was relatively fresh in my mind, I could, more often than not, guess whether an unknown French word was masculine or feminine--but I had no idea how.
Maybe it was a statistical fluke, or maybe the sound was the key--hence my suggestion.
But when I went to look that up the fire hydrant opened.