Why do so many languages have gendered nouns? Why does English not have them?

488 viewsOther

I’m curious as to what the initial purpose of gendering every noun would be, since (from what I understand) it doesn’t really change the meaning of the sentence, just the form of certain words. Also, since English evolved from many of the ~~Romance~~ European languages that do have gendered nouns, why do we not use them in English?

In: Other

19 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

English did not evolve from Romance languages, but it did have gendered nouns in the past. However, gender was marked by word endings which have since disappeared.

Even in other Germanic languages it’s often hard to tell the gender of a noun just by looking at it, and languages like Danish and Swedish have also lost some distinctions (merging the masculine & feminine, only distinguishing the neuter nowadays). This is because Proto-Germanic developed strong stress on initial syllables, which led to many final syllables getting weakened and disappearing (this also affects verbs, which have been greatly shortened and simplified, especially in English).

Many languages have different kinds of grammatical noun classes, although a grammatical “masculine-feminine” distinction in particular is not too common outside of a couple language families such as Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic.

The word “gender” originally simply meant “kind/type” and had nothing to do with men/women, so the term “grammatical gender” may be somewhat misleading for modern English speakers. It basically just means “noun classes”; different kinds of nouns which use different adjectives/verbs/etc, making it easier to form complex sentences and still keep track of which thing you’re referring to.

In English if you say “There was an apple on the table.” and someone asks “Was it big?”, you can only guess whether they meant the apple or the table. On the other hand in a language where “apple” and “table” belong to different noun classes, there’s far less ambiguity (since some or all of the words “was”, “it”, and “big” will change according to the noun class they happen to refer to.

You are viewing 1 out of 19 answers, click here to view all answers.