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
Gender systems help reduce how much thinking you need to do to figure out what words go together in a sentence. Words of one gender will take compliments, like adjectives or articles (the, an) or other parts of speech that match up with their gender—nouns (or pronouns) of one gender get one version of the adjective while nouns of another get another version. Or in languages where nouns appear in different forms depending on what they are doing (case), nouns of one gender get one sort of case marker while nouns of another gender get another case marker.
This helps make it so even if you move the compliment far away from the noun it describes, you can still tell what goes with what. It can also help sort out which noun a compliment goes with, since there is a good chance the nouns may not share genders. Objects that aren’t alive get either the sort of endings and compliments that go with male people and get called masculine or the sort that go with female people and get called feminine. It isn’t saying the objects are male or female themselves, just that they share the same rules as male or female people nouns.
English has very rigid word order, so this type of confusion doesn’t happen very often. Also, its gender system got confused when Old Norse (a North Germanic language) and Old English (a West Germanic language) got put in close contact during the 8th-10th centuries. They often had different genders for the same words, so people think it got too confusing and got reduced in importance. French is even less related and has even more different genders for nouns, so that may have helped make it even less important when the Normans took over England in the 11th century. This ended up with English only keeping gender in its personal pronouns (he, she), which also kept part of the case system where nouns with different roles have different forms (I, me, my). Old traits sometimes stick around in very fundamental systems like this.
Male/Female/Neuter gender systems are very common in Indo-European languages (a very big family that very many European languages are in), but other times genders have nothing to do with the genders male and female, instead having totally different traits. We often don’t think about that since so many European languages have them.
Latest Answers