For example, when you say “the door” in French, it’s feminine; “La porte” instead of “Le porte”. What happens if I use “Le” instead of “La”? Does it change the meaning?
In: 18
First, it’s important to recognize that, for the most part, “grammatical gender” doesn’t have anything directly to do with gender as sex-based roles or gender identity, etc.
In languages that have gendered nouns, it helps provide clarity. For example, take this sentence in English (which does not have gendered nouns):
*I have a cat that is in the house that is mine.*
In English it’s unclear whether the “that” is refering to “a cat” or “the house”.
In a language that has gendered nouns, like German, it wouldn’t be unclear because the pronoun “that” would be different depending on whether it was referring to “die Katze” (the cat, feminine gender) or “das Haus” (the house, neuter gender).
So that’s the function of gendering nouns, but it’s also important to understand that “masculine/feminine/neuter” genders are not the only way languages grammatically gender nouns. It’s common in Indo-European languages, but there are many languages that either:
* don’t have any genders for nouns but still have genders for pronouns (e.g. English)
* don’t have genders but have noun “classifiers” to indicate things like size and quantity of noun objects (sign languages as well as many Asian languages)
* grammatical gender but around other axes unrelated to sexual gender like animate/inanimate (e.g. Vietnamese)
* many grammatical genders (e.g. many African languages have 10-20 “grammatical genders” … although linguists tend to call them “noun classes” at that point because they’re so far removed from sexual genders).
All of which is to say that grammatical gender is a linguistic construct that only is *tangentially* related to sexual gender in *some* languages and *entirely unrelated* in other languages.
Latest Answers