Noun gender in language

Just read this on another thread. Seeing as there are some linguists on this forum, I'd like to know if anyone can actually offer a decent reason as to why any language should have noun gender. Strikes me as something totally pointless that does absolutely nothing to enrich a language atall.

One reason may be that it makes the use of pronouns less arbitrary. In referring to things by pronouns it is best if gender is distributed among the nouns. So if you point to something and use the feminine pronoun the audience will be able to have a clearer idea of what you mean because the can limit the possible object of reference to those nouns which are feminine.

This doesn't really answer your question, but I've always found it rather puzzling why people have to know why a language has certain character traits. You learn a language and that's it. There's no philosophy to it. Btw, if you think German is bad, Estonian and Finnish have 15 cases, if I remember correctly. It could be more.

Ah, but they have no grammatical gender.

Good general point, Ulysses. Why does English have an indefinite article? What's the point? Let's scrap it.

why does English (and others) have irregular verbs? Why does English have a different ending usually for 3rd person singular? Why bother with the present continuous tense (other languages do without)?

BR: better examples than mine.

I suggest it is to make language more precise: Das Pferd as a general description, der Hengst as male subdivision and die Stute for female.
Then you get mean words with two genders, such as das Gehalt (salary) and der Gehalt (contents). The different gender gives you the different meaning of the word. In olden days your salary would be paid in coins in a bag, but both were Gehalt.

The thing that really still gets me and I have basically resigned myself to the fact that I will never get to grips with it 100% is the way the gender changes depending on how one interacts with the aforementioned noun..

Die Post (Post Office) becomes zur Post (zu der Post) and so on and so on...

Totally confusing indeed...

Well the gender doesn't change, just the article...or whatever it's called. I'm with Don though - why not just scrap der die das dem den des blah blah blah and replace them with 'the'. Simple really. All that hoo-ha about a Rechtsschreibreform and all they do is remove the ß which is the best thing about learning German in the first place. I'd have ß back tomorrow, at the expense of the 235 versions of 'the'.

Exactly Jimbo... bloody confusing is what it is... I got away with "de" for 4 years in Augsburg and everyone knew what I meant...

Why don't we all just speak Newspeak. Good/ungood, not bad, etc. Would make life a lot easier for all those learning English...

Yes, confusing, and lets try not to confuse gender with case, like above. Since english has no gender and fewer cases, it is hard for us to keep it straight.

Firstly cases:

Since English cases are not expressed in changes to the articles, word order is more strict in English than it is German. For (a stupid) example:

"The man hit the ball". has a different meaning than "The ball hit the man". Word order makes it clear which is the Subject and which is the Object (Nominativ and AKKusitiv). In German, on the other hand:

"Der Mann schlägt den Ball" and "Den Ball schlägt der Mann" have identical meanings (with a difference in stress); because the Nominativ and Akkusitiv are specified by "der" and "den" in this case.

But this has nothing directly to do with gender. But indirectly, the gender can make the difference between Nominative and Dativ (as in the above quote), since unfortunately "der" may be used in both cases.

I personally do not see any "advantage" to having gender in the German language, and if it were up to me, I would throw out the neutral and feminine genders and use only masculine and plural, since masculine distinguishes nominative and akkusitive cases.

My 2cents worth.

Genders are stupid, and english actually had them originally!
Thats why I always get annoyed with those who get all uptight about "incorrect" spelling, grammar and use of punctuation.

If we listened to twats like that back in the day, we would still be speaking old english, which is basically a dialect of german complete with genders and cases (I think it actually had 5 cases, 1 more than german).

Anyone know any old english insults for such pedants? (Something like "if you are so allergic to the natural change of language why are you speaking such an abberation of old english?")

Languages evolve, for the better, as people find ways of using them that work better than the rules suggest.

Kza I agree. Old English insults However the "incorrect" use of spelling, grammar etc. should not go as far as to obscure the meaning. Language has its own rules of natural selection on this: if meaning becomes blurred then changes do not persist.
The use of normed spelling is for the purpose of ensuring that everyone understands what is meant, and that should as far as possible be the same thing for everyone. If no rules are applied then meaning goes down the chute, and getting your meaning across is, after all, what language is about.

Why should German do away with genders just because they are a pain in the derriere for foreigners to learn? If you really want to reform the language, I bet even Germans would be perfectly happy to do away with all nouns beginning with a capital letter, a fad which began in the late 17th century as far as I recall. That would be a minor change, not a huge revolution like introducing a general article. (I rather like the thought of "diras" as containing all the former articles.)

TBH I'm not sure that anyone is advocating doing away with them for that reason, but because they have no discernible function.

Switch to Bavarian. The definite article is "da", except when it is "s", which you as a foreigner are not expected to remember anyway. The indefinite is "a". Works for me.

I would also vote to reform the counting, i.e. 23 = Dreiundzwanzig. It not only causes problems for foreigners, it also causes problems for German kids not to mention German adults expressing in other languages. Have heard the mixup lots of times when Germans tell me the price in English.

Other question: Is grammar taught in Brit/US/other schools? Such as cases, conjugations etc.? I learned all my languages except English here and consider grammar the bones of any language. Get it down straight in one language and learning another is that much easier.

my first (French) boss here in Munich used to complain about the numbers in German, until i pointed out to him that 97 in French is "four twenties ten seven"
it was one of the few times i succeeded in shutting the silly sod up

Amen to that, I can't imagine the German language without genders. The capitals drive me nuts though.

Oh FFS! I actually might have taken the time to write something serious had this thread not so quickly descended into another bitchfest about how $ForeignLanguage ought to be more like $MotherTongue. Wah wah wah. STFU!


What a load of shite. We don't speak Old English because the fucking Normans invaded the island and William I was good at defense, severing England's ties to Scandinavia. And while OE had a fifth case -- the instrumental -- it was falling out of use back then because it was only distinct from dative for strong adjectives and for a few pronouns. It was used to indicate the thing or person by means of which the action of a verb was accomplished. For example, in the case of lifde sweorde ("he lived by the sword"), sweorde is the instrumental form of sweord.

All languages make groupings and distinctions. English got rid of cases by using word order and prepositions. It happened because the Scandinavian invaders in the north needed to be able to communicate with the Germanic invaders in the south and vice-versa.

Japanese provides some interesting examples of language weirdness in its assignment of counters. When you have a group of items, you have to use a counting word, such as hiki for small animals (e.g., inu go hiki, or "five dogs"; literally "dog five <small animals>") or hon for long, thin, cylindrical objects. So what's the counter for phone calls? Kai perhaps, since that's the counter for occurrences? No, it's hon, because you make a call over wires which are long, thin, cylindrical things.

Every language does this sort of thing in its own way because it's natural to group items.

You me understand I write so but not good English. But big important: you understand!

The above is atrocious but you understand the meaning nonetheless; it's part of the beauty of English. And when you mangle or drop the articles in German, you come across the same way. Yes, you'll be understood but it's not correct and not natural.

Our English language is a bastard child born of necessity and raised on the tongues of numerous invaders. We have no need for particles, genders, cases and counters but we carry a lot of other baggage: plurals, strong and weak verbs, word order, and various cruft left over from previous transformations, including verb conjugation (to be, for example) and even declension (he/him, she/her).

So to get back to OG's original question, Romance and Germanic languages have gender because of grouping -- creating noun classes. There's some more information over at Wikipedia on the subject of grammatical gender but if you really want to get into it, read George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Most Western linguists have a copy.

woof.

Bloomin' heck! Interesting though. I will see if I can revive the instrumental case in my day to day conversation.

Thx for invoking tolerance for any language as it is, BD. Me with you, meow.

I cook, to make a lovely meal, needs many ingreditents to make a fine meal. I painter needs his paints. Musicians need the many notes. Complicated languages allow for fuller expression. That the sun has a female article (die) and that the moon a male (der) already adds spice to life, thought, and the soul.

Not all languages. Finnish, for example, doesn't have gender category. There is no 'he' or 'she', both females and males are 'hän' and you can talk for ages about going out with a friend without that anybody has a clue whether it is a guy or a girl.

Natalia, see post #4.
Finnish does see the need to distinguish between animate and inanimate objects hän/se. However this is not a grammatical distinction.


End of discussion

For my own part I find gender nouns useless, although my mothertongue has because it comes from Latin, which has three genders, as well as German. (Many) Years ago I asked my Latin high school professor about this matter and he told me old latin people discerned three genders thinking about noun roles. E.g. a tree makes fruits and feeds people, so it should be female (as a mother feeds her children). If the noun has no particular meaning in this way it should be neuter, that's it.
I can understand the origins, but I think it complicates and gets people mad, especially nowadays because the people often have to speak more than a language. English evidences that we can understand all even without any gender discerning and adjective agreements (such as ein schönes Mädchen), but just giving words the right place.
They are two different concepts, but the english one is easier to learn and I think that's one of its success reasons.

Would be nice if there was some vague logic to what nouns are what, but very often there is absolutely none atall.


And sometimes a chef does something fucking stupid like putting non-edible flowers and leaves on a plate - absolutely not required, adds nothing to a meal apart from crap to wipe off the plate at the end of it all. Just like noun genders, not required thank you. "Complicated languages allowing for fuller expression" is one thing, but my point is that noun genders do NOTHING to allow for fuller expression atall. A point of view that has not changed after reading any posts on this thread


Le soleil,el sol, die Sonne. Who decides these things?

I don't think that genders make it any more difficult to learn a language, but they are utterly unneccesary. The French are possible the worst of the bunch, because they have a whole load of assholes paid to sit about on their pompous backsides giving "new" words a gender. As I have said countless times, when McDonalds arrived in france, the french were thinkning seriously about naming hamburger "hambourgeur" or something equally over-rich in vowels, simply to make it more "French". How on earth they got to the point of calling a "quarter pounder" a "Royal Cheese" we shall never know.

Best explanation I think, and far more informed than the rather obtuse "you just learn the language and that's it" comment above.

Whether a word is masculine, feminie or neuter comes from the way the words are spelt and their background (e.g. most English sounding "ings" are das - "das training". Most -"eits" are feminine - "die Freiheit"). This has a practical purpose in meaning recognition, pronoun and adjective choice.

Burp

Well, it seems that having noun genders definitely makes a language more interesting since without it you wouldn't have anything to complain about. The fact that "sun" has different genders in different languages could be a result of the fact that a language is the expression of a society and its culture. When these languages first emanated, the sun could have played a different role in each culture. It could've been a symbol of birth to the Goths hence it being feminine in German and a symbol of war to the Celts hence it being masculine for the French. Don't forget though that French and Spanish are both Romance languages whereas German isn't.

Either way, I think "Royal Cheese" is cool. Imagine how boring the world would be if everyone called it a "Big Mac". Variety is the spice of life.

That's 200 cents worth, and worth the effort to read.

Good stuff.

@ MTV

Tell that to the people who speak Afrikaans where the word for "this" and "that" is the same as well as the word for "the" and "those". Afrikaans is very simplified Dutch which shows that you don't need half the grammar Dutch has and Dutch doesn't have nearly as much as German.

Try tell "that" to an Afrikaans linguistic historian (who will argue that German, French, Dutch and Malay are all interwoven into Afrikaans and that the language essentially developed at its own pace in a geographical vaccuum). Oh sorry, I forgot, you are one.

For clarity, is the point that "German is stupid and unnecessarily complicated"?

errr everyone does call a Big Mac a Big Mac. It is one of the "core" products whose name will never change from market to market. It the quarter pounder that causes problems, especially in non-english speaking countries with metric weights systems since they have no concept of what a "quarter pounder" is; to them it is meaningless.

Back to the point, the two reasons that stick out a to why we have noun genders are 1 ) our desire to group things and b ) our desire to symbolise nouns or attach meanings. Do we have a "need" for them today? Well , we could do without them but why the hell should we. They serve a purpose and to remove them (and the declination of the nouns) would have other consequences on the language, as already stated (ie the need for strict word order etc). So "should" we get rid of them? Nah, why bother? it just causes other problems we would have to deal with.

Cataluna manage to handle it. So do Spain. I just think its ace that France pisses about debating whether or not people are "allowed" to use franglais words like "le weekend", but lets what would have been a simple translation slip into "Royal Cheese".

@ MTV

It could be argued German is unnecessarily complicated. I don't think it's stupid though. As for Afrikaans, you're absolutely right. Same thing happened to American English. It was too difficult for the non-English- speaking immigrants to learn decent English hence the simplified version they speak and write today:-)

I don't think "Royal Cheese" was something decided upon by the powers that be. I think you should rather point your finger at the marketing gurus in France. Perhaps if you had a similar body in Germany though you wouldn't have a "Handy" for a mobile phone. But these things all have a reason. "Drive-thru" is a great example. Ever wondered why it's called a "drive-in" here? Doesn't make sense, does it? It does actually when you realise Germans can't pronounce "th".

i would guess that thee 'complicated' languages will be dumbed down over the coming decades/centuries as travel and the requirement to be able to communicate more and more effectively will dictate this. many german friends of mine say that they don't fully understand or 'get right' the agreements all the time - how comforting. for my part, some of it sticks and some of it (most) i make up. folks understand, so i'll improve slowly with time.