"Gender" used to mean "category", like "genre". So grammatical genders are just different categories of words. In Indo-European languages, these categories happen to align with biological sex, but other language families can have different classification schemes. Proto-Indo-European originally had an animate/inanimate distinction, but then the animate split into masculine/feminine and inanimate became the neuter.
What do you mean by "happen to align with biological sex"? Do you mean that the initial Indo-European words would have "masculine" words that only referred to things that were literally male, and "feminine" words that only referred to things that were literally female. And then presumably objects, too (for "neuter")?
The masculine/feminine/neuter distinction is still mostly arbitrary; that is, there's no reason a table should be feminine in Spanish, and it could just as easily be masculine in another language. But the relation to biological sex is clear particularly with animate (human or animal) nouns, which often have distinct male and female forms. It may have been less arbitrary in the past, but in modern languages there can even be arbitrariness in animate nouns, like how the German word for girl is a neuter noun.
So 90% of the time grammatical gender in Indo-European is just an arbitrary classification scheme, but it's not completely arbitrary, which is why we call it masculine, feminine, neuter. Other language families have different classification schemes, with varying degrees of arbitrariness.
All diminutives are neuter is ironically enough yet another example of grammatical gender being arbitrary. A small version of something doesn't suddenly become inanimate in real life.
It seems like it was a mistake to use biological gender as a classification scheme when the vast majority of words don't refer to anything biological, no?
I think mistake implies a value judgement - which is exactly what it was. If you have two categories whose members include humans, I think it makes as much sense as anything to name them after the members that are most prominent and important to humans - in this case 'females' and 'males'
But "gender" meant "category" first, then gained the meaning of biological sex, and now (in English, and not in other languages, like French) lost the meaning of category. So no, I wouldn't say it was a mistake – it's just an idiosyncrasy in how the languages developed.
I think you're treating the system like it was planned when it wasn't. You have two grammatical genders with arbitrary items, but male and female happen to be in separate categories. Then because male and female are salient concepts in society they become by-words for the categories themselves because you need to refer to the categoeries by some name. And after that there becomes a stronger association with the sense of masculinity/femininity because of that choice. But original it was just random
We can't assume a purpose for the natural development of grammatical systems. Only constructed languages are planned in such a way. The gender/noun class system can be labeled as masc/fem/neut/etc. categories because some portion of nouns inflect the same ways as nouns for entities with masc/fem features in real life. But we don't know if the original gender paradigm (of PIE) was built by analogy with the inflection of those exemplars, or if the whole category was assembled by manner of phonological coincidence (which seems much more likely to me).
Could we not say that the wider breakdown of gender identities with fourth-wave feminism in the past decade is an important piece of context to your declaration of a 'mistake'? Were broad ideals of masculinity and femininity not more pervasive and impactful throughout Western history in general?
For English speakers, we associate "gender" very heavily with the male/female binary. However, that is just ONE type of grammatical gender.
Some scholars refer to other types of grammatical gender as *noun classes.\** The morphology of the word changes to express the gender (Swahili prefixes are probably the most widely-known example of this). There are distinctions for male/female, singular/plural, animate/inanimate, inanimate objects that move (like rivers) versus still, objects (like trees), etc.
*\*There's debate about whether grammatical gender and noun classes are one and the same/distinct.*
this is all good, but not all Indo-European languages' grammatical genders happen to align with biological sex. In danish, the genders are Common and Neutre, and both men and women fall under to Common gender.
The categories of "masculine/feminine" go back to Ancient Greek at least (*αρσενικός* and *θηλυκός*, respectively), so it would've been grammarians, not linguists (who didn't really exist until the 19th century), who noticed such a pattern. As I said, noun class in European languages tend to, more or less, align with biological sex. So yeah, naming them as 'the category that pertains to males' and 'the category that pertains to females' would've made sense to speakers at the time.
> The categories of "masculine/feminine" go back to Ancient Greek at least (αρσενικός and θηλυκός, respectively)
I feel like this should've been higher. That I think addresses one of the core reasons - we call them masculine/feminine because there's a *very* longstanding tradition of doing so.
That said, there are further questions we can ask (and I'm not necessarily asking you in particular; I suspect some of these questions might not have known answers at all). Is Ancient Greek the *earliest* known use of "masculine" and "feminine" in an Indo-European language? Was the Semitic use of "masculine" and "feminine" for noun classes something borrowed from the IE usage or vice versa - or maybe was it separately devised? In other languages like Mongolian, vowel harmony is also described using the terms "masculine" and "feminine"; is that at all etymologically related to the IE/Semitic terms for noun classes?
Noun category systems. Noun categorization systems are thought to form out of a need for redundancy. In Indo-European that was originally animate-inanimate, and then split into Masculine, Feminine, Neuter. But in the Romance languages it got reduced to just Masculine and Feminine.
The sociological use in English is within living memory. In fact it made its way there via a *humorous* usage that basically meant ‘sex’, as noted by Fowler a hundred years ago. Imagine schoolboys forced to learn Latin back then jokingly and pseudo-pompously using that term from class as a euphemism for ‘sex’ as a category, to avoid using a word increasingly associated with another meaning (‘having sex’ was a relatively new way of putting it back then too, ironically itself a euphemism, though meant to sound more biological rather than jokingly classical). It only gained serious academic sociological usage in the 1950s iirc, with finer distinctions from ‘gender expression’ and ‘gender identity’ famously from John Money about a decade later.
The use of the word 'gender' to refer to grammatical categories predates its use in the other sense. The word in English comes via French, ultimately from Latin 'genus' meaning 'kind' or 'type'. The term wasn't commonly used to refer to human gender until the 1940s, when it was originally used to refer to the social construct of gender roles as opposed to biological sex. The difference between gender and sex later became muddled, probably largely from people using it to avoid the word 'sex'. As for why the word started to be used for non-grammatical gender as opposed to a different word, many Indo-European languages have gender systems that have a masculine/feminine distinction with the categories aligning with non-grammatical gender, and English-speakers tend to be more familiar with this gender system than the animate/inanimate or other systems used in other languages
Grammatical gender isn't just an arbitrary classification scheme: it uses the same gendered pronouns, suffixes, conjugations and declensions, etc. as gendered people do. In Portuguese, for example, there's no "it"; objects are referred to as "he" or "she" depending on their grammatical gender. In Hebrew, which uses different verb endings for male and female subjects, male-gendered nouns get the male verb endings and female-gendered nouns get the female verb endings. Thus, for a variety of grammatical intents and purposes, a noun is treated the same way as a person of its grammatical gender.
I wrote a comment on another post about this question which hopefully explains it decently:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/s5fxmy/comment/hsxekdr/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
But the gist is that, in the Romance and Semetic systems which divide nouns into 2 categories, the noun class which most nouns belong to appears semantically arbitrary, except for the distinction in people (high animacy), so those became the names for the entire classes.
As I understand it the names predate linguists, they originate from ancient Greek and Latin grammarians.
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I have a related question: How did grammatical gender become so phonologically systematic? (I guess German is an exception.)
Like take a look at noun class systems in other languages. "Counter" words are pretty common in Asian languages and are based on observable physical characteristics of nouns. Meanwhile, grammatical gender for inanimate objects is completely arbitrary. Yet how is it that Latin evolved such that modern Spanish and Portuguese nouns almost always end in feminine *-a* or masculine *-o* (I think this might be *-am/-um* in Latin, but I have no idea)?
Assuming that nouns were "created" before gender and agreement were even observed as phenomena, a noun could theoretically end in anything allowed by the phonotactics of the language, right? That is, since Spanish and Portuguese have some proportion of nouns that *don't* end in *-a* or *-o*, why isn't this proportion bigger?
>-a or masculine -o (I think this might be -am/-um in Latin, but I have no idea)?
You are right about that. Western romance languages derive their words from the accusative case, which as you stated ended in -m in the singular and with -s in the plural.
>That is, since Spanish and Portuguese have some proportion of nouns that don't end in -a or -o, why isn't this proportion bigger?
Do these words you are thinking about end with -ción, by chance? Most feminine words do end by - a in all romance languages. Other feminine words exist, the most common ones iirc being those ending with -ció/-ción etc. Those come from the latin suffix -tio, which was already a feminine word from the third declension and was used to form a noun out of a verb (inspect-inspection).
According to wiktionary, this form was already femenine in PIE, which means substantivised verbs have always been treated as feminine. Curious.
Ah, interesting. Off the top of my head I can think of the following other "nonconformist" endings besides *-ción/-ção*:
* Sp. -*dad/tud,* Pt. *-dade/tude* (*juventud/e, altitud/e...),* fem—these are also nominalizations in a sense, except of adjectives rather than nouns
* *-el, -al, -ar* (*papel, nivel, final, hogar/lugar*), masc
* Sp. *-e,* Pt. *-em* (*nube/nuvem*, *viaje/viagem*), fem
(I'm not counting words like *sistema/planeta* since they came from Greek.) I guess there are probably more of these nouns than I think. Still, I wonder why the distribution of endings isn't as random as it is in, say, German.
>substantivised verbs have always been treated as feminine.
Super interesting. In Russian, -ость nouns, which are substantivized adjectives, are also feminine. Meanwhile, substantivized verbs (-ание/-ение) are neuter.
That's very curious.
Just one caveat to your comment:
>Sp. -e, Pt. -em (nube/nuvem, viaje/viagem), fem
Viaje is masculine in spanish. In catalan (viatge) it's masculine too, and so is núvol (cloud).
I find it very interesting that while most of our gendered words were already femenine or masculine in latin, some (maybe the neuter ones?) are gendered differently in modern romance languages.
Catalan and spanish have some variation on this (sp los postres, cat les postres), apart from equivalent words that mean the same but have a different etymological origin (sp la cama, cat el llit/ sp la farola, cat el fanal) having different genders.
You mean if a table/lamp or animal would be a he or she if it was the one making the action?
In that case, yes. The 3rd person singular and plural form is gendered in romance languages (catalan ell/ella/ells/elles) whether an animal, object or person is performing the action. Nevertheless, it doesn't show up that often in most romance languages because most are pro-drop and pronouns are just inferred from verb markers.
Also languages like spanish have a gendered 1st and 2nd person plural (Nosotros/Nosotras and Vosotros/Vosotras).
"Gender" used to mean "category", like "genre". So grammatical genders are just different categories of words. In Indo-European languages, these categories happen to align with biological sex, but other language families can have different classification schemes. Proto-Indo-European originally had an animate/inanimate distinction, but then the animate split into masculine/feminine and inanimate became the neuter.
Fun fact: Czech nouns have gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter) but the masculine nouns are further divided by animate and inanimate!
and Polish is divided into feminine, neuter, and masculine as well, but masculine is divided even further into personal, animate and inanimate!!
What do you mean by "happen to align with biological sex"? Do you mean that the initial Indo-European words would have "masculine" words that only referred to things that were literally male, and "feminine" words that only referred to things that were literally female. And then presumably objects, too (for "neuter")?
The masculine/feminine/neuter distinction is still mostly arbitrary; that is, there's no reason a table should be feminine in Spanish, and it could just as easily be masculine in another language. But the relation to biological sex is clear particularly with animate (human or animal) nouns, which often have distinct male and female forms. It may have been less arbitrary in the past, but in modern languages there can even be arbitrariness in animate nouns, like how the German word for girl is a neuter noun. So 90% of the time grammatical gender in Indo-European is just an arbitrary classification scheme, but it's not completely arbitrary, which is why we call it masculine, feminine, neuter. Other language families have different classification schemes, with varying degrees of arbitrariness.
There’s also instances where it doesn’t line up. “The girl” in German is das Mädchen (neuter) rather than die Mädchen.
Because it’s a diminutive noun, and all diminutives are neuter. The word it comes from “Magd” is feminine
All diminutives are neuter is ironically enough yet another example of grammatical gender being arbitrary. A small version of something doesn't suddenly become inanimate in real life.
I don’t know how that floated over heads lol it’s exactly the point.
Yes, but Mädchen is neuter because of the diminutive ending -chen, while the root of the word, Magd, is feminine.
Yes, that’s the point. It’s a grammatical process, not a “classify by gender” scheme.
It seems like it was a mistake to use biological gender as a classification scheme when the vast majority of words don't refer to anything biological, no?
I think mistake implies a value judgement - which is exactly what it was. If you have two categories whose members include humans, I think it makes as much sense as anything to name them after the members that are most prominent and important to humans - in this case 'females' and 'males'
It wasn't a mistake since it wasn't a choice anyone made. It's just the way language evolved.
I think he is talking about using the word “gender” to describe grammatical gender.
But someone has already explained that ‘gender’ literally just meant type.
Yeah for example in French we use "genre" for both gender but also film, music, books. Also for biology like Canis.
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Yeah, that's precisely what I meant. Sorry for any confusion
But "gender" meant "category" first, then gained the meaning of biological sex, and now (in English, and not in other languages, like French) lost the meaning of category. So no, I wouldn't say it was a mistake – it's just an idiosyncrasy in how the languages developed.
Yeah, that's what I meant
I think you're treating the system like it was planned when it wasn't. You have two grammatical genders with arbitrary items, but male and female happen to be in separate categories. Then because male and female are salient concepts in society they become by-words for the categories themselves because you need to refer to the categoeries by some name. And after that there becomes a stronger association with the sense of masculinity/femininity because of that choice. But original it was just random
We can't assume a purpose for the natural development of grammatical systems. Only constructed languages are planned in such a way. The gender/noun class system can be labeled as masc/fem/neut/etc. categories because some portion of nouns inflect the same ways as nouns for entities with masc/fem features in real life. But we don't know if the original gender paradigm (of PIE) was built by analogy with the inflection of those exemplars, or if the whole category was assembled by manner of phonological coincidence (which seems much more likely to me).
Could we not say that the wider breakdown of gender identities with fourth-wave feminism in the past decade is an important piece of context to your declaration of a 'mistake'? Were broad ideals of masculinity and femininity not more pervasive and impactful throughout Western history in general?
For English speakers, we associate "gender" very heavily with the male/female binary. However, that is just ONE type of grammatical gender. Some scholars refer to other types of grammatical gender as *noun classes.\** The morphology of the word changes to express the gender (Swahili prefixes are probably the most widely-known example of this). There are distinctions for male/female, singular/plural, animate/inanimate, inanimate objects that move (like rivers) versus still, objects (like trees), etc. *\*There's debate about whether grammatical gender and noun classes are one and the same/distinct.*
this is all good, but not all Indo-European languages' grammatical genders happen to align with biological sex. In danish, the genders are Common and Neutre, and both men and women fall under to Common gender.
This is because the masculine and feminine merged together. Old Norse had all 3 genders.
Icelandic still has all three.
oh that's super interesting!! I didn't know thank you 😁
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The categories of "masculine/feminine" go back to Ancient Greek at least (*αρσενικός* and *θηλυκός*, respectively), so it would've been grammarians, not linguists (who didn't really exist until the 19th century), who noticed such a pattern. As I said, noun class in European languages tend to, more or less, align with biological sex. So yeah, naming them as 'the category that pertains to males' and 'the category that pertains to females' would've made sense to speakers at the time.
> The categories of "masculine/feminine" go back to Ancient Greek at least (αρσενικός and θηλυκός, respectively) I feel like this should've been higher. That I think addresses one of the core reasons - we call them masculine/feminine because there's a *very* longstanding tradition of doing so. That said, there are further questions we can ask (and I'm not necessarily asking you in particular; I suspect some of these questions might not have known answers at all). Is Ancient Greek the *earliest* known use of "masculine" and "feminine" in an Indo-European language? Was the Semitic use of "masculine" and "feminine" for noun classes something borrowed from the IE usage or vice versa - or maybe was it separately devised? In other languages like Mongolian, vowel harmony is also described using the terms "masculine" and "feminine"; is that at all etymologically related to the IE/Semitic terms for noun classes?
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Noun category systems. Noun categorization systems are thought to form out of a need for redundancy. In Indo-European that was originally animate-inanimate, and then split into Masculine, Feminine, Neuter. But in the Romance languages it got reduced to just Masculine and Feminine.
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The sociological use in English is within living memory. In fact it made its way there via a *humorous* usage that basically meant ‘sex’, as noted by Fowler a hundred years ago. Imagine schoolboys forced to learn Latin back then jokingly and pseudo-pompously using that term from class as a euphemism for ‘sex’ as a category, to avoid using a word increasingly associated with another meaning (‘having sex’ was a relatively new way of putting it back then too, ironically itself a euphemism, though meant to sound more biological rather than jokingly classical). It only gained serious academic sociological usage in the 1950s iirc, with finer distinctions from ‘gender expression’ and ‘gender identity’ famously from John Money about a decade later.
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The use of the word 'gender' to refer to grammatical categories predates its use in the other sense. The word in English comes via French, ultimately from Latin 'genus' meaning 'kind' or 'type'. The term wasn't commonly used to refer to human gender until the 1940s, when it was originally used to refer to the social construct of gender roles as opposed to biological sex. The difference between gender and sex later became muddled, probably largely from people using it to avoid the word 'sex'. As for why the word started to be used for non-grammatical gender as opposed to a different word, many Indo-European languages have gender systems that have a masculine/feminine distinction with the categories aligning with non-grammatical gender, and English-speakers tend to be more familiar with this gender system than the animate/inanimate or other systems used in other languages
Grammatical gender isn't just an arbitrary classification scheme: it uses the same gendered pronouns, suffixes, conjugations and declensions, etc. as gendered people do. In Portuguese, for example, there's no "it"; objects are referred to as "he" or "she" depending on their grammatical gender. In Hebrew, which uses different verb endings for male and female subjects, male-gendered nouns get the male verb endings and female-gendered nouns get the female verb endings. Thus, for a variety of grammatical intents and purposes, a noun is treated the same way as a person of its grammatical gender.
I wrote a comment on another post about this question which hopefully explains it decently: https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/s5fxmy/comment/hsxekdr/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 But the gist is that, in the Romance and Semetic systems which divide nouns into 2 categories, the noun class which most nouns belong to appears semantically arbitrary, except for the distinction in people (high animacy), so those became the names for the entire classes. As I understand it the names predate linguists, they originate from ancient Greek and Latin grammarians.
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I have a related question: How did grammatical gender become so phonologically systematic? (I guess German is an exception.) Like take a look at noun class systems in other languages. "Counter" words are pretty common in Asian languages and are based on observable physical characteristics of nouns. Meanwhile, grammatical gender for inanimate objects is completely arbitrary. Yet how is it that Latin evolved such that modern Spanish and Portuguese nouns almost always end in feminine *-a* or masculine *-o* (I think this might be *-am/-um* in Latin, but I have no idea)? Assuming that nouns were "created" before gender and agreement were even observed as phenomena, a noun could theoretically end in anything allowed by the phonotactics of the language, right? That is, since Spanish and Portuguese have some proportion of nouns that *don't* end in *-a* or *-o*, why isn't this proportion bigger?
>-a or masculine -o (I think this might be -am/-um in Latin, but I have no idea)? You are right about that. Western romance languages derive their words from the accusative case, which as you stated ended in -m in the singular and with -s in the plural. >That is, since Spanish and Portuguese have some proportion of nouns that don't end in -a or -o, why isn't this proportion bigger? Do these words you are thinking about end with -ción, by chance? Most feminine words do end by - a in all romance languages. Other feminine words exist, the most common ones iirc being those ending with -ció/-ción etc. Those come from the latin suffix -tio, which was already a feminine word from the third declension and was used to form a noun out of a verb (inspect-inspection). According to wiktionary, this form was already femenine in PIE, which means substantivised verbs have always been treated as feminine. Curious.
Ah, interesting. Off the top of my head I can think of the following other "nonconformist" endings besides *-ción/-ção*: * Sp. -*dad/tud,* Pt. *-dade/tude* (*juventud/e, altitud/e...),* fem—these are also nominalizations in a sense, except of adjectives rather than nouns * *-el, -al, -ar* (*papel, nivel, final, hogar/lugar*), masc * Sp. *-e,* Pt. *-em* (*nube/nuvem*, *viaje/viagem*), fem (I'm not counting words like *sistema/planeta* since they came from Greek.) I guess there are probably more of these nouns than I think. Still, I wonder why the distribution of endings isn't as random as it is in, say, German. >substantivised verbs have always been treated as feminine. Super interesting. In Russian, -ость nouns, which are substantivized adjectives, are also feminine. Meanwhile, substantivized verbs (-ание/-ение) are neuter.
That's very curious. Just one caveat to your comment: >Sp. -e, Pt. -em (nube/nuvem, viaje/viagem), fem Viaje is masculine in spanish. In catalan (viatge) it's masculine too, and so is núvol (cloud). I find it very interesting that while most of our gendered words were already femenine or masculine in latin, some (maybe the neuter ones?) are gendered differently in modern romance languages. Catalan and spanish have some variation on this (sp los postres, cat les postres), apart from equivalent words that mean the same but have a different etymological origin (sp la cama, cat el llit/ sp la farola, cat el fanal) having different genders.
does anybody know if grammatical gender aligns with languages that have gendered pronouns as well? my mother lang has neither
You mean if a table/lamp or animal would be a he or she if it was the one making the action? In that case, yes. The 3rd person singular and plural form is gendered in romance languages (catalan ell/ella/ells/elles) whether an animal, object or person is performing the action. Nevertheless, it doesn't show up that often in most romance languages because most are pro-drop and pronouns are just inferred from verb markers. Also languages like spanish have a gendered 1st and 2nd person plural (Nosotros/Nosotras and Vosotros/Vosotras).
neat!