Ask Lemmy

[Shameless comm advertisement: make sure to check [email protected], this sort of question fits nicely there!]

There are two main points: agreement and derivation.

Agreement: grammatical gender gives you an easy way to keep track of which word refers to which. Consider for example the following sentence:

• The clock fell over the glass table, and it broke.

What does "it" refer to? It's ambiguous, it could be either "the clock" or "the glass table" (both things are breakable). In Portuguese however the sentence is completely unambiguous due to the gender system, as the translations show:

1. O relógio caiu sobre a mesa de vidro, e ele quebrou. // "ele" he/it = the clock
2. O relógio caiu sobre a mesa de vidro, e ela quebrou. // "ela" she/it = the table

It's only one word of difference; however "ele" he/it must refer to "relógio" clock due to the gender agreement. Same deal with "ela" she/it and "mesa" table.

Latin also shows something similar, due to the syntactically free word order. Like this:

• puer bellam puellam amat. (boy.M.NOM pretty.F.ACC girl.F.ACC loves) = the boy loves the beautiful girl
• puer bellus puellam amat. (boy.M.NOM pretty.M.NOM girl.F.ACC loves) = the handsome boy loves the girl

Note how the adjective between "puer" boy and "puella" girl could theoretically refer to any of those nouns; Latin is not picky with adjective placement, as long as it's near the noun it's fine. However, because "puer" is a masculine word and "puella" is feminine, we know that the adjective refers to one if masculine, another if feminine. (Note: the case marks reinforce this, but they aren't fully reliable.)

The second aspect that I mentioned is derivation: gender gives you a quick way to create more words, without needing new roots for that. Italian examples:

• "bambino" boy vs. "bambina" girl
• "gatto" cat, tomcat vs. "gatta" female cat
• "banana" banana (fruit) vs. "banano" banana plant
• "mela" apple (fruit) vs. "melo" apple tree

Focus on the last two lines - note how the gender system is reused to things that (from human PoV) have no sex or social gender, like trees and their fruits. This kind of extension of the derivation system is fairly common across gendered languages.

Addressing some comments here: English does not have a grammatical gender system. It has a few words that refer to social gender and sex, but both concepts (grammatical gender and social gender) are completely distinct.

That's specially evident when triggering agreement in a gendered language, as English doesn't do anything similar. Portuguese examples, again:

• [Sentence] O Ivan é uma pessoa muito alta.
• [Gloss, showing word gender] The.M Ivan.M is a.F person.F very tall.F
• [Translation] Ivan is a very tall person.

Check the adjective, "alta" tall. Even if "Ivan" refers to a man, you need to use the feminine adjective here, because it needs to agree with "pessoa" person - a feminine word. This kind of stuff happens all the time in gendered languages, but you don't see it e.g. in English.

Speaking one language that is mildly gendered (English), two that are strongly (and in the case of the second bizarrely!) gendered (French, German) and one that is almost entirely ungendered (Mandarin), I have not found any utility whatsoever in grammatical gender.

I suspect that grammatical gender is just an ur-form of grammatical classifiers that has stuck around for non-useful amounts of time. I suspect this because one of the grammatical "gender" divisions that's in use in many languages isn't masculine/feminine(/neuter) but rather animate/inanimate. So I suspect that grammatical gender was a classification mechanism whose system and utility was distorted into uselessness over the thousands of years of spread and development.

So why do we have classification mechanisms? Well, in Mandarin there's classifier words. (In English too: "a sheet of paper", not "a paper", but it's waaaaaaaaaaaaay stricter in Mandarin.) The classifiers in Mandarin, given the sheer amount of punning potential in oral language, are likely a redundant piece of information to help nail down which specific word you mean in contexts where it might be unclear. For example in a noisy environment, or if someone is speaking unclearly, "paper" (纸张[zhǐ zhāng]) might be confused with "spider" (蜘蛛 [zhī zhū]). But if I say 一只蜘蛛 [yī zhī zhī zhū]—a spider—it's harder to confuse that with 一张纸张 [yī zhāng zhǐ zhāng]—a piece of paper.

So I'm positing that perhaps at some point grammatical gender was used as a primitive form of classification for disambiguation that some languages just never grew out of. Which is why in German men are masculine, women are feminine, boys are masculine, and girls are neuter. It has nothing to do with actual physical gender and is just a weird, atrophied, and somewhat useless remnant of language.

What we call "grammatical gender" in Indo-European languages is a worn-down version of a noun class system. English's is extremely worn-down; we only use gender on pronouns, whereas many other European languages use it on articles and adjectives with all nouns.

Some other language families have much more complicated sets of noun classes. Dyirbal has four (roughly: masculine, feminine, edible, and other). There's a language in Georgia with eight, including two dedicated to body parts. Swahili has eighteen (and both adjectives and verbs are inflected to agree with nouns).

Meanwhile the Uralic languages (including Finnish and Hungarian) don't have noun classes, not even gendered pronouns.

In languages with noun classes, it's common for the words for "man" and "woman" to belong to different noun classes. And when we say "this word has feminine gender" all we're really saying is "this word is in the same noun class as 'woman'."

There is no point!

Languages evolve. They are not invented, designed, engineered by people. Human language evolved just like the human body evolved, just like the genome and the microbiome evolved.

There’s probably more to it but the more isn’t the sort of thing that could be explained in documentation.

What I mean by the more isn’t super clear to me. I’ll just say I didn’t fully grasp the Spanish language, which I had studied and spoken for many years, until I smoked a joint with a Swiss girl in college and we listened to some songs being sung in Spanish. All of a sudden I realized there are things you can express in Spanish that you can’t in English.

That may or may not have to do with it being a gendered language; I don’t know. I don’t even know what it is that I saw. I just realized there was some parallel thread running beside the string of words, that I don’t have in English. That you can’t do in English.

gendered words, plural agreement, conjugations, declensions were all forms of “parity checking” for spoken languages – ways to make sure you were accurately hearing what had been spoken

as writing systems advanced, languages started to drop some of these forms when the written word was considered to be an “accurate” representation – ex. you can see this happening in the transition from Old English → Middle English → Modern English

There's no point, it's just how the language developed. It can be useful but it can also be a pain. In my language the phrase "the teacher is late" has two gendered words (teacher and late), so if I say that to you, you will also know the teacher's gender based on which gender I use. At the same time a writer may run into trouble trying to keep a plot twist under wraps in their story because they can't write anything without revealing the subject's gender.

Once upon a time, English had gendered words just like many other European languages. According to my dad (a retired linguist), the Norman invaders, being non-native speakers, learned a kind of pidgin English with a much simplified grammar they could handle. This eventually developed into a creole which everyone started to speak.

It can help with disambiguation of pronouns. Eg. if I'm talking about a city (ciudad, female) and state (estado, male) you can tell which one I mean because the pronoun "it", neutral in English, has both male (lo) and female (la) forms in Spanish.

It also makes a language more poetic, IMPO.

Both my native language (Russian) and the one I use the most (Hebrew) have gendered words. The first one has a "middle" neutral gender, and the latter one even has a full set of gendered pronouns, every pronoun except for "I" has a goddamn gender. This shit is endlessly confusing and makes no practical sense except to annoy people using these languages.

That's one of the reasons why I love English so much, English is nice.

It creates an additional connection between the parts of speech you intend to be conceptually linked.

Eg. "He kicked the ball at the park - it was huge!" Was the ball huge or the park? If 'ball' and 'park' have different genders in your language, then it's easier to know immediately what 'it' represents.

This allows for greater freedom to majorly rearrange a sentence and still be understood. It also helps poetry and LLMs, incidentally, when you can just throw words around and people know which adjective goes with which noun, etc. Not that Chinese poetry ever cared much about that, but that's a different topic.

Why is it related to gender? I guess they just picked something to relate the new system to the people around them, like picking colours to represent emotions. It's a clunky 3 category system, but if you're creating enough ambiguity in your sentences that 3 additional categories of differentiation can't help with... well. Then you have other conjugation systems you can implement. Looking at you, Finnish. Or you can go the English route and get really strict about your word order.

I'm not fluent in any gendered languages, but afaict in many situations pronouns are removed in favor of a gendered suffix, shortening phrases.

This doesn't really answer your question but it reminded me of the following that I think is somewhat relevant.

I was listening to a podcast several years ago that was discussing a study that was done about the effects of gendered words in various languages. It was rather interesting. They did things like showed people a picture of a bridge and asked them to describe it. In languages that used a masculine gender for 'bridge' it was generally described in ways that highlighted features such as strength, solidness, etc. And for languages that used a feminine gender it tended to be described more artistically, talking about it's grace or curves etc. If I remember correctly, they even studied people fluent in both languages and the answers would vary along those same lines depending which language they were asked/responded in.

Disclaimer: Joke!

To help native speakers identify foreigners.

Learn Indonesian/Malay. They are the most logical and uncluttered language around. No bullshit grammar and spelling rules.

Language is just specific expression. It evolves alongside the human brain as we become more and more socially complex, we needed to be able to express ourselves or information to each other which wasn’t easy with things like grunts and pointing. Things like facial expressions are some of the earliest examples of pre spoken language, with which one could express emotion, as it is not only the foundation of humanity’s perception, but also effective at giving others enough info to infer where to look for something. This could be why it is so innate a language within the human mind that even people across different cultures can comprehend. But even that isn’t enough to express everything and so eventually spoken then written language evolved, allowing us to be specific with each other and allowed us to evolve into societal beings rather than pack animals. Each type of language has its own quirks from its evolution, and will continue to evolve. Some languages allow specificity in ways incomprehensible to those who don’t understand the language itself, gendered languages being one such example. A gendered language allows one to apply societal constructs and in a way stereotypes to objects in a way that allows metaphor to imply information. Another more mundane example of this same type of implicit metaphor that may be better understood by one who doesn’t speak such a language is tone. This is implied just as facial expression implied what spoken language would one day become. It will be a wonder to see where language evolves in the future, especially as technology augments our ability to transfer and encode information, as all any of that really is is just information.

EDIT: Just fyi I did make all this up and have no qualifications to say any of this, but it seems right and accurate so please someone prove me wrong, otherwise I will assume my deductions are correct.

No, it's just how it's always been, same with all the other grammar constructs like stemming, prepositions, anything. Often it doesn't convey any additional information and it's just a bitch to learn.

I mean, if your native language (or one you know very well) has gendered nouns, you may tend to think of inanimate objects as male or female - not all the time, but say, when writing poems and such.

Research also shows that we tend to associate inanimate objects with gendered qualities based on language. So if in your language "bridge" is male, you're more likely to associate bridges with being strong and tough, while someone whose language has female bridges tends to think of them as lean and elegant. It's a bit of a feedback loop that way.

But logically, no, no real reason or meaning. When adapting foreign words into the language, the tendency is to follow the habits of the receiving language. Such as if in your language most female nouns end with -a, then you'll probably use new words ending with -a also in the context or grammar of female gender.

Ed: obviously there's meaning if it refers to people, e.g. if "customer" has two variants based on gender - that's additional information of the actual gender of the person. Of course then there's the opposite issue if the gender of the person isn't known. Usually there's a fallback of some sort.

Long ago, and I mean very, very long ago, in all cultures, when you named a child, the name would be derived from the language, something still common in the main Asian languages. Of course, when you have a name system, you need to separate names by gender, so they would separate their dictionary by gender. Over time, however, names became separate from words (so we got people named, for example, "Johnny Smith" instead of "Cloud Bridge") and the gendered rule just stuck around (furthermore it explains why Western cultures are accustomed to naming kids after relatives, because we no longer have the whole baby name book at the top of our heads because it's separate from the dictionary). This means, no, it won't ruin the language ecosystem to simply remove the gendered rule.

There is some debate in France about gendered profession names. Conservative want them removed. Feminists are asking for a neutral form. Regular language usually has gender for them.

In terms of utility, it adds information in a tight way. When you use the gendered name, you add the information about the gender of the person. When there is a neutral form, you can also choose to not give this information.

Obviously when your language doesn't give you this possibility it's harder to get used to it. From my perspective I'm sometimes put off by the lack of specificity and accuracy, or by the ambiguity of the English language.