It is not clear whether that explains the function of gender, but it is certainly an idea, she says. The gender category is typically very difficult for adult learners, and the project leaders actually argue that it might be impossible to learn the Norwegian gender system perfectly for a second language learner, as gender must be learned noun by noun. If you are one of those who struggle with grammatical gender in Norwegian, then Marit Westergaard offers a piece of advice:.
He explains that the gender terminology goes back to Latin. The noun for a male animal would typically be masculine, a female animal would be feminine, and the rest would typically be neuter. And then it gets generalized and non-animate nouns also get masculine or feminine gender.
This makes sense in a biological system, but Bantu languages, e. Swahili, may have 15 or 20 different classes for nouns. CAS also enables us to do new things. They both believe it is likely that the project will result in new collaborations and new projects that will continue for many years to come after the CAS year has ended.
Interestingly, the dual meaning of masculine forms is often grounded in historical androcentric and sexist pressures Gabriel et al. For example, in English, the singular and non-gendered they , used for several centuries in English literature, met with fierce criticism by 19th century androcentric prescriptive grammarians, who — following an earlier drive to impose the sex-indefinite he — saw the masculine form as the worthier one Bodine, In French, in the 17th century, grammarians deemed it important to establish the masculine form as the dominant one, as they felt that men were simply nobler than women Viennot, Until the 17th century, it was not uncommon to refer to a group composed of women and men by using pair-forms, meaning both female and male versions [e.
In German, masculine nouns have been promoted as having the ability to refer generically to both sexes only from the beginning of the 20th century Doleschal, : Formerly, women and men — namely feminine and masculine forms referring to them — had been treated separately by grammatical description, and masculine forms were not described as having both a specific and a generic meaning Doleschal, Thus, in all the languages with grammatical gender that we discuss in our database, there is a potential bias in favor of the masculine forms.
Note that — although they would constitute interesting languages to compare to — we are not aware of any European language with a similar potential feminine bias. Psycholinguistic investigations of how readers derive gender from the masculine form mostly show that its alleged generic meaning is rather difficult to activate e. For example, in a series of experiments in French, Gygax et al. This effect was also present when participants were explicitly asked to consider the masculine form as a generic one.
In a recent cross-linguistic study in German and Italian, Horvath et al. Others have also looked at lexical access of gendered nouns, in comprehension and production. Among them, some have examined different asymmetries between the masculine and the feminine forms e. Still, whether explicitly or implicitly, most studies on individual grammatical gender languages suggest that their findings are generalizable to other languages with similar grammatical features.
Several cross-linguistic comparison studies have demonstrated this generalizability see Esaulova and von Stockhausen, , or Gygax et al. Some studies have also suggested that languages bearing different grammatical gender features may display differences in the ways that speakers of these languages mentally represent the world in terms of gender see Sato et al.
Some authors have interpreted these differences as being illustrative of the impact of language on thought e. However, most cross-linguistic comparisons of grammatical gender effects on mental representations have documented interesting variations.
Yet, the grammatical gender systems under investigation are not always described in detail, at least in terms of similarities and differences, and existing indexes do not always provide the adequate dimensions to do so especially when the focus resides in the way women and men are perceived.
Cross-linguistic comparisons will remain useful for documenting the effect of language on thought and on social constructs , but a more fine-grained analysis of the grammatical gender systems under investigation is required. Most studies on the topic have concentrated on existing taxonomies e. In the present paper, we present a non-exhaustive index of 15 grammatical gender systems i. In accordance with our goal to provide data for research on gender biases, our index focuses only on gender-related information and does not document other differences between these systems.
We first present the dimensions chosen, along with their justifications, as well as a comprehensive table see Supplementary Table S1 on the language samples. The list of languages chosen is obviously not exhaustive, and we do hope that additional languages will be categorized using our classification system.
When establishing the data for the Language Index of Grammatical Gender dimensions , we followed an a priori grouping of several gender system types based on features that are known for a broad range of languages. We excluded universal features such as the existence of lexical gender words e.
Such forms appear to exist in most languages and therefore do not help to differentiate between languages. Importantly, our index not only complements existing taxonomies of grammatical gender e.
As such, and to the best of our knowledge, we offer a new taxonomic perspective on grammatical gender. For the purpose of the present paper, we identified five different language groups, based on previous gender system descriptions e. Even though languages in the first and second groups are very similar in many respects, we present them as two distinct groups, as only languages in the first group make a systematic distinction for human nouns between masculine and feminine forms.
This distinction is highly relevant for research of the way gender distinction affects our representation of women and men. Grammatical gender languages e. These nouns control agreement of various other lexical categories such as determiners, adjectives or pronouns. Gender assignment is mostly semantically arbitrary for inanimate nouns, whereas the grammatical gender of human nouns shows considerable correspondence with the sex of the referent or gender identity; see note 2.
In such cases, one can observe agreement according to grammatical gender especially when the satellite elements are close to the noun as well as agreement according to the to the gender of the referent when such elements are more distant ex. Es pron. She is from Germany. In other cases, nouns denoting humans may be used to refer to women and men French la personne n. The number of such hybrid names varies across languages see Corbett, , for a detailed account of hybrid nouns.
Such examples should be avoided in experiments testing grammatical gender because they represent exceptions with respect to the functioning of gender systems. Languages with a combination of grammatical gender and natural gender e. In such cases, gender generally relates to the sex or gender identity of the referents. Contrary to languages such as German, Italian or French, where human nouns are often differentiated between masculine and feminine forms, the majority of human nouns are not formally distinguished between masculine and feminine forms.
They can therefore be used for female and male referents without being linguistically differentiated. In this respect, these languages are closer to natural gender languages like English. For example, these languages have nouns equivalent to the English teacher , doctor , neighbor , etc. Pronouns usually express the sex of the referent or the gender identity of a human referent. I hope that you will continue doing this type of content. I have been searching for the answer to this for a long time.
This is another article that explains how gender is used, but does not explain why it is used. My best understanding is that languages are often controlled by elites. Elites have often made languages more complex than is needed for communication. They have done that so that it is easy to distinguish the educated people from the others. English dropped gender during a period after the Norman invasion of , when the elites moved their focus to French.
The ordinary people took their opportunity to drop gender. I think similar ideas have led to simpler conjugation of verbs. And simple conjugation made phrasal verbs more effective. And those advantages built on themselves. English is powerful because these changes. I think that is why English is used so much for communication, especially practical communication.
The English is both simpler and of practical use. As a native English speaker living in Israel, I found Hebrew a very difficult language at first. Apart from the alphabet and writing right to left, it has gendered nouns and verbs. If a girl is speaking or a boy is speaking about a girl then you use the feminine form of the verb. It is usually possible to find the gender of a noun according to the plural. BUT you need a good reason to go to this trouble,so. I have come to the conclusion that, the gender attributed to any give noun is relative to the god or goddess that the given item is reigning over i.
Thus invoqeing the inherint power of given diety,in a pagan society a very relavent motive. Toby, what a beautiful perspective and insight. I loved your comments about language not simply being about the exchange of data. As Christina Anne has said, Toby has nailed it. As someone who studied Romance languages and English, I find it somewhat hard to believe that gendered nouns cause sexism.
Speaking English does not automatically mean you are not sexist, after all. There is plenty of sexism to go around in the English-speaking world, no offense to anyone, without gendered nouns.
Also, there are nouns that are gendered simply by the way they are written or conveyed: a prince is male, a princess is female. English is horrific regarding spelling! Every rule I was taught has a ton of exceptions. Similar with verbs.
Every English speaker detests verb conjugation, given how easy it is for most verbs in English: I walk, you walk, you [plural] walk, they walk, and… he walks!
But in certain situations, the verb tells you nothing about what you are speaking of. I have to add the pronoun in English to know who is doing the walking. This may seem trivial in my example, but there are other situations where it can be very helpful… English is most prevalent internationally due to economic and political reasons. And as others point out, language is more than strictly for communication. Your email address will not be published.
Blogging about language since ' And gender systems, especially elaborate ones like Bantu languages have, basically give one a hashing algorithm for all of life's entities; pretty good for pre-FORTRAN programming. Show 2 more comments. At least in Russian I think there is some correlation. This is masculine: while this is feminine: This is masculine: while this is feminine: This is masculine: while this is feminine:. Anixx Anixx 5, 1 1 gold badge 21 21 silver badges 32 32 bronze badges. Since when?!
In fact, to me, he glass seems feminine, and the catbird box masculine relative to its wooden counterpart. I don't know. Can you elaborate on the differences you see?
Gender assignment for inanimate nouns in Modern Russian is purely grammatical based on morphology and has nothing to do with semantics. Show 1 more comment.
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