Grammatical Gender - An Accidental Response to Luke Ranieri

[SimonClarkstone]

English has something that looks like animacy: the rules about when you can use "who", rather that "which"/"what"/"that". You can call people "who" but you don't usually call objects "who".

[melanezoe]

You know, Simon, there is more to a YouTube channel than just “content”. There’s your voice, interesting digressions, non-content scenery and sounds, and quirky graphics. Those things work together to get my thumb up.

[Graybat]

“Apologies for my Spanish”
*pronounces word perfectly*

[keizan]

"...having said that." *Proceeds to show trees on a window*. You've got my view.
BTW: as a Spanish speaker myself, it was kind of unexpectedly thrilling listening to you speaking some Spanish here. Very nice pronunciation for someone who only studied Spanish some time in their life :).

[belgianvanbeethoven]

Exactly what I needed today. I just had an exam on linguistics and I messed up a bit. These videos always manage to spark my interest so I don't come to hate linguistics in times of frustration.

[joseg.solano]

Simon Roper: pronounces "mesa" perfectly.

Also Simon Roper: "apologies for my Spanish pronunciation".

[davidbaptist]

An interesting feature (I personally think anyway) is that in Italian grammatical gender is sometimes used to create semantic variety.

The most classic example is that fruits generally have feminine grammatical gender (“mela” apple, “pera” pear, “pesca” peach etc) while the same word root but with masculine grammatical gender indicates the tree (“melo” is the apple tree, “pero” pear tree, “pesco” peach tree etc).

Sometimes the two variants of grammatical gender aren’t so clearly distinct. I remember a friend of mine who was quite frustrated by the pair “tavolo” (masculine) and “tavola” (femminine). Both those words mean “table” but are used in different contexts and semantic expressions.

[hulakan]

I watched Luke's video a couple of days ago, and while it was very well produced, I find your video much more enlightening on the subject. Also, your production values have been increasing markedly. Keep up the good work.

[kingbeauregard]

I like how you describe PIE as a language in flux even at such stages we're capable of evaluating it. PIE seems to be a complex, challenging system that I can't imagine anyone would have purposely chosen to speak; but if it's the product of a whole bunch of processes acting on previous languages, that could explain much. I hadn't heard about grammaticalisation before, but that makes so much sense. And looking to the future, I could see the common contractions like "he'll" or "I'll" being core words of their own, along with "I've" and "you've" and then we end up with different inflections for past / present / future.

[abruemmer]

Not only your very interesting video has answered a lot of questions, it answered questions that i wouldn't even ask. Thanks a lot again, Simon and have a great start of 2023!

[michaelshelton]

I literally just got through reading the section in The Nature of Middle Earth, where Tolkien mentions that the Elvish languages distinguished between animate and inanimate rather than masculine or feminine

[hannahemiliasings]

I'm a secondary school French teacher and I get the question "Why are there genders?" so, so often. Finally, I can frame some kind of answer. Thank you 👏🏻

[palmitas]

I've already seen Luke's video and was pleasantly surprised to find you made one on this subject! I absolutely adore your presentation style and diction. My native language is Spanish (Caribbean, Puerto Rico dialect), and loved this explanation on grammatical gender. Thank you for the effort and research you put in your content!

[JimmyChappie]

With your hypothetical example, you perfectly described how the Romance future tense came to be formed by originally using the Vulgar Latin verb 'habēre’ as an auxiliary verb for the future tense, which eventually became grammaticalised and reduced to a mere inflectional ending: cantāre habēo (Vulgar Latin ‘I will sing’) > je chanterai (French ‘I will sing’) where the inflectional ending ‘-ai’ is the remnant of the VL auxiliary ‘habēo’. Same concept as 'I will work' > 'I wiwork' 😊

[vladyslavshcherbatyi]

That was pretty accurate to point out that "grammatical gender MOST OF THE TIME doesn't have anything to do with biological sex", as a speaker of English, Polish, Ukrainian and Russian I can say that we do attach slight feminine, masculine or neutral characteristics to words if we want to emphasize something's femininity or masculinity or neutralism (the last one we often use towards people in order to undermine their position or to show strong condemnation, because neutral gender is percieved like something that is definitely lower in status). Btw, I reckon that the grammar influences the perceiving of our world so badly that for instance almost all the cartoons that show let's say [a pen] as a character in it, will almost always be a faminine character because its grammatical gender is feminine but [a pencil], as a character in the same cartoon will be a masculine character, but at the end of the day I bet no one could ever explain to you why on earth a pen is more feminine than a pencil.
PS: the example with the words "pen" and "pencil" was based on Ukrainian. In Polish for example the case with those two words would be different. The Polish think that pencils and pens are male XDD. So if you ask people to make up a little trivial story for kids with a pencil and a pen people will give them characteristics according to the word's grammatical gender in the majority of cases, which I find very interesting.

[lajuntahighschool]

Great explanation of this concept! Japanese isn’t considered to have gramatical gender, but it does have many different categories of countable nouns, which have to be specified when the number of them. For example, there are separate categories for long cylindrical objects (like a pen or a single hair), flat thin objects (like a piece of paper or a slice of bread), and there are several different classes of animals (small animals like a mouse are separate from large animals like a cow, birds have their own category, and humans have their own category), etc.

Mandarin has a similar system and even goes a step further, requiring determiners to specify which noun category to refer to. So is someone says “this”, there is often significantly less ambiguity than even in languages with gramatical gender, because the relatively narrow noun class is specified.

[PeterPaul]

Thank you very much Simon. This is a superb scholarly explanation of an extremely interesting topic. Ranieri’s video is completely inadequate, as it centers on his idea that nouns acquired gender as a function of their sound. Your exposition shows that this is the reverse of what actually happened. Italian nouns that end in ‘a’ end in ‘a’ because they are feminine, and are not feminine because they end in ‘a’.
As you clearly set out the core of grammatical gender as being the separation of animate and inanimate objects, you must know about the theory that Animism is the prevalent source of all our current belief systems, and that grammatical gender is a response to the respect (and fear) that early societies had for the spirit of objects that has the power to help or harm them. J G Frazer in The Golden Bough explains that word gender can be seen as a product of either patriarchal or matriarchal societies, and Robert Graves in his extensive forays into Greek myths explains them in terms of Greek culture transforming over time from matriarchal to patriarchal. It has been put forward by others that in the belief system of Animism, the sun was the supreme being, and that the patriarchal society of the Roman world makes the Latin word ‘Sol’ masculine, whereas the onetime matriarchal world of Germanic culture makes the German word ‘Sonne’ feminine.
The only example that I know of in English of an inanimate object having a gender is that ships, and by extension other vessels, are feminine. It strikes me that this is the last vestige of superstitious Animism that English speaking seafarers have retained due to the extremely dangerous nature of what they do.

[multizrak]

in russian we don't have the grammatical category for noun animacy, yet there's this little grammatical rule left from the times when we did have it: masculine nouns in accusative case have different forms for animate and inanimate objects. since it's only an atavism, it doesn't always work well, for instance 'robot' is considered an animate noun. there's even this 'tricky question' regarding the matter: which one is more dead - a corpse, a deceased, or a dead man (труп, мертвец, покойник)? of these, only corpse is declined in an 'inanimate' way

[manuelcampagna]

Hi, Simon! Here's something amusing for you. In Hungarian the word for queen consort is királyné, where the -né means "wife of" and may be used for any married woman by attaching né to the husband's surname (women increasingly refuse this); when the queen, like Elizabeth (Erzsébet in Hungarian) is a female king, then the word for queen is királynő, literally "king female". You guessed it, király means king.
Something important that you failed to mentioned is that gendered languages often assign the neuter gender to persons. For instance in German "das Fräulein" (the miss or maid), "das Liebchen" (the little loved one"), etc, are neuter because of the diminutive -lein or -chen or other, and their entourage of article, adjectives, and pronouns obediently agree in being neuter.
Apparently (you may correct me if I'm wrong) in Old English wi:fman was masculine because of the -man, while the wi:f whence it came was neuter.
I am myself a linguist and I believe this is the most fun occupation in the world after sex.

[eckligt]

One of the weird and wonderful things about the indo-european language family is how often the feminine grammatical gender is associated with "a" suffixes. This also stretches to people's given names. I know there are exceptions, like how Andrea is a male name in Italian.

But it any case, it would be interesting to hear if there is research on how this characteristic has become so widespread. Maybe it's a trait that has persisted since starting out in the PIE "eh2" suffix mentioned at 15:54