What's the Point of Grammatical Gender?
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- Опубліковано 8 тра 2024
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What is the purpose of Grammatical Gender in language? Why do the Romance languages have masculine and feminine, but German has neuter too? Is English more efficient than other Indo-European languages since it doesn't use grammatical gender for innanimate objects? If that's so, why do over a third of languages in the world persist in using this form of grammar? Is it archaic, or useful?
Simon Roper has made a fabulous video on the subject of grammatical gender that I recommend: • Grammatical Gender - A...
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Intro and outro music: Overture of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) by Mozart
00:00 Grammatical What?!
00:38 Busuu
01:48 Any Sense in Grammatical Gender?
02:34 Proto-Indo-European Origins
05:00 Are Romance Languages More Efficient than Latin?
05:56 Why Grammatical Gender is Useful
08:45 Gelato Time
A FURTHER EXPLANATION. I appreciate all the comments on this video, so thanks for the discussion. In the video, I was rather glib, so allow me to clarify a few points.
1) The fact that grammatical gender exists in so many languages, and continues to be functional (meaning new innovations are formed around this feature) through the evolution of languages over thousands of years demonstrates that it is not "useless," and clearly is less an obstacle to the native speakers than it is an advantage. Otherwise, if this feature were truly an obstacle, it would cease to exist pretty quickly, and likely would never have developed in the first place.
2) Given that grammatical gender must have utility, based on its persistence through the millennia, what is that utility? What I seek to describe here is not *absolute* utility - something good or desirable for every lanugage - but relative utility, within the system of that language. (There is relative utility even between the languages that have grammatical gender; note how in German it can be rather difficult to determine gender based on the ending alone, while in Ukrainian the endings are usually unambiguous, while Latin and Romance languages are somewhere in between.) The answer to the question is that utility arrives within the system itself - relative utility - because the whole language's system is dependend on that feature. In Italian, if you hear "L'ho mangiata," you instantly know that the object of the sentence is feminine singular, while "L'ho mangiato" tells you it is masculine. Where is the utility in this? Well, if the known dinner objects were a pizza and a gelato, then the gender alone allows the listener to immediately recognise that object was intended by the speaker, and leave no room for doubt. This system is less user-friendly for foreigners, but for native speakers it is more efficient because it is automatic.
3) Allow me to make an analogy. Apple often seeks to make products, like its iPhone or Mac, that are user-friendly. By contrast, often Samsung or PC computer brands have taken the approach of appealing to savvier individuals who prefer customization. (This is just a generalization.) Many prefer the iPhone due to its simplicity, while others are content with the customization of their Galaxy. The fact that languages without grammatical gender (English, Persian, Japanese) are more user-friendly to newcomers (at least when it comes to the lack of grammatical gender) is something in their favor to help the beginner. However, they are unable to take advantage of the verbal shorthand that the more complex system provides.
Grammatical gender is just one feature among many in any given language. Written languages can also be more complex, just as Japanese's exotic fusion of kanji, hiragana, and katakana. The Japanese system is very hard to learn, but once you know it, you can appreciate that it's merely a more sophisticated writing system, not a bad or inferior one. This is also true of sophisticated grammatical systems; they work in the context of their language, and until the native speakers spontaneously change their speech or writing to use something else, these elements of sophistication are necessary for communication, and for them actually improve it.
Thanks as always to Channel Members and Patreon Supporters. If you want to support this channel, visit patreon.com/LukeRanieri
Ok, I don't buy the functionalism Interpretation of language, since it seems like a undirected grown order governed by evolutionary-like laws. Just because it's there doesn't mean it has or had grammatical use. Some things might also serve aesthetical purposes, which is a different kind of functionalism than grammatical functionalism. However, I found the example about the function of grammatical gender on Wikipedia still useful: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender
Luke, what about the possibility that grammatical gender evolved out of the "extension by pattern" of natural gender, where natural gender had and has obvious and clear functional benefit, but grammatical gender beyond the natural cases does not. it just arose from extension by analogy, a common pattern in language evolution. That is after all what you pointed out as the probable impetus for the extension beyond naturally gendered objects. If the cost is low for native speakers as they claim then maybe it need not have functional benefi in order to be preserved by convention as the language and vocabulary grew. near zero cost near zero benefit is possible too.
I don't see why that proposition is untenable. It would explain why English retains natural gender in pronouns where it is useful and discarded grammatical gender without any consequences. the advocates of grammatical gender "functional benefits" need to address why the elimination of such in English caused no disruption, nor caused any compensation to arise!
The example cited for grammatical gender providing disambiguation is just weak, come on you have to admit it's weak sauce. The case only applies in a contrived scenario of exactly 2 objects of opposite genders in a single sentence. If both objects are the same gender (just as likely as they are opposite) or if there are more than two objects or less than 2 , the asserted disambiguation cannot apply. This means in well under 50% of the cases, probably well well under the disambiguation value is impossible. And even in the classic 2 object case, the times where references to the object are temporally separated in the utterance is yet another smaller subset. And even in the most contrived case if disambiguation is at all a risk, the speaker has other alternatives such as repeating the object specifically rather than relying on a reference. The whole argument seems like a post hoc justification based on contrived examples. I have asked Brazilians, i live in Brazil, and none that i talk to believe this assertion. I understand the value of "shorthand" utterances , i just don't see enough evidence of such shorthandedness to convince me, but i will keep on the lookout for such examples on a daily basis and maybe i will be a convert. cheers
👏👏👏👏👏
@Lebowski Servicios Brazilians are not the best to ask because in extremely colloquial speech we brush off any grammatical gender mistakes, they wil sound odd, but we'll get it, and if you use masculine for a feminine object you can fix it by saying "negoço" and if you use feminine articles for a masculine object you simply get away with meaning a "coisa". As if having a feminine and a masculine "thing/stuff" word for when you mess up the gender helps things a bit. We are not a good example on rigidity because frankly, a lot of brazilians speak poor Portuguese, I doubt they are the ones speaking to you, most people don't interact with foreigners here at all. So the gender is as much a hindrance as any other aspect of this difficult language that many haven't mastered here.
@@RenegadeShepard69 Brazilians don't make gender mistakes at all. It's ridiculously easy for us because we learn it by ear/by heart. It's not like conjugating verbs. Yes, most of us suck at verbs and plurals, not gender.
Definitely the first time I've seen an American in Rome wearing a cowboy hat while snacking on gelato and explaining grammar to me
I like to be first
Very pleased to see someone actualy explain the grammatical gender instead of just ridiculing it for once, too often do I see people just dismissing it as a nonsenscal and even stupid quirk while barely even having a surface-level understanding of it because "uhhh a chair isn't a girl or a boy, silly". Great video!
I’m glad. Thanks
that pisses me off, seriously. silly arguments.
As a native portuguese speaker, i have never even considered not having genders for nouns, it's just so natural that we simply dont care about its existence
I am glad you enjoyed the video - i would say though that grammatical gender really doesn't have much of a purpose and it is pretty arbitrary
@@iain349 like a whole language. Weird.
Fun fact: the language with the most grammatical genders is an Aboriginal Australia language called Yanyuwa, which has SIXTEEN (along with a complex system of agreement between nouns, adjectives and verbs). It works out to about one gender for every 3-4 people alive who speak the language.
What are those genders?
@@blugaledoh2669 Noun class is a better term: there are ones like "female (human)", "male (human)", "masculine", "feminine", "food (non-meat)", "abstract", "arboreal" etc
@@vatnidd gender just mean, "class, grouping, race, kins." But today just refer feminine or masculine.
@@blugaledoh2669 sorry you're wrong please don't speak on something you don't know :)
@@GobsAlmightyVlogs Dude, that literally what it mean. A female and male gender therefore literally mean, "a male and female group or category."
One of the kids I took Spanish with in middle school had some learning disabilities and he could not grasp the concept of words having genders, and I don't blame him. I just remember him telling me he didn't like how in Spanish, he wasn't allowed to say "computer" because only girls could say it. I died laughing when in private.
Sometimes it feels like it would be easier to grasp if the genders were just called groups or something, and had names that doesn't lead one to think of boys and girls or men and women.
@@STOPGREENSCREENKIDS1015 I had the same thought once. But the word groups do fall into obvious masculine/feminine group like human male and female. So I guess they just call it m/f/n. But what baffles me most is words with obvious gender doesn't fall into the corresponding gender group.
@@STOPGREENSCREENKIDS1015 thats why sometimes linguists will use the term noun class rather than gender, because its a much more linguistically neutral way of explaining what is actually going on with grammatical gender
As a native "gender user" (Italian), there is something I'd like to point out to non-gendered language speakers that might help them understand better: *grammatical gender does not refer to the object itself, but **_to the word_** that indicates such object.* I've seen way too many American series where people trying to learn Spanish have an hard time figuring out why a pen should be masculine or feminine. Well, it isn't any of those two. A pen is just a pen, it's an artificial inanimate object. But when you want to talk about that pen you have to indicate it with a word, and such word can be either the masculine word _bolígrafo_ or its feminine synonym _pluma._ It's the name of the pen to be "masculine" or "feminine", not the actual pen itself.
In Italian, a man is masculine but a guard is feminine: there is nothing "unmanly" in describing him with feminine adjectives, if in the context of the sentence you called him "the guard".
_Quell'uomo è stanco._ = "That man is tired", where "tired" is masculine.
_Quella guardia è stanca._ = "That guard is tired", where "tired" is feminine.
Some Spanish speakers invented something called "lenguaje inclusivo" which literally makes them look/sound like they weren't native Spanish-speakers. But it's like feminism, they only do it when it matters for them, so presidente (president) or jefe (boss) can now be feminine but persona (person) is always feminine... I mean we're all persons so it's not important to clarify you're proud of being a woman, but when value is associated to the word then they suddenly need to feel represented by an incorrectly-used letter... Progressivism is destroying Spanish and German, probably Italian too but I don't know about the latter.
@@SharkJ002 Do your parents have normal children as well?
@@rubenlarochelle1881 they only have intelligent and enlightened children, so no, we aren't normal, we're superior. Thanks for asking though.
Lol when I read that in Italian the word for a guard is feminine I found it funny but then I realised that in my language it is feminine too xD
Not really, things can be more complex. In Polish there are 3 layers of gender: morphological, grammatical AND semantic.
For example:
Kuba [masc. name, short for Jakub] - it's semantically masculine (so it will take masculine adjectives) because it refers to a man, but it ends with an "a", so it's morphologically feminine, and grammatically it will also decline the way a feminine noun does [in grammatical case declination for nouns].
So all those 3 aspects are seperate and independent.
As a Polish speaker I must say I was quite surprised by the fact that most of the Italian words you mentioned had the same gender they have in Polish, even though our language retained the neuter.
Same thing in German. "Marmor" looks like the Latin form but takes the masculine gender from Italian. I imagine it has to do with Italian influence on Medieval Latin.
My family originated from campagna and Sicily prior to arriving to America, the Napolitano dialect retained neuter and looks closer to romanian.
I'd say they are still proto-indo-European, and still their grammatical basis is Latin; Polish still has masculine, feminine and neuter and 7 noun cases like Latin has. Still just like in Latin (and, Italian, and Spanish) -a ending indicates feminine gender, and still there are some nouns (like those with -um ending) which are inflected the same way as in Latin.
And than as a German and Russian bilingual I remember cases than pig is in German neutral but in Russian female and crocodile is in German neutral but in Russian male (Russian gender is based more on the word endings btw)
@@ashenen2278 German is based on word endings, too.
-ling → masculine, e.g. der Liebling.
-nis → feminine or neuter, e.g. die Finsternis, das Hindernis.
-heit, -keit, -ung → feminine.
-e, -ei → feminine, but only if it is a proper ending, e.g. die Kreide, die Spielerei; don’t be tricked by word stems that merely happen to end in those like _der Schrei._ It is for that reason that most insects (and spiders) are of feminine gender: Biene, Fliege, Wespe, Hornisse, Spinne, Libelle, Termite, and Ameise come to my mind. It took me even a while to find counterexamples: der Käfer, der Schmetterling (cf. -ling).
7:17 A famous Roman Jakobson's quote goes like this: "Languages differ essentially in what they *must* convey and not in what they *may* convey".
What they DON'T teach you in language classes - whether it's high school, university, wherever. You went there and made this tricky topic much clearer for us, thanks Luke!
P.S: An example that comes to mind to show the usefulness of grammatical genders is the Spanish 'la mañana' (morning) vs 'el mañana' (the future) - it's as though a change of gender can bring out different implications and emphases from the same word.
German: der Band = tome, volume; die Band = band (e.g. a rock band), das Band = ribbon, tape.
Why not just say el futuro.
@@SpaceRob Sure. It's not the same word.
@@alexzambrano8441 mañana (adverb, thus no article): tomorrow
el mañana: future in general
la mañana: morning
also in Portuguese we have things like "o cabeça" (the chief in an organization or group) and "a cabeça" (the head in a literal body), or "a capital" (the capital city) and "o capital" (the capital as in money).
I just looked at it this way when studying or teaching languages. The whole gender issue has nothing to do with sexual characteristics or qualities, at least in Spanish. It is simply a system of nomenclature to separate out the correct form of article or adjective that accompanies the noun.
Except when refering to people, and nouns with clear human genders.
No. People are not an exception. Persona is feminine. Gente is feminine. Ser is masculine. It doesn't matter if you are a man, insofar as you are a person, you're still 'una persona'. Individuals have grammatical gender that agrees with their sex, not people as such.
@@Carewolf coming from italy here. Every male is also "una persona" (a person), which is feminine. Every female is also "un individuo" (an individual), which is masculine. For a lot of time we also used "lei" as a form of respect in formal language, which is feminine, however it gets used as a third person even when talking directly to someone.
It's literally just a way to differentiate things.
@@mikicerise6250 I am talking about referring back to names.
@@Carewolf In french we use "une personne" which is feminine. It doesn't matter if you're talking about a man or a woman you are still going to be "une personne"
I like how Dr. Crawford's hat is spreading like a virus ahaha. looks good. also kudos to the camera operator, this video had a cool rhythm to it between the music and the constant movement
Haha thanks. I’ve been wearing cowboy hats in videos since 2017 ua-cam.com/video/ChVgJdAIX2c/v-deo.html
But he gets credit for being first
ultra-masculine
@@cleitondecarvalho431 talking about gender
Scary movie police woman
@@polyMATHY_Luke gasps! Somehow I've never noticed, the Mandela effect for real. I'm usually way too fixated on the content
As a Russian speaker, grammatical gender is natural to me. Every language is beautiful. When I had immigrated to America and started learning English, I couldn't grasp why anyone would need 12 tenses, but in time, I've gotten used to comprehend them and understand the subject of conversation with higher accuracy in the timeline. Though I still cannot use all tenses properly especially in conversation where quick formulation is needed
@@peppermint5117 You probably already know them, you might just not know specifically why the verb forms and auxiliary verbs change. The tenses are basically past present and future. These are generally combined with aspects, as to the state of completion of the action, to get a longer list of tenses than probably really exist. Really the tense should be thought of independently of aspect, but that's frequently not how it's taught.
@@peppermint5117 You just used 3 tenses with no issue.
Past simple - I didn’t know…
Present perfect - I have known…
Present simple - I’m….(I am….)
I think you’ll be fine. You only need to know the names of the tenses if you’re teaching English. Using them correctly is what is important.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade I was taught that, but also taught never to teach it cause ESL students don’t need to know the nitty gritty when most native speakers don’t know it. 😂 I was also not to focus on the names of them with ESL students either (ie past perfect, future continuous, etc), cause using it correctly is what is what is important, not knowing the names. 🤷🏻♀️
@@SmallSpoonBrigade The only annoying thing about English is the gerundium/gerund. That is something you can only learn by studying and listening to natives. In my mother tongue the function of the gerundium is expressed with a different mechanism and not by using a distinct, separate tense. Otherwise modern English has got reasonable tenses compared to German even though there are slight differences here and there.
@@bobbwc7011What is that?
If you think 3 grammatical genders is confusing, then let me introduce you to the Niger-Congo language family and its noun class system. As many as 20 such classes can be found in certain languages within this family. Those noun classes act identically to grammatical gender for all intents and purposes.
Agree - would have been great to hear a bit more about gender in non-indo european languages
@@iain349 Other than Indo-European, the Afroasiatic language family is the only major language family to feature grammatical gender.
Why tho :(
@@ahumanistpotato0501 ultimately just because, I guess. In Bantu languages, noun classes are basically building blocks of vocabulary. So, you'll have a stem with a generalised meaning but only with a class prefix does is it become a word with a more specific meaning. E.g. a Nguni language stem -zulu derives:
• class 5 izulu "sky, heaven"
• from there to locative class 16 you get phezulu "on top, above"
• with class 1a you can derive a personal name uZulu "Sky"
• someone name Zulu founds a clan & becomes their namesake, collectively called amaZulu "the Zulu nation" (class 6 noun; also the regular plural of izulu)
• class 1, the human class, gives you the ethnonym umZulu "a Zulu person"
• class 7 gets you isiZulu "Zulu language/culture"
• class 15, a locative class, gets KwaZulu "Zululand"
Each class also has its own set/pattern of referent/agreement prefixes for marking verbs and qualifiers. The classes themselves have a set of general connotations so you can maybe guess/intuit which classes might be used to derive what kind of related meanings. But I don't think they're all equally productive today- the five or so Zulu words in class 16 are kinda like fossils compared to Shona where any noun can be transplanted to derive a meaning "in/at/on noun X".
The only reason the categories were called gender in the first place is because in the languages that the linguists knew at that time, which is antiquity, had two or three categories, and for the most part, words for men were in one category and words for women were in the other. Hetitian, which would have refuted that, was discovered in the 19th or 20th century, over 2000 years later.
Another important point is that grammatical gender is pretty useful in agrarian societies (most societies were largely agrarian until recently).Gender allows you talk about male, female and baby animals, without much confusion since they correspond with m,f and n gender in most languages.
Arabic has grammatical gender, yet we still give different names for different genders of animals of the same species, such as cow (feminine) and bull (masculine) and cattle (neuter), chickenette (English say hen, which can mean any female bird, not just chicken; chickenette is specifically chicken) and rooster, duckette and drake.
Kind of - i do think i have to disagree that it makes any signficant difference. Do we think that societies that had grammatical gender were better farmers? I don't think anyone is seriously making that suggestion. American farms are among the most efficient in the world, could they be even better if we had grammatical gender?
We do have names for those sorts of things even in english though?
@@Sara3346 male goat, female goat and baby goat have three different nouns?
@@iain349 Please understand that contemporary America is all but an agrarian society and that the first guy was not talking about efficiency but about usability in a precise context. It's pretty different.
P.s. I may be wrong but I assume that you probably are an English speaker, generally the only people that complain about grammatical gender (rarely people from East Asia do it too), for the simple reason their language lacking grammatical gender and assuming that all other languages could work the same way.
I think something that helped me think about this topic was a reading that explained while we call it gender, it's not about our social construct of gender, we just chose that word for teaching purposes (something that's only taken hold in the past 150+ years, depending on where you live / what language you speak). It would be equally viable to just call them category A , B, and C.
In retrospect, that might have been a better choice. Especially because there are languages that have a relatively large number of possibilities and the actual gender of things has little to do with the grammatical gender.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade That depends, for french it's the some words used for female words, and woman related stuff. So it's a direct relation for that. The thing is I don't know if all those languages conjugates(Both verbs and adjectives, as well as pronouns, etc) with gender also, or if that is more unique for french.
@@jawstrock2215 Its the same in Portuguese.
1:56 Little note: "Frutto" (masculine, countable, pl. frutti) means fruit as in "I ate a fruit", "I ate a couple fruits", but "Frutta" (feminine, uncountable) means fruit as in "You should eat more fruit".
As a Spanish native speaker I'd like to add that nowadays many people are trying to introduce a third gender due to inclusivity issues. However this is clearly an influence from english language and culture and it's not really sticking to the everyday use. One of the reasons is that, as you said, in Spanish we use masculine when referring to a neutral gender. However, people in favor of this change want a third ending to neutral adjectives, pronouns, etc(-o for masculine, -a for femenine and -e for neutral). But as I said, it's not really sticking
Oh, I don't know about that! Feminine awakening and identity didn't take place only in the United States or Britain. I see inclusivity and awakening taking place in many languages I understand. Especially in Germany and in Switzerland too. Os professore (Portuguese) was said to include women teachers too, the same in German. Well - you know what, women all over the world do not want to be implicitly mentioned. In German LehrerInnen and other constructions including masculine and femiinine or "Lehrer und Lehrerinnen" and some other forms have even been proclaimed correct by government offices. Of course, this diverges from the purely linguistic explanation that masculine and feminine have nothing to do with gender. In fact, this modern outlook pleads for exactly the opposite. Language perceptions change,, although I am sure many linguistics will say this is a "misunderstanding". Many women will plead for change. No wonder women feel they have been ignored in history. Might this grammatical inclusivity have been one of the reasons for this. I think it definitely contributed to that.
As for sticking to everyday use, in Switzerland there is an official language guideline for inclusion of the feminine.
Being a German speaker I have always considered the article "lo" like in "lo bueno" or "lo inexplicable" to be the last relict of the neuter gender in Spanish but I may be wrong.... .
If you’re taking about Latinx than yes that’s America trying to force Hispanic and Latin Language speakers to change their language to fit a narrative. That’s bigotry, but it’s not sticking so the Spanish language won’t change to fit bigotry.
" lo " is more an object pronoun more than an article , but yes. " Eso" is also a neuter pronoun
What's worse is that in English, we use the Spanish words "latino" or "latina" to describe someone from Latin America, but in an attempt to make it gender-neutral (English doesn't have grammatical gender), some people say "latinx", which is utter nonsense in Spanish. "latino" is already neutral in Spanish, since the neuter and masculine genders from Latin merged.
I think what Hittite is telling us about the origin of grammatical gender in Indo-European languages, is that the origin indeed was the animate-inanimate distinction. The nominative -s in many languages could originally have been an agent marker. Neuter words couldn't be agents, and this is also why nominative neuter words all are identical to the accusative in Indo-European languages. So where does the feminine come from? Could it be from neuter plural when used to denote something more abstract and then become reinterpreted as singular? Something like Latin neuter "opus", plural "opera", then reinterpreted as a singular feminine word.
That is a good hypothesis
I've been reading into it and the most common hypothesis seems to be that the feminine gender originated from an abstract-plural case/gender(?) in late Proto-Indoeuropean. Think of how the word "juventud" in Spanish can refer to the concept of youth as well as a group of young people.
We see in most Romance languages, particularly Italian, that neuter words ending in -a got reinterpreted into full blown feminines, so it's possible.
@@Ennio444 Yes, which is not surprising since feminine -a singular was well established. Originally, however, the concept of grammatical gender had to be established. If my hypothesis is correct, it means that things capable of action got associated with masculinity, whereas ideas, the more abstract, vague or generalised got associated with femininity. Which also gives us an idea of the society that spoke this language. The decision making was mostly likely left to men.
@@midtskogen I wonder whether the feminine came about from plural because in ancient times women were usually either pregnant or with children.
for someone that his ENTIRE language is gender parted its quite natural for me that some objects are feminine and some masculine and when i learned English i found it quite weird that the concept of referring objects as he and she just as it doesn't exist, I'm learning French now and their masculine feminine partition in objects is quite similar to our language with some exceptions so I've found it quite easy to understand
There is some traditional use of he and she for objects in English, notably referring to ships as "she/her". A more obscure example: In English (as in British) church bell ringing, we begin with the archaic phrase "look to, treble's going, she's gone!"
I also speak a gendered language natively, but we have different pronouns for male/female persons and male/female non-persons -- although people will often lump their pets and AIs etc in with persons. The _personal personal pronouns_ (to coin a new phrase) are "han" and "hun", while the _impersonal personal pronoun_ is "den" for both masculine and feminine objects. The neuter pronoun is "det". Both "den" and "det" correspond to the English pronoun "it", while "han" corresponds to "he" and "hun" to "she".
Based on what you say, I suppose you use the same pronouns for masculin things regardless whether they are considered persons, and similarly you use the same pronouns for feminine things regardless whether they are considered persons.
@@jamesbaker8831 That reminds me of Titanic. “But this ship can’t sink!”
“She’s made of iron sir, I assure you, she can. And she will.”
@@jamesbaker8831 yes i know that in english somtimes ships refered to as she
but also aircraft like the boeing 747 "queen of the sky"
which i find it weird because in my language aircarft is male and not female lol but i understand why since ship is female than aircraft is like a floating ship
However in my language we also refer ship as female
as a native English speaker, I remember learning French in school as a child and the whole class giggling when we learned about grammatical gender, because it just seemed funny to us that a door was a woman (la porte) and a roof was a man (le toit) etc. It's interesting to me now as an adult how the things that seem odd about other people's languages make perfect sense to the people who actually speak those languages (and that things that make perfect sense to me about English seem strange to people who are learning it!)
In most Latin languages we have some words that can be masculine or feminine according to their meaning (generally two concepts that are related). For example: in French "le port" (the port) and "la porte" (the door), in Spanish "el puerto" and "la puerta." In this case, both are use to enter somewhere (a house or a city). Or Fr "le mort" Es "el muerto" (the dead) and Fr "la mort" Es "la muerte" (death).
in Italian is the same (porto/porta - morto/morte)
In Spanish, a dead woman is referred to as _la muerta,_ correct?
@@Bolpat Correct
@@Bolpat Italian : il morto/la morta/la morte Spanish : el muerto/la muerta/la muerte French : le mort/la morte/la mort
I'm Italian. They can be just different words (like english "bear" and "beer"), you don't change the gender as you need. Of course, through history the language took advantage on changing gender in order to create words, but there's no a real main rule on changing the gender on purpose. For example: in Italian "mela" is the fruit and "melo" is the tree of it (same for "pera" or "arancia"), but not all the fruits are female gender and not all the tree are are masculine. Sometimes, words looking different just because the gender, don't share meaning or etymology neither.
collo (m, neck or large package) colla (f, glue) colle (m, hill/plurar for colla)
callo (m, callus) calla (f, the flower calla) calle (f, a kind of street/plural of calla)
Another reason, at least in Spanish, is for clarity of pronunciation. For example, “el aguila” is a feminine noun with a masculine article because the feminine article “la” would blend the two words. However, the plural form uses the feminine article “las aguilas” because there’s no danger of blurring the two words together.
That *feminine* "el" comes from "illa"→"ela", and from "ela" both "la" and "el" (as feminine articles), depending on the word that follows.
There is no change of gender happening there, its a feminine article, it has always been, it just so happens to be identical to the masculine one.
So it's something related to gender, but not gender itself what helps with pronunciation in those cases.
I love how comments like yours, despite all this “I’m so glad you’re setting the record straight that grammatical cases have a purpose!!” talk, only _support_ the notion that it’s just a needlessly complicated relic of Latin, and by extension Proto-Indo-European.
And before anyone responds “But these things are what make languages beautiful!”, just know that that still doesn’t make them practical 😂
That's because Spanish refuses to just use the apostrophe for contractions, but to be fair, given how fast Spanish gets spoken, there wouldn't be much point.
Still "l'agua" would be much nicer on paper, anyway.
@@ZhangK71 English isn’t exactly practical either. In fact, no natural languages are. That’s not their point.
@@Warriorcats64 It’s because Spanish has very few contractions, not their refusal to use an apostrophe.
Great video!
In southern Italian dialects the gender system is often more complex, with three or four distinct gender values. The Latin neuter here has not disappeared at all, it has split into alternating neuter and mass neuter. There is a great book by Loporcaro about that
Luke should make a video about that dialect.
Yes, although it may cause some confusion... in Sicilian, a lot of words still take the neuter plural from latin, in -a:
"Thought/ Thoughts": Pinzer-i sing./ Pinzer-a plur.
And so on... or in even, in some dialects of sicilian, a neuter ending in "-ura", from the latin ending (someone affirms it's from sikanian, but it's most likely an outdated theory) "-oră":
"Woods": Vosc-u sing. / Vosc-ura plur. As in "Nem-us/Nem-ora". It may be confusing, but pretty interesting. Southern italian languages have retained a lot from latin.
At the latest here it should be clear why _gender_ is a stupid name for that concept. _Genus_ would have been infinitely better in not tricking people to think about sex/gender when learning languages.
The word "gender" is a direct descendant of "genus". And languages that translate grammatical terminology also use their own word for "gender" for grammatical gender as well.
@Pol Pot 2024 Yes, but the using the term _gender_ implies that to some degree. There are some languages that have exactly two. Most Romance languages have grammatical genders named “masculine” and “feminine.” However, Swedish e.g. also has two genders that are called “common” and “neuter.” Why? Probably because in Romance languages, words for men and women usually fall into different categories, but in Swedish, they fall into the same category.
I like the part where you said that gendered pronouns in a gendered language can make it easier for listeners and speakers to limit the options of what a pronoun could refer to in a sentence. My native language is Cebuano and my L2 is Filipino, and although both languages have gendered nouns loaned from Spanish, we don't have any concept of gendered pronouns. I actually think this lack of gender in these languages makes it a little harder for me to read written text in them - even names of persons, regardless if the persons are male or female, are referred to by just the same set of third person pronouns and it can be confusing sometimes for me to link what pronouns refer to which persons in a text. As for English, whenever I write, I sometimes find this lack of a concrete system of noun classes a little annoying when I want to have pronouns be more specific.
I'm also an Austronesian language speaker, and I find that most of the times, the gender of the person we refer to is rather irrelevant.
I find it more complicated in English where we have to choose between either her or him in third person singular.
Another thing in Austronesian pronouns which is IMO very useful is the distinction between inclusive and exclusive "us".
This lack of distinction in English and German has led to misunderstandings several times in my experience.
6:50
I liked how you recognized that no language more efficient than any other language. With practice, anything is possible. The example you used, relative pronouns, is a good one because it shows that languages deal with and use ambiguity in different ways.
Still, the influence of nearby languages without relative pronouns tends to "erode" them. Catalan has a rich system of stackable relative pronouns, more complex than that of French, but it's losing them quickly thanks to exposure to Spanish, which has a much simpler array of relative pronouns. Modern Catalan (in areas where Spanish and Catalan speakers coexist usually, like Barcelona) has lost them.
What I mean is that languages tend to get simpler not by virtue of humans being lazy, but because when different languages "clash", the simpler traits of each of them tend to get picked up by the young generatins, who will decide, by the way they use it, how the language evolves.
@@Ennio444 Pidgins (languages that arrive out of necessity when speakers who do not share a common language are forced to interact) are legitimately simple-because they HAVE no native speakers by definition; creoles, on the other hand (what pidgins turn into after a generation of new speakers learn them as their native tongue) are not. Humans, especially children, are remarkably good at inventing new grammatical features out of thin air when the language they are taught is insufficient to express themselves and socially negotiating with their fellow new native speakers on which innovations to consider the new status quo. Whenever complexity leaves a natural language in one area it returns in others-unless it is artificially forced not to. I’d wager this modern dialect of Catalan is closer to the latter category, and if not, it will be in a generation. A language dying is always sad, but humans always find a way to make the languages they speak complicated.
You can express anything in any language for basically anything that is shared between them. But I stumbled upon things between German and Italian where I could not find an elegant way to say something seemingly simple in the other language without using something like an explanation. However, with increasing context, explanation is less and less needed and more general terms do the job.
@@IONATVS You won’t find many English learning textbooks that explain to you why un⋅bloody⋅believable is something you can say in Britain at least.
@@Bolpat Oh, you can do tmesis for emphasis in American English too, tho the go to example here is a sarcasm-laden “fan-f***ing-tastic”. And while you don’t see it in textbooks, I HAVE seen articles online on the subject. Latin also has tmesis in poetry, though instead uses it for certain types of “word picture” like “circum-virum-dant” (tr. “they sur-the man-round”) or “saxo cere-comminuit-brum” (tr. “his bra-he shattered-ins with a rock.”)
In Portuguese we have an expression "para bom entendedor, meia palavra basta" translates to something like "for the" wise" , half a word is enough". That's because in our language, you don't really need to say a full sentence for the other person to understand what you want to say. And the grammatical gender plays a big part in that.
can you give an example where the gender is critical to allowing this? i understand Portuguese so let it rip. By the way are you referring to the tendency of Mineiros to shorten words or something else entirely?
Not only in Portuguese
I always see how people get frustrated about the whole gender ideal in languages, but to me I think it’s really cool, fun, and creative. I was born in America and I speak English which to me is a boring language. My mom is Afro Brazilian and she taught me Portuguese and with the help of Portuguese I also learned Spanish
I was also born in America. The post which Amerigo Vespucci explored and where Martin Waldsemuller wrote AMERICA, the name he coined for the New World.
She is Brazilian. Afro Brazilian is not a word we use at all, because, and this might seem rude but, if anyone is definitely Brazilian, its Black Brazilians, after the natives of course. We don't use hyphens in Latin America like in the USA. We differentiate nationality to ethnicity. Nobody is more Brazilian than anyone, no halfs, no almosts, etc. And, again, if black brazilians aren't brazilian enough idk who is.
@@RenegadeShepard69 "if anyone is definitely Brazilian, its Black Brazilians,"
Why???
@@RenegadeShepard69 "Afro-brasileiro" is not a term commonly used in Brazilian Portuguese to describe black people because most of them have lived in Brazil for multiple generations, so they do not have citizenship of any other country other than Brazil itself, nor are integrated to the culture of their country of ancestry. However, if someone immigrates from South Africa, for example, and has a child in Brazil, the child can be referred to as "afro-brasileiro (a)" because the ancestry is very close, the child has citizenship of both countries, probably speaks the language of his or her country of ancestry and is knowledgeable about the culture of his or her immigrant parent. It's not about being "full, half, more, less or almost" Brazilian, it's about being Brazilian and "something else". It's a term that describes origin, even though sometimes people might use a fractionary vocabulary. If this person's mom has a Brazilian parent and an African parent, she's Afro Brazilian, or "Afro-brasileira".
@@Cortov Why are you explaining my country to me? I know all of these things. "Gringosplaining" is real jeez. But still, no, a person born from a migrant and a local wouldn't necessarily need to call themselves a hyphenated brazilian. Just the same way that many descendants of migrants feel the need to call themselves hyphenated, many children of migrants don't, because it's subjective and not as common as in the US, most people are just brazilian. Plus I highly doubt that aptly named Bumbum3000br's mother is a daughter of an african migrant, he is just an uninformed gringo at best.
Very interesting "lecture". I remind that in Italian some nouns ending in -a are masculine, for example, teorema, patema, anatema and so on. They are nouns that come from Greek.
Same for Latin. A lot of them are occupations and the like, such as poeta. In French, the -a changed to -e, but don't get me started on the exceptions.
I think the article is more important than the letter at the end of the word, in portuguese "teorema" also is a masculine word, we use a masculine article in it, "O teorema"
@@chitlitlah Yes, pirata, poeta, scurra... are masculine in Latin. When these words penetrated into Italian, they remained masculine. Unfortunately, nowadays someone uses "la poeta", instead of "la poetessa" for the feminine. It is horrible.
@@pedrosabino8751 Articles are masculine and feminine, singular and plural: for a foreigner they can be hard to learn.
@@pedrosabino8751 In Italian too.
I recently found myself contemplating about this concept in modern Greek (MG). I realized that by changing the gender of some words you also alternate their meaning. For example, in MG we say ο χρόνος (the time- masculine), but the feminine version of it: "Η χρονιά", actually means the year. However, I noticed a strange thing, when the gender in some neutral words is changed. For example: "Το πλατάνι" (plane tree) when masculinized "ο πλάτανος" (which is also used as a variant) actually seems in part, to put an emphasis on it's vastness. At least in my imagination, the neutral version is visualized as a unit rather small, while the masculine version does seem to enhance the size of the tree.
“Χρόνος” can algo mean “year”.
@@oraetlabora1922 Interesting, in which contexts? I've always known it to mean "time" but that's coming from Ancient Greek. And I also ask because languages like Polish have two different words for "year". Like, ,,rok" for the "year 1452" or "for 1 year". But then ,,lat - lata" for "I have 27 years" (ie: I am 27 years old) or "it was 5 years ago". Does MG do something similar?
Same thing in portuguese
@@Nikelaos_Khristianos Χρόνος can mean year in phrases like "αυτόν τον χρόνο" (this year), which can be said instead of "αυτή την χρονιά". The word χρόνος is kind of ambiguous in this context however, so you don't hear it very often
I was studying innu-aimun in school, an algonquian language in Quebec. In those languages, they have a grammar aspect called obviative used to distinguish different 3rd persons in a sentence or a narrative. So there’s a 4th person pronoun with its own conjugation.
That can happen. Isn't it a agglutinative language? In fact German has this, too.
The reflexiv pronouns in accusative and dative are sich/sich, but if you speak about another one regarding gender, you use ihn/ihm (masc.), sie/ihr (fem.), es/ihm (neut.), Possessive the same.
@@SchmulKrieger I'm 99% certain it isn't (and 100% certain for the way you described it). The conjugations in German (regardless of gender and case) are still the same. It's still the same "person"; the only thing that changes in your examples is the case.
Never heard of "the obviative" before till now, but it seems to be quite complex. Although, from what I understand, the goal is more or less the same (namely to distinguish different third person referents). For example (and correct me if I'm wrong); when you say: "my dog at his food" you can interpret "his" as refering to the dog, but perhaps also the food of a friend. Because of the obviative; it should become clear who "his" refers to by the way the verb is conjugated and the nouns are marked (and that's not the case in English nor in German).
@@ewoudalliet1734 you should study the language better.
There's a different when saying ”sie wäscht sich“ (she washes herself) and ”sie wäscht sie“ (she washes her). It's true that German doesn't have this with possessive case in its own, it's not anymore er nominative and ers (possessive to another he) and sein- (of another himself). The same that sich/sich in both cases, instead of older /sich/sir. But the thing is that this is actually inherently Germanic as Norse Germanic languages all have preserved that.
@@SchmulKrieger
"There's a different when saying ”sie wäscht sich“ (she washes herself) and ”sie wäscht sie“"
But that's still not an obviative, and you claimed it was. In fact, the same difference is true for English (I mean, look at your translation). Also; these are just different types of pronouns (reflexive pronoun vs personal pronoun - not an obviative as here a marker/conjugation would be used; also note that the verb is conjugated the same way in both sentences).
"It's true that German doesn't have this with possessive case in its own,"
Yes, but in the example sentence I gave, both interpretations, in English and German, use the exact same word. It's also the same type of word; namely a possessive pronoun. I hope you can see the difference with your example.
"But the thing is that this is actually inherently Germanic as Norse Germanic languages all have preserved that."
Reflexive pronouns are present in most Indo-European languages. In the case of Germanic languages its origins can be attributed to Proto-Indo-European. The use of gender, cases and reflexive pronouns are just another way of achieving the same/a similar goal as the obviative; as described in my previous comment. It having the same goal, however, doesn't make it the same mechanism.
@@ewoudalliet1734 you still don't understand that. A reflexive pronoun is actually per Definitionem obviative-ish, when you have different referents. Okay, another example. ”er schreibt sich einen Brief“ (He writes a letter to himself) vs. ”er schreibt ihm einen Brief (He writes a letter to him. Or in other words, because English has this paradigm not! it has to use *self* as a suffix to clarify to whom it is written.
In German *sich* is not literally *he-, her- or itself* . In English it is *he writes a letter to him self/own/his own self* whereas in German it is clearly distinguished by sich (accusative/dative) and ihn (masculine accusative)/sie (feminine accusative/)es (neuter accusative) and ihm (masculine dative)/ accusative)/ihr (feminine dative)/ihm (neuter dative).
If I would say *ich schreibe mir einen Brief* it would be a whole different case but it would be still *I wrote a letter to mySELF). In German *mir* would indicate the dativus commodi (an object who benefits from what the subject do). So and now read the definition of an obviative again.
Nice and important video. Unfortunately many people conflate grammatical gender with physical gender. In Greek elementary a teacher once tought us that they are different and generally speaking masc. expresses more concrete objects while fem. more abstract ideas. at least in ancient time did and again not always as words coming from other areas/languages/idioms into Greek carried different genders or maybe due to some kind of significance religious or otherwise genders changed
Maybe if they were called something other than masculine, feminine and neuter people wouldn't be so confused
But in English they use grammatical genders pronouns for physical gender as well like in Italian, right?
I can give you an example about this, in Italian the masculine for the table il "il tavolo" and it means the object itself, but the feminine for the same word is "la tavola" and it specifically means the table where you eat/have lunch with everyone, the second one it's more of a concept
@@aplcidr ie maybe learn it
Wow! Thanks, Luke! You gave me a new perspective on how to deal with these inconsistencies. As a native portuguese speaker, I'd always think about genders as some sort of inconvenience, but now I see it as an amazing tool to improve intelligibility.
Great video as always!
Beautiful backdrop of Rome. I miss Rome so much. I lived there as a toddler, but that was 60 years ago. ...
Brazilian Portuguese is my first language. And that's funny that just a few years ago I realized that Lua/Moon was feminine and Sol/Sun was masculine just because a foreigner mentioned something about it as if we saw them as male and female hahaha. I think we just use the articles we learned as children and done, without questioning. BTW, it's really easy for us Brazilians to learn and use "it" in English, and it's funny when I see Americans referring to cars, tools, and guitars as she. It doesn't make any sense to me though it should, but it doesn't. Go figure. Before I forget, I think masculine in Portuguese functions as neuter. "Vacine seu filho"/Vaccine you son - and here filho means son, sons, daughter, and daughters. And we also use it in the singular without any article: "Você tem gato?" Do you have cats? Some people have been trying to force a neuter language here these days. If you say "Olá a todos!" it already includes everyone, but some people like to say "Olá a todos e todas!" or even worse "Olá a todEs," and todes doesn't even exist. I know languages evolve, but they're forcing/imposing an artificial change. I love your videos!! Thank you!!
Good points… The only perspective I would add is that, as a male, you see no issue with “todos” meaning everyone, (male and female), but, if it’s the same as Spanish, (which I have studied), it literally *never* breaks the other way. Like “todas” tells you that there is not a single male in the group being referred to, but “todos” could mean all are male, half are male, only one is male, etc. Females are supposed to be fine with being referred to with a male ending, but most males would be incensed to be (even off-handedly) referred to with a female ending. (In English, you have sort of the same situation with the term “you guys” having been widely accepted as meaning “you all,” no matter what the gender make up of said group is, but if you use the term “you girls” or “you gals,” you better make darn sure there’s not one man present in the group, or he’s highly likely to be offended).
With this in mind, ask yourself why this is. My point is that it’s easier for someone in a position of privilege, (in this case, belonging to the gender that has in Western culture always been seen as the dominant, as opposed to females, who are seen as somehow less-than and second-class), to say, “Why do we need more neutral terms?” Would you be okay with being referred to in the feminine?
@@vespista1971 If I was a king (not a queen) in Brazil, "Your Majesty" (Sua/Vossa Majestade) is feminine, and it works for both queen and king. "Vossa Excelência" is also feminine and it's used for both male and female Deputies, Senators. The word "person" (pessoa) is feminine and refers to both men and women. "Eu sou uma pessoa sábia" where "pessoa" (feminine noun) and "sábia" (adjective in the feminine form) are super ok. I could mention thousands of masculine words we use to refer to women and vice versa.
I wanna thank every person for being here "Quero agradecer a cada pessoa (feminine noun used for men and women) por estar aqui". I think this gender thing is a waste of time at least in my language. It sounds weird and it's being imported from countries where it might make sense. So gender here doesn't actually mean male or female. It's just words that we learn from childhood. There's an agenda from somewhere not in Brazil trying to change things that doesn't make any sense. We also have two gender words like estudante, presidente, assistente, but the same group of people who force "neutral" words refers to the former female Presidente Dilma Rousseff as "presidentA" to emphasize that she is a woman. By doing that, they all throw that gender talk into the trash can. There are only two genders: male and female. I don't mind if you have anorexia and you think your fat when you look at the mirror. But honestly I don't wanna see a grown-up dude using the same bathroom as my daughter just because he identifies as a 6 yo girl. Poeple don't see that these "causes" are just to make more wars, they don't want equalty, but payback, revenge, whatever. Too many pronouns, it's creating more problems than solving. Let's just make it simple. Just call everyone a "human being" and done. hahahahaha Teach everyone to be polite and respectful, not to fight back. Look at Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr, they are my heroes. "I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls.” I don't know how things go in America, but my daughter is white and she never realized her friends are black, white, tanned, whatever. I'm 46 and I never noticed that I've always had black and white friends. I only see people. Born and raised in Rio, black and white people get married and nobody things it's weirds or whatever. I'm straight but most of my friends in school were girls. For the 1st in my life, being 46, I'm starting to see colors and I feel bad for noticing that. That's horrible.
Excellent explanation and very helpful! Also, your camera operator is talented! ;)
Grātiās summās tibi agō, amīcissime!
Thank you for not just disparaging the gender system as something unnecessary that should be eradicated. I’m always telling people who say this about German or French the same thing you explained. Very happy to see that others think so, too. 😁
Great video!
Thanks
I being Polish am doing a language exchange with a Hungarian native speaker (for better context - Hungarian doesn't have grammatical gender) through an app and while I was explaining some gender related grammar to her,it actually stroke me how messy it can be in my language,when for years I thought we (and the majority if not all other slavic languages) were doing it in the most efficient way possible. 'Cause we don't have articles (so for example le,la,un,une) and instead we just have different typical noun endings for each gender ("a" for feminine,for example "agrafka","o" for neuter - "krzesło" and whatever random consonant for masculine - "patyk/trot/gość"...etc.,oh and also "i" for plural feminine "y" for plural masculine and "a" for plural neuter,with some exceptions,like diminutive forms). And I just realised that it's all fun and games until it comes to cases,'cause all of what I've just written only applies to the nominative case. And we've got six more to go and they flip those endings around in a manner that could give you a headache. For example - the word "drzewa" can either be singular genitive,plural nominative,plural accusative or plural vocative. Without context you can't tell (altho as you see it on its own,you'd automatically assume the nominative). The thing is that as a non-advanced learner you always kinda see words in separation from one another and might need a second to figure out what's going on. And I also guess that from what I've written couple of sentences before you assumed that the word "drzewa" is feminine,right? Well it's neuter,the singular nominative form of it is "drzewo".
Meanwhile the Hungarian "case" system (which in reality is more like a suffixed preposition system) is super simple,once you get used to the vowel harmony and the initially scary-looking possessive case (which is an exception from the simplicity of other cases,'cause it has 2 separate full-blown conjugations - one for singular and one for plural,but it's much easier than it sounds)
Gość is not a good example as soft consonants - ć, ś, ń, dź - endings can be either masculine (gość, miś, koń, niedźwiedź) or feminine (kość, gęś, dłoń, gawiedź) and you just have to memorize which is which
Also the fact that one of the exceptions to words ending with -a are female is the word for man (male human) - mężczyzna (masc.) - will never not be funny
@@Ellestra Right,it completely flew past me that there's plenty of feminine words ending with soft consonants,so thanks for the correction. That's one of the problems of explaining a language while being its native speaker. Some things are just so obvious you never give them a second thought
I recently came across a sentence in "La Sombra del Viento" that demonstrates the utility of grammatical gender:
“El piso estaba situado justo encima de la librería especializada en ediciones de coleccionista y libros usados heredada de mi abuelo...”
Because "Heredada" is feminine and singular, we know it's connected to "librería" and not "libros usados". To translate the sentence into English, we'd have to move around the words (e.g. "The floor was situated just above the bookstore inherited by my father specializing in collectors editions and used books").
Great example!
Plus, it's combined with grammatical number, which reduces ambiguity even further.
Even when learning German, I had the hardest time with grammatical gender. I think the main crux was the nomenlacture, as reffering to an inanimate object as a he or she just feels confusing and arbitrary. Btw! It's pretty cool to look at the differences between grammatically low context languages (Latin, German) and high context languages (Chinese, esp. classical Chinese). My German friend gets very frustrated with Chinese because he's so used to information being fairly explicit, that the Chinese generic third person or the bare-bones tense system makes him super confused over what's actually going on in a sentence xD Classical Chinese gets even worse, where say, one of the common third person pronouns can refer to both sexes, animate and inanimate, be possessive, dative, accustive, an exclamation or have no meaning at all, all depending on the context! This is why classical texts come heavily annotated (There are even different names for annotations from different periods as well!) and can in some cases be almost unintelligeble without them, because without proper explanation and context, a lot of it would just be gibberish even to an educated native speaker.
From what I understand, you can blame the Brothers Grimm for that. They chose to use grammar as a name for the classes, and we've largely been stuck with that since. For languages that have 3 or fewer it's not a major issue, but there are languages with 4 or more and that can get confusing.
Really, the way it should be explained is that they're just groups of nouns and that the gender will have some impact on some aspects of gender. German has rules that dictate the gender for somewhere around 70% of the words. Those other 30% have to be memorized individually, as there is no particular pattern.
As far as Chinese goes, there are no tenses, only aspects. As in whether the action is in progress or completed. And a statement about roughly when it's happening. As opposed to English, which has both aspects and tenses and the ability to generate incredibly complicated sequences of events. For example, "After which point he will have already had completed his breakfast" is confusing, but completely legitimate English. In practice, people wouldn't normally say that unless forced to.
The 3rd person is only distinguishable in written Chinese, this kind of thing happens fairly often where the language lost a bunch of its tones and syllables over time and the spoken version isn't capable of drawing the same distinctions that the written one does. On top of that, the written language, at least in areas that use the simplified character set, has lost a bunch of the characters and were combined in ways that words that share little in common are now represented by the same character.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade GRIMM BROTHERS! *shakes fist angrily* Well, at least that makes sense now, even if the nomenclature doesn't.
I'm quite well versed in Chinese both modern and classical, tho I prefer the latter for my writing. There are still quite a few dialectal pronouns, though as far as I know, biological sex was never really a feature of Chinese pronouns untill contact with the west (in fact, the character for "woman" is an ancient homophone for "you" so you often see it used in classical texts even when referring to men! xD). Chinese does however skirt around this problem by using the name, title or other non-pronoun ways to talk about the third person though traditional polite conversations might still see someone refer to themselves in the third person. It's pretty fun if a bit confusing at times.
Love the production on this. I'd love to see these videos (Especially Latin learning) reaching a bigger audience.
Thanks. Very kind
What an excellent video. So well explained. Having studied both Latin and Ancient Greek, I can appreciate the efficiency aspect.
Very kind
As an Italian, I also think grammatical gender is quite fascinating. Other than your example, I like how the same word can assume a different meaning based on its ending. For example "tavolo" is a generic table, while "tavola" is a table used for dinner (or less commonly a big tablet). Not to mention it's very easy to point out the gender of the animals, such as gatto/gatta for cat (I always thought that english is a tad too ambiguous on this side)
Oh, and I like a lot that we have words that (I guess) are ethimologically different but would be written the same if it wasn't for their "gender".
Porta (door) - Porto (port)
Manico (handle) - Manica (sleeve)
Razzo (rocket) - Razza (Race)
and so on...
Luke, what do you think about the generic masculine? I think it has nothing to do with actual gender as well, but it's making people freaking out a lot these days.
In italian you guys have only one verb to be, right? It blows my mind, how can you guys differenciate between be drunk at that moment and always be drunk? Portuguese and spanish have 2 verb to be, "ser" and "estar"
yes
@@pedrosabino8751 In many dialects this difference exists.
@@pedrosabino8751 Same in french, only ´être ´. We still manage to communicate 😀. We would say things differently (être ivre vs être un ivrogne).
@@pedrosabino8751 we have essere and stare too, but we use them for different purposes than you
It's also the same with conjugation, it's the reason why the subject (i, me, you, she, John, etc) is optional in a sentence in Romance languages. The subject can be understood from the conjugation the verb. It's a pain in the ass to learn, but it works once you learn the language.
that doesn't work in French tho
As someone who has been studying Modern Greek for some time now and struggled to answer this question, thank you so much for giving such a clear answer.
Good day Tribune Luke, loved to see another great video of yours. 😊😊
Luke, could you do an episode or episodes on how the Latinate daughter languages developed their pronoun and relative / determiner (this, that, etc.) systems from their Latin sources? Or does it go further back? I mean how we get from Latin having a very different way of dealing with these 3rd person and relative pronouns, into a new paradigm. (I'm surely muddling that, because I don't speak Latin so I don't know the full grammar system, just that Latin had something quite different while the daughter languages developed mostly (but not always) parallel systems from an intermediate (Vulgar Latin, Common Romance?) stage.)
I’ve also heard it said that it’s not the TABLE itself that’s feminine; it’s just the word “tavola” that is feminine. Small distinction, but a helpful one.
You do a good job of explaining how gender helps clarify certain things. But as an American who learned French at 14 and have spoken it regularly since then, I still spend 25% of my brain power in a conversation focusing on the dang gender and getting it wrong 10% of the time. It gets easier, but even though I’m fairly fluent, the gender just never seems to reach native level.
Only because gender rules are more vague in French. It's much easier to get the gender right in Spanish since the exceptions are fewer and the rules more consistent. As a Spanish speaker who learned French, I thankfully didn't have to suffer. Most nouns share the same gender in both languages regardless of ending, so you only need to learn the exceptions like la cama (feminine) but le lit (masculine), etc.
Thank you so much for putting the name of the intro/outro piece in the DB. Many creators don't when it's a classical music piece, which often ends up being frustrating if I really like the piece or if I'm familiar with it but can't think of its name. In this case, I recognised the overture, but when I don't, it can be so frustrating because it's difficult to google that kind of music. So thank you!
My pleasure! I agree
Great vid as always. It was fascinating to know the animmate-inanimmate duality was the genesis of gender in Indo-European langs. You must be having the time of your life in Rome, I'm very happy for you!
i love how languages are different from each other and all of them have their own structures that blow my mind, for example, Turkish doesn't have either grammatical gender in nouns or object/subject
Yeah, as an italian i can confirm that we love subintenderr parts of a phrase. Grammatical genders and conjugations come in handy
yes
I had a lovely lesson with my teacher about gender in Italian and German, how every language works in giving additional information about nouns. We considered the word for Sun in Italian (masculine) and in German (feminine) while the Moon is the opposite so that we have a couple in both the languages. I still remember the lesson after 30 years 😀 I hope you enjoy your stay in my country.
Well said
I'd like to believe that the Moon and the Sun are always a couple, and in languages like Urdu where (I believe) they have the same grammatical gender, they can just be a gay couple :D
Your mini documentaries are getting better and better!!! Funny and cool!
Nouns with identical spelling and pronunciation can be distinguished with gender.
In Swedish you can distinguish 'en hov' from 'ett hov' (a hoof from a noble court) and 'ett zoo' from 'en so' (a zoo from a female pig).
In German there's also a lot of nouns that sound the same but with different meaning dependant on the gender.
_Der Band_ and _das Band_ as well as _der Schild_ and _das Schild_ come to my mind immediately. Edit: That being said, a lot of people conflate the latter two and only use _der Schild_ for both.
Der Band = edition, volume.
Das Band = ribbon.
Der Schild = shield.
Das Schild = sign, plate.
Der See - the lake
Die See - the sea
When a "tavolo" makes love with a "tavola" they make many "tavolini" and "tavolette"
7:00 thank you very much indeed from EGYPT the land of Hieroglyphics, your videos are brilliantly brilliant I love them so much. Please please make more videos about our Egyptian Language. And I'll say to you "Duat" / thanks in our ancient Egyptian Language 😁👍🏻
Great production quality on this video!!
Thanks
I remember being so confused by the grammatical gender in my mandatory French classes (and German is even more confusing because of the three genders); I could never remember which words were what. Spanish, my favourite Romance language, is a lot easier in that regard since there's at least a loose rule for which words are which.
One nice thing about Finnish is there are no articles to worry about, not even definite or indefinite, although in spoken Finnish they often use "Se" ("It") the way we use "The" in English. They also only have one word, "Hän", that means both "He" and "She" (although that can lead to some ambiguity sometimes, especially since in puhekieli, they also use "Se" to refer to people, which makes me feel like I'm being rude even though it's normal for Finns). The rest of Finnish grammar is a gong show to learn, although at least it's a lot more consistent than English grammar is.
using 'Se' as 'The' seems like quite weird of a change to me as a estonian speaker. The same word exists in Estonian, "See", but you would only ever use it emphasize that something is a specific object among many. Now that It hink about it I guess it works like 'it' or 'this/that' in different contexes and Finnish might not use it like that
@@lollakasfamilianimi3246 Yeah, I don't think it's "proper" Finnish, but it's really common in the spoken language, from what I've been reading and listening to over the years. And in a way it's kind of nice for me coming from English, since there's at least one way to be a bit more specific (i.e. "Se koira" to mean "The dog" instead of just saying "Koira" by itself, which could mean either "A dog" or "The dog"). I can't really speak to Estonian though, since I haven't studied it as of yet beyond a few basic words and phrases. But hopefully when I feel reasonably fluent in Finnish, I'll give Estonian a go. 🙂
There's usually rules that will cut it down to a manageable number. Otherwise, you just learn the word with the appropriate gender. Also, relax because usually gender isn't that big of a deal. In most cases, you'd still be understood even without the correct gender.
Another good (though less known to your intended audience) example is Persian, which has lost even the minute references to gender. You can mention him, her etc in English, in Persian the 3d person pronounced are neutral (but _do_ distinguish inanimate ān, ānān, and animate ō, īʃān).
The plural, in standard Persian, also used to distinguish animate, persons with suffixed -ān, and inanimate with -hā, though in Farsi (Iranian Persian) the latter tends to be used more and more.
Finnish is similar; "Hän" means both "He" and "She", and "Se" means "It". The former is only used for people and never for animals or objects, but the latter is commonly used in spoken language for people as well (which I still struggle with a bit because to me it feels rude to refer to a person as "It"). They also have two words for "They" ("He" and "Ne") that are used the same way.
As for the plurals, Finnish has so many different ways to form plurals depending on the case and position in the sentence; it's a nightmare to learn.
@@corinna007 Finnish isn't an Indo-European language, which might explain it. It's Uralic. Uralic languages don't have gender.
@@andrasfogarasi5014 I know. I just find the little similarities between languages fascinating, even (Maybe especially) if they aren't related languages.
Your videos are getting better and better.
Another explanation why italian words often ends with -a or -o is cuz they come from the ablative of the original respective latin word, not the nominative, which would seem more obvious.
Meanwhile in the process of development of romance languages we lost the neuter gender (as much as we lost the dual which was there in some cases). Great videos, keep it up
omg thank you for this video I have been trying to fight against the senseless ridiculing of grammatical gender for as long as I can remember
I’m glad it helps!
Yes! Thank you Luke, finally someone explained it. I can't imagine anyone doing a better job at this that you, you're a true magister. 😀
That’s very kind.
Wow, thank you! Answering the question that is probably always in the back of every English speaker's mind when they study gendered languages, but never quite gets around to asking. It makes a lot more sense now.
English still has traces of gender in 3. pronouns. When I learned English that thing did seem so weird.
A lot of languages have 'noun classes'. They gave me a headache in Swahili. I always wondered, if the exceptions in noun classes actually became grammatical genders. In some ways you can find noun classes as 'counting words', i.e. many/ much as the simplest form. In Japanese this gets a whole lot of differently complicated.
I think the biggest hurdle for English speakers to understand, especially in today's gender-centric politics, is that it's not even remotely biological in nature but they try to understand it like it is. Even if they think it, "helps". But to be fair, in English, we have grammatical gender but it's exclusively biological, eg: waiter vs waitress, and things like that. Which only compounds the aforementioned issue.
In regards to your point about names, I think it's even more apparent in languages where names (personal and place) decline like nouns. Like in Polish and Greek. Mostly because those "things" are effectively nouns in a grammatical sense, their gender is just pretty obvious as a result.
Right
There is no gender in English.
It is good that you bring up the problem of English-speakers thinking that gender is to do with biology, but then you make the same mistake in saying that the distinction between "waiter" and "waitress" is a distinction of grammatical gender. It is not. In English, there is no _grammatical_ distinction between the words "waiter" and "waitress". For example, there are no distinct articles (e.g., we don't speak of "the waiter" and "thess waitress") and no agreement of adjectives (e.g., we don't speak of "the tall waiter" and "the talless waitress"). The distinction is in the sexes to which the referents belong, not in the grammatical categories to which the nouns belong.
@@omp199 Sorry, I used the wrong technical term, because on a technical level, there is gender in English. It's just not grammatical. What I mean to illustrate is that English has a system of natural gender. In other words, certain nouns (mostly occupational ones/ones for species) will change according to the biological gender of the thing they correspond to. Afrikaans has the same system.
I wasn't trying to insinuate that English had a deeper grammatical system than that.
@@Nikelaos_Khristianos But what you are calling "biological gender" is actually called "sex". It is confusing to use the word "gender" to mean "sex". It is clearer to say that for some animals, there are different words for the animals of each sex. There is no need to use the word "gender" to talk about that.
@@omp199 I gotta be honest, English is my first language and I've used "sex" and "gender" interchangeably my whole life. At this rate, I might as well just use Latin "genus" (gender is flipping cognate with it!) and mean "category" instead. Gosh I can hate this language sometimes. 😤
Very nice presentation. As a Frenchman who needs to write in English quite often, I'm always frustrated by the lack of relative pronouns in English compared to French. I took a few writing classes about English, and our teachers would always warn us against writing sentences that would be too long. One of them even told us that the worse offenders usually spoke Romance languages. I guess Proust was a real nightmare to translate into English... ;-)
I found this to be a very nice presentation, as a Frenchman who needs to write in English quite often and is always frustrated by the lack of relative pronouns in English compared to French, and who took a few writing classes in English in which the teachers would always warn us against writing sentences that would be too long, one of them even telling us that the worst offenders usually spoke Romance languages.
😜
Honestly the longest run-on sentences are probably written by Spanish speakers, which is an ironic achievement for a language in which 'Voy' is complete sentence. ;)
The camera work and production videos on these videos are great! Thanks for doing cool videos for us whilst you're faffing about Italy.
Thanks very much! I’m in Italy to do my job, indeed to make these videos, so I’m happy you like them
The camera work was terrible. What are you talking about?
Now that's sponsor money put into good use. The bump up in production quality is noticed and appreciated.
I’m glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for the comment
I really want to point out what an excellent resource this is for English speakers looking to understand Romance grammar
Thanks, very kind
But English has gender in pronouns, ist that pretty similar? As it comes from grammatical gender
@@turkoositerapsidi English's 3rd person animate pronouns usually only get used for things that actually have genders, which is to say people and sometimes animals. I don't really think it's analogous.
@@appleoxide4489 It's similar to Swedish, that still has grammatical gender.
@@turkoositerapsidi that's not grammatical gender/class. That's actual gender. You're referring to a thing by the gender you assign to it. Different from romance languages, German and at least some nordic languages
In Swedish it was the male and female grammatical genders that merged, so we now have utrum ("n-words") and neutrum ("t-words").
Därför är svenska mer lätt språk än tyska eller ryska.
Neat, way of looking at it. I have never studied a language with grammatical gender, but when I heard about the concept, i thought that it was just a weird way to talk about Vowel Harmony, where end vowels must match other vowels in a word.
Italian here: we have also some tricks just to confuse who tries to learn our language.
For example, finger is masculine as singular (IL dito) but feminine as plural (LE dita).
Arm is masculine as singular (IL braccio) but as plural is feminine if used for the body parts (LE braccia) and masculine for parts intended as extensions, for example in buildings (I bracci)
Well done, Luke, for explaining this in context. A good example is the Italian “cosi fan tutte”, as used by Mozart and usually translated as “Women are like that”. It’s the “tutte” that feminises it, otherwise it would just mean “everyone does it” or “all do thus”. All showing that the Italian is so concise and elegant. Your reference to relative pronouns illustrates that gender improves a language’s efficiency, making it rather surprising that English (largely) dropped gender.
Exactly. A great example of the utility
It's Also interesting to see this phenomenon where romance languages such as italian have masculine words like "il braccio" (arm) when it's plural it becomes feminine "le braccia" this also happens in romanian for example "pix" (pen) masculine in the plural becomes "pixuri" (pens) which is feminine
anyways good video luke I wish more people talked about this subject :)
I’m glad you liked it.
the actual neuter gender should be lo in Italian.
@@polyMATHY_Luke doesn't count Italian to the East Romance language branch?
@@SchmulKrieger yeah, debatable, but very close indeed. I'd count Dalmatian firmly in the East, but standard Italian less so. Perhaps Neapolitan moreso.
They seems feminine, but they are traces of neuter: E.g. le ciglia, le braccia, le dita, le interiora....
I am surprised you do not have your own academy for Latin!! Discord may be an idea to consider
Thanks! I don’t have time for Discord. I have two channels to run and an audiobooks store that take up my time.
Best explanation I've seen on UA-cam. But...
Can we take a closer look at how the animate/inanimate genders became the masculine/feminine/neuter genders please?
And what about the common gender? I'm sure that can shed some light too.
_The point is a simple feature of some languages, it has nothing to do with "Sex and/or biology", when thinking about a 'cadeira' [chair] which is feminine (In portuguese, my native language), it is just a feminine noun and that's it! No philosophy.._
Anglophones often have trouble separating natural gender (male, female, neither, etc.) from grammatical gender (masculine, feminine, neuter, etc.) conceptually.
@@b4byj3susm4n But what is its purpose then?
@@yoditgudit6578 For grammatical gender? Disambiguating terms, most usefully. Like if two words are identical except for which gender (and thus which declension and agreement patterns) they follow, then they can be distinguished. And with pronouns, they can be more specific to referents than nongendered pronouns (think about how many times you had to wonder “who’s ‘they’?”).
The terms “masculine”, “feminine”, and “neuter” are millennia-old affectations for Indo-European languages that sorted their nouns into categories (Latin “gender” just means “kind” or “type”, think “genre”). Bantu languages like Swahili have up to 18 noun “genders”, although at that point most linguists prefer to use the term “noun class.”
Apparently, early Proto-Indo-European only had four distinctive vowels, "e, o", long and short. The vowel "a" would develop later, probably leading to a categorization of many animate nouns into feminine by the development of a new suffix. However, this process is not well understood as far as I know.
Is there a single language today without an /a/-like vowel? I'm no expert, but that seems unlikely. Maybe those 4 distinctive vowels are just a theoretical framework?
A related question would be why some word pairs differ only in their gendered suffix but have very different meanings. In portuguese copa and copo for example. These pairs seem to just add confusion rather than reduce it. seems that having different roots would be better from an efficiency perspective.
The Spanish neuter articles are my favorite things to use to remind people that there is more than just masculine/feminine in Spanish, even though the Spanish neuter is a very exceptional and circumstantial use. Examples include lo, ello, esto, eso, aquello.
I am not sure about efficiency but one thing I have always found puzzling about language is whether polysynthetic or highly isolating, at base, they are all doing the same thing but there is so much superficial difference (differences that generative grammar tends to ignore, which is a separate discussion) that it seems odd that they are all seeking to achieve the same thing. When we look at evolution for example, at a phenomenon such as say convergent evolution on separate continents, for example pangolins and armadillos have no overlapping range and do not share direct ancestry but they nonetheless converged in terms of their adaptive response to their environment. No such analogue can be found in human language, which if one thinks about it, SHOULD converge in similar ways, after all, all language is attempting to facilitate communication but they go about in such vastly different ways for no explicable reason. I am not claiming that evolutionary adaptations are telic per se but they make sense given certain environmental pressures and constraints but why are Inuit languages insanely polysynthetic but continental Scandinavian languages not? Maybe the question is not well formulated so I will ask it one last time; if all language is there for communication (which it clearly seems to be there for) why is this communication facilitated in such vastly different ways for seeming no good adaptive reason whatsoever, above all when compared to rather obvious evolutionary adaptations. This is a question that linguists seem to have zero interest in, perhaps because it has no answer one way or another. Anyway, I thought I would throw that out there. Fun fact; different Indo-European languages inherited at times either the animate form of a word or the inanimate; I beliieve ignis stems from the animate category of fire and pyron from the inanimate.
I actually think that it IS pretty analogous to natural evolution.
At its core, natural evolution works in three steps:
• Random mutation through gene modification
• Natural selection through environmental pressures
• And reproduction, where those mutations get passed on.
Every mutation can be either beneficial, harmful, or neutral. What makes a mutation harmful is the environmental pressures that kill off individual with x mutations. But neutral mutations can also become harmful if the individuals with beneficial mutations become the vector for the environmental pressure.
Language evolution has the same process:
• Random mutation, where something in a language may change
• Selection by x pressures, which can make that something beneficial for communication, or harmful, or neutral
• And reproduction, where that something will start being memetically copied by other indoviduals.
The thing with language evolution that differs with natural evolution, I think (and this is where I’m not sure), is that most "mutations" are actually neutral. For one reason or another, communication is able to perfectly be computed through many different methods. That is why it may seem that it isn’t the same process, but I think it actually is. I think we don’t really notice it much, because the environmental pressures are able to act on harmful mutations very quickly. If someone starts speaking some way that is worse that what was spoken beforehand, other people in their community will immediately shut it down and that mutation will disappear.
I do think that we can ask ourselves the question of wether beneficial mutations do exist in language evolution or not, as in, all mutations that are not harmful hold the same level.
This all interests me so much, considering I will start studying for my linguistics degree this September. Thank you for your comment :)
@@deithlan It is a thoughtful response but I am not sure if the analogue of neutral mutations holds. Thank you nonetheless.
Quite an off-topic comment, but Ive never thought I would find you commenting Lukes video since I regularly watch yours about fantasy stuff. Such a small world (or yt community?) we live in :D
@@dopellsolder3572 Appreciated. It not surprising that one's interests are not confined to just D&D.
So, what you're asking is, if I am correct, why since all languages occupy the same 'niche' do we see such variety, when usually animals that occupy the same niche tend to evolve similar features? That's an interesting question - I think that it might be sample bias, and that languages are a lot more similar than we might think. With animals, since there is so many different niches to survive in, we can see just how diverse life can get. However, with language, there's only really one niche to compare, so all the differences stand out. For example, imagine you're a fish in the open sea, and all you know are sea creatures. You would probably think "wow, look at all how the differences between all the different animals, they have so little in common." However, once you've seen land creatures or creatures that roam the ocean floor, you would probably start noticing just how much in common fish have.
Actually, there is _sort_ of another niche that languages can occupy: computer languages, which occupy the 'niche' of specificity rather than communication. It's pretty obvious that human languages are much closer together with each other than they are with computer languages. Perhaps a better example would be the made-up language Ithkuil: it was designed using the properties of human languages but for maximal information density rather than effective communication. The guy who made it says if you try to learn it, it becomes clear very quickly that no human language would ever evolve in that way.
Indeed. My English-speaking friends always looked puzzled when I tried to explain why a chair would be female for instance, and that we don't use "it"... next time I know where to send them :P
Thanks!
The same function we have with verb inflection by person, give us information who practice some action without put a subject in sentence. That's why romantic languages have sentence without subject but in English we have to put subject in all sentence. Portuguese native here.
Man, he's really stepped up his production quality. Kind of feels like network television. I like it.
Very kind. It’s not easy making videos like this, but it is fun
thanks for this video. American living in Brazil, this hits home. The efficiency and ambiguity reduction argument is possible but i don't find it very compelling in term is cost benefit. Seems like a large cost for small benefit. I have also asked many native Brazilians if they ever consider the gender to be helpful in correlating as suggested in this video and they all dismiss the idea as being irrelevant to their experience.
It happens too naturally for people to be conscious about it.
And at the same time, what large cost? Maybe for a foreigner who speaks a non gendered language.
2 year old kids already know the genders of most nouns, so how can that be considered a big cost?
A much greater cost is the lack of phonetic correspondence in English language. Which is why spelling bees are extra popular in English language.
Really, learning which of two genders a noun is, learning together with the nouns, is MUCH MUCH easier than memorizing the totally irregular English spelling system
@@rogeriopenna9014 Hahahaha you hit him with the horrible English spelling. I can relate with you as a native Spanish speaker. Gender is just as natural as anything a person with a non-gendered native language will learn. You learn it and it's just part of the language.
Gender is indeed useful in real life when referring to one of two or more things, because the gender makes it obvios which one you're talking about. Although in a setting where you can point to it it's not that useful.
In any case, no spoken language is better than another because of "useless" features. In Spanish and probably Portuguese you can mishmash words in various orders and anyone older than 7 will understand the meaning.
What cost benefit? Native speakers simply learn it, there is no cost.
Not all the grammar rules will make sense from our perspective, it is part of learning a language.
@@rogeriopenna9014 i understand your point but the spelling comparison is not helpful. its completely beside the point and just a distraction. This is not a conversation about the whic linguistic features have higher cost benefits ..that is an interesting question but it's has nothing to do with the cost benefit of any individual feature, and nothing to do with the one we are discussing.
Also, it's an apples to oranges comparison because the English spelling atrocities are a historical accident related to archaic pronunciations evolving into modern pronunciation while the spelling was fixed by printing expansion...yes it's the worst part of learning English and harder than gender i agree, but it is not a proper comparison became the proper focus for gramatical feature cost benefit analyses for natives is the spoken language not the written form, because languages principally evolved in spoken contexts. writing is a epiphenomenon of specialists. Natives learn to speak first and read write later if at all.
@@echinas0908 none of this discussion is about one language being better or worse , please don't misrepresent the discussion by going there or suggesting i was.
I'm happy someone finally is giving some justice to the concept of grammatical gender, but this videos only scratches the surface. There are many questions I was expecting to find an answer for in this video, but it just doesn't explain much.
Yes, gendered languages can distinguish more efficiently between two things using different genders, but 1) sometimes you might have two words with the same gender, in which case the gender system becomes pointless and 2) all those languages who don't have a noun class system do just fine, so where's the advantage?
Also you forgot to mention that grammatical gender is just one way languages can classify nouns. Some languages have a whole different set of nounqa classes (you mentioned the animacy/inanimacy class system, but there are more), so my question is: why did some languages decide to use genders as a metaphor to classify nouns in the first place? My theory is that, as cultures develop, people tend to personify objects and abstract ideas, i. e. they develop an anthropocentric view of the world, but I would have loved to see a more in-depth research on this point as well.
I’m glad you liked the video. I appreciate the questions, but I already answered them in the video. Your theory is okay, but I explained the prevailing linguistic theory: the coincidence of inanimate object endings with human name endings is the genesis.
The advantage offered by grammatical gender is *within the system,* not a universal concept that makes one language better than another, otherwise all languages would be the same. And that advantage, as I mentioned, is that hearing “l’ho vista” tells the listener that the object or person seen was feminine. The subconscious mind thus has fewer options to identify who or what was intended.
i get the gender by "pattern extension" argument, but i don't really buy the utility argument as currently formulated. It seems the cost in memorization does not justify the infrequent payoff ..see Pinker theory on memorization vs rules... thousands of português nouns are neither a/o ending, not to mention the very frequently used a/o exceptions. That's a lot of costly memory dedicated to a very small payoff. Every Brazilian i have talked to scoff at the suggestion that the gender assists in the way described. If it does so assist it is at an unconscious level ..or it may have assisted more in past form of IE languages and has just stubbornly persisted even though as English shows it's loss is inconsequential.
Thanks for posting Luke!
A teacher gave us a roughly similar explanation, but said the redundancy that cases, declensions and gender give are particularly useful in stress situations like hunting, but also e.g. shouting in fields. Smug teenagers that we were, we thus concluded that they were the way of the dodo with the advent of (cell)telephone
To people wondering why German and non Latin languages also call their Genders Masculine and Feminine when they have no attachment to say name endings, it's purely a relic of the dominance of Latin as a literary language in Europe.
There's nothing masculine or female about German nouns, people simply applied Latin grammatical names to non Romance languages. You may aswell call the German genders Noun Class 1, 2 and 3.
Omg Luke that opening was fuego (m.) 🔥
Gracias
Interesting Latin script on the façade behind your shoulders at 7:40: my best translation is: stay, good neighbours, bad ones keep off!
It's great that you did this video. Many people think that grammatical gender and societal gender are the same thing. Yes, both are classification systems, but applied to differing areas. It doesn't help that nouns referring to males and/or traditionally males roles (depending on the society) are classed as "masculine", and the same referring to females, "feminine". Even though, there are "exceptions". I prefer to use the term "class" or "classification" as used with the classification system in Swahili just to drive the point that grammatical gender is not the same as societal gender. In some languages there is just a huge overlap between the two "genders", grammatical and societal. How words are classed will differ from language to language also. There isn't a universal set of criteria. For example, the word "Fraulein" is neuter because of the diminutive ending "-lein"; there is no other reason. And, any word in "-chen" or "-lein" is neuter no matter what class the root was. The reason very plain and linguistic. And, as you mentioned, what were neuter nouns in Latin became masculine in later languages because the endings started to be sound the same or their forms coincided. Speaking of Romance, there isn't even an consensus about the classification of the word "flower" (Lat. flos/floris m.). In Italian and French, it's masculine, but feminine in Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan.
Update - on reflection, I realise the detail I'm thinking below is just way too complicated for a short video!!! :) I can see why you didn't include it. But can we get some other videos further down the line that explore some of these issues ??? :D Thanks by the way man, your work is always great.
LONGER POST !
Good video - just a few thoughts. I think there's a little more to be said about why gender emerged and why it persists. I think gender illustrates some of the points that make linguistics so interesting and that didn't quite come through in the video.
As you say, gender was a feature of the ancient ancestor languages of the languages where it exists today. No one knows why it was a feature of them and there's no way to find out (currently - hey maybe someone will invent a time machine :)). It's possible they were feautures of ancestor languages to those languages going back tens of thousands of years and you'd really have to go back that far to see why they emerged and the indo-europeans had no idea why they were using them either, and it's possible that your hypothesis is part of the explanation. another hypothesis is that originally there was far more than 3 genders, there could be 20-30 plus genders, which were effectively categories of like nouns (many languages today have a gender system with this many genders). Another possibility is that each gender is a category related to some god in a polytheistic religion, i.e. all masculine things are related to the sun for example, and maybe the sun was considered masculine. All feminine to the moon considered female or whatever. In all, I just think you could be slightly clearer that no one knows why gender emerged.
I also don't think it's quite correct to say it creates efficiencies of any significance and it isn't why it persisits either, and while no one can be sure I doubt it emerged for this reason. As a speaker of a language that has gender I don't notice any efficiencies but happy to be proved wrong. Was English more efficient back when it had gender? Are there records of people lamenting the loss of gender in English right after it fell out of use, saying "ah the lost efficiencies"?
Also, it's not as though people who speak languages with grammatical gender sit down and ask themselves questions like "You know, it's time to think about whether we keep gender, should we drop it?" And have debates, ultimately concluding that the 'efficiencies' of it justify its continued existence and then it is officially kept on. Languages don't change for those reasons (except very rarely e.g. as we are seeing right now in English and other languages with people starting to talk about and consciously using different pronouns). I reckon maybe you just need to add a bit more information about why languages change and why some features persist.
In all the main reason I think that gender persists is because all languages are easy to learn for children/babies, no matter how complicated they may appear to non-natives learning as adults. It is no effort at all for people to do gender when you grow up with it because that grammatical system is wired into the brain, any more than it is hard for native English speakers to use things every day like the English tenses or modal verbs or a few other things that flummox non-natives. It is only hard for adults who are learning and have as their base a different language with a different grammar that was wired into their heads as children. As such, there is no need to drop it as a concept out of difficulty if the dominant class that sets the standard for the language / most of the people learning it are learning it from birth. Just as it is no effort at all for people to master and use languages every day that have other features that are even more complicated for non-natives like case, or like for example some native american languages that are so complicated that there is no regularity at all, so complicated they were used as 'code' during the world wars.
While you are right about how the endings in words in the Latin descdent languages changed and that made neuter hard/dropped the case system, it would be nice to hear about why they changed. Again people did not sit down and decide "ah this is all just too hard, let's just simplify the endings and drop neuter". Go on man, gives us more of that awesome story of language change!! :)
Finally it would have been good to hear a little more about gender is languages that are not European/Middle eastern. African languages can have 30+ genders, I believe there's Australian aboriginal languages with many genders. Or do you have any examples of gender emerging in non-European languages more recently? This would have added some more cool stuff.
Interesting video. People really get caught up on the whole feminine/masculine thing more than they should
Absolutely. Gender is mainly important for speaking grammatically in languages that use it. But, most of the time if you screw it up or forget it completely, you'll still be understood. There are exceptions like with German's relative clauses where if you use the wrong gender it could lead to confusion. But, that's a small detail.
Because it’s arbitrary and has no reason to exist, maybe? Nah it’s super necessary, actually
In French, Latin neuter nouns more used in the singular than in the plural have passed to the masculine, whereas Latin neuter nouns more used in the plural than in the singular have passed to the feminine. Is it the case in other Romance languages?
very interesting, thanks for posting quite illuminating.
Thanks
When I was learning Portuguese, I remember learning that many nouns that came into Portuguese from Greek (e.g., drama, mapa, problema, telefonema) even though they end in "a" are masculine because they are masculine in Greek.
Those are actually mostly neutral, not masculine!
@@ArturJD96 no. they are masculine, you use "o mapa" to find "o problema" and finish "o drama" and after that give me "um telefonema". all male
@@ArturJD96 there's no such thing as neutral gender in portuguese, ever since portuguese developed into a different language from vulgar latin the neutral gender has been absorved into the masculine gender
@@astk5214 I mean they are neuter in Greek!
@@saoirse4976 I mean they are neuter in Greek!
It’s easy to understand why so many native english speakers tend to confuse grammatical genders with something like _social gender._ They see masculine and feminine and think it’s only aplicable to persons, because they lack of this feature in their language.
I’m not mocking, I’m just pointing out a fact.
Hi, interesting video! Although I'm not fond of your explanation (or I might have not fully understood what you meant). I'm french and it also happens that I've studied ancient egyptian for many years (since you've mentioned it).
In both these languages, there is no distinctive sound in word-endings (like the "o" and "a" in spanish or italian for example) to distinguish feminin from masculin. In French, there are loads of different endings for feminine words and the same goes for masculine words. The gender is only heard in oral in the article that comes before the word.
I'm aware that that wasn't the case in earlier stages of the language where words that are now feminine ended in "a", for example. However, if these words ended in "a" in earlier stages of the language it's because they were already feminin ! Like in latin "vita" (life) is a feminin word and it is still in french (la vie). I believe that if it ends in "a", it's because it was thought to be feminine in very ancient times and not because it conveniently ended in "a" like other feminin words. Life is a concept that was attached to women in Antiquity (and other periods) so it makes perfect sense that "vita / la vie" is feminine.
I mentioned studying ancient egyptian. I've noticed while learning the language that their grammatical genders match their belief system perfectly. For them, "sky" was a feminin word while "earth" was a masculin word. They have no concept of "mother-earth" in their religion while all they sky deities are goddesses and all their earth deities are gods. We could then assume that the grammatical gender was determined by very old beliefs from animists / chamanic religions from prehistorical times. Either that or it is the other way round and it is the language that influenced the beliefs of all these different populations.
Anyway, I do think that people speaking languages with grammatical gender tend to think these objects as gendered. Most of the genders of words can "find explanations" in the culture, the belief system (even though it might not be the explanation for why these words had that specific gender at the beginning). Don't know if I make a lot of sense. Just wanted to comment because I find the subject interesting as all you videos :)
I have to say, it was very sensible of English (and quite accomodating to those of us who use it as the lingua franca) to shed off grammatical gender.
Beautiful explanation, by the way.
It wasn't because they're sensible. It's because they're (*whisper, whisper* a French creole *whisper whisper*). ;)