Where do grammatical genders come from?
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- Опубліковано 31 жов 2024
- German and Russian have three of them, French and Spanish two: grammatical genders. They annoyed Mark Twain and confuse students to this day. But where did they come from?
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Written Proto-Indo-European looks like thirdway between chemistry, matrix multiplication and Elvish.
the h with indices are phonemes that are unknown and cannot be reconstructed, so they got an indexed symbol
"Mädchen" ist ein Diminutiv von "Maid" und Diminutive sind nun mal immer sächlich.
Der Hund - das Hündchen
Der Baum - das Bäumchen
Die Flasche - das Fläschchen
etc
No shit Sherlock
is Junge not a diminutive of Mann then
@@jivanjovan No. It`s a word on it`s own and masculin. A diminutive of "Mann" is "Männchen" or "Männlein". And these are neuter too.
and therefore is similar' to child - and child is neutrum.
Then why couldn't they have non dimunitive of "das mädchen" in "die" forms 😒
As @113270891694482619187 said, the grammatical-“genders” are really just Noun Classes. Many non-Indo-European languages have them, too. But only when talking about an Indo-European language do we go calling its noun-classes “grammatical genders.”
We could just as easily name these noun-classes after other prominent member-words. For example: “canine”, “bovine”, and “porcine”, named after _„der_ Hund“, _„die_ Kuh“, and _„das_ Schwein“. Or “spoon”, “fork”, and “knife” [ _„der_ Löffel“, _„die_ Gabel“, and _„das_ Messer“].
Or, we could name them after common noun-endings: „er/ling“, „heit/keit/schaft/ung“, and „lein/chen“ [“masc.”, “fem.”, “neut.”, respectively]. Although, not all words ending in „-er“ are in that noun-class; there are some exceptions. Still, it's a helpful and non-confusing way for native-English-speakers to wrap their brains around the noun-classes.
And then there's languages like Dyirbal. ;) I remember hearing about Lakoff's "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things" the first time at university, I had just started my first linguistics semester and was absolutely stunned when I realized that other languages work totally different.
I love those language quirks. It shows so much how different people categorize the things they find in the world and are yet able to learn another person's language to begin an understanding. It's amazing.
This is such a beautiful and elegant explanation. It's surprising that this video only has 50k views, despite this. Deserves at least 100 times of that.
As the comment below says, genders are just noun classes. Genders used to be used for all kinds of noun classes, not just the masculine/feminine/neuter classes in the IE languages (e.g. some African languages were said to have dozens of genders). I suppose that got changed as "gender" became a euphemism for "sex" (as "sex" became idiomatically used for "sexual intercourse"). "Gender" comes from French, ultimately from Latin "genus" (class), and so etymologically has nothing to do with the sex of someone or something.
In Polish we call grammatical gender "rodzaj gramatyczny", which literally would translate to "grammatical *kind* ", so no personal identity involved... unless you get to the names of the genders themselves, cuz we still use the traditional masculine, feminine, neuter terminology, sadly. It's still funny to me though, that the language that doesn't have grammatical gender (anymore) took the word "gender" to mean an aspect of a person's identity and thus somewhat made the original term have the connotations it has today, lol
Mädchen has a neutral genus (genus = grammatical gender) because it is in dimunitive form. There is old word for a young female person: Magd, Mad, Maid. The dimunitiv form Mädchen becomes the standard German word for a girl.
It would be the same for young male persons:
der Bub - das Büblein, das Bübchen
der Junge - das Jungchen, das Jüngelein
But the dimunitive forms for Bub and Junge didn't became so popular.
Very interesting! Thanks for this video -- I've been wondering about this for a while so really cool to at least get a "maybe possibly" answer to WHY German and other languages has such genders for nouns.
+Wanted Adventure I followed the link you gave me and now I possibly know why we have genders but I still have no idea which rules we follow. I grew up just basically knowing the gender of nouns but we were never taught WHY a door has a female article or why a girl has a neutral one. I saw in some other video that words that end in a certain way determine gender but I am still pretty clueless on the matter hah!
botibomaus aaaah, yes I see what you're saying. Yeah, I've noticed that sometimes the ending points you in the right direction, like if a word ends in "chen" (like Mädchen") then it's always Das. And if it ends in "heit" or "keit" it's Die. But there seem to be a lot that just have no reason at all.
+Wanted Adventure Still gotta be carefull though. A word like "Drachen" (kite / hang glider) is "der Drachen". But the pronunciation of the "ch" is different (like "lachen"). So not exactly all words that end with "chen" are "Das". Words that end with "chen" are usually diminutives and I guess those are all "Das" and they are also pronounced differently, with a soft "ch". I don't know if that's an official rule though. Just my observation :P
It might also be because of the letter before the "ch". If it's "a" like in "lachen" or "o" like "kochen" then the "ch" is not soft. And of course, plurals that end with "chen" are never "Das", like "die Sachen", "die Entchen", "die Mädchen". Sorry if I'm bad at explaining. I don't know the exact rules I just know how it works lol
Wuzzysbrand06 oooh those are great points!! I hadn't thought of those at all. I was just thinking of "chen" as a diminutive. Thanks point that out :)
+Wuzzysbrand06
The -chen is a sign for a diminuative, but it can be, that it isn't. It is probably the word before the -chen, which makes see, if it is really a diminuative (if I'm right.). "Mädchen" is from "kleine Maid". So it is neuter. So is "Bübchen", which is "kleiner Bube" translated to "little boy". Sometimes people say "Jungchen" with the same meaning. Well, its more the meaning of "fresh/unexperienced boy".
The perfect way of illustrating discrepancies in the grammatical gender system of the Welsh language is to use Latin loan words (castell = castellum, pont = pontem ; here, the Latin words are given in their accusative form). Great job! ;)
In portuguese it's a bit more simple. Most words end (in singular form) in a vowel. That vowel usually determines the gender of the word.
99% of words ending in A vowel are feminine. It sounds feminine in portuguese. And notice how many feminine names end in A.
Same thing for O, which is the "masculine" vowel. 99% of words ending in O are masculine, as well as names.
As for other vowels, there are usually some rules, some exceptions, but it´s much more straightforward than german.
Same in Italian
They got it from 1st and 2nd declension nouns in Latin
Same in Spanish 🇪🇸❤️🇵🇹 😁
Wasn't expecting such a well pronounced castell, good job!
Oedd, dwi'n cytuno.
Was das Erlernen von Nomen noch erschwert:
(1) Im Deutschen gibt es keine einfache Regel zum Bilden des Plurals. Persönlich fand ich das überraschender und schwieriger als die grammatikalischen Geschlechter. Im Englischen fügt man in den allermeisten Fällen ein S am Ende eines Nomens hinzu, um den Plural zu bilden. Im Norwegischen gibt es zwar verschiedene Pluralendungen ("er", "e", "ene" oder nichts), aber die Regeln, welche Endung man in einer bestimmten Situation nimmt, sind ganz einfach. Im Deutschen dagegen bilden unterschiedliche Nomen den Plural auf unterschiedliche Weisen (zB Pfad->Pfade, Feld->Felder, Auto->Autos, Regel->Regeln, Zopf->Zöpfe, Kloster->Klöster, Zügel->Zügel). Manche Nomen haben zwei Pluralformen mit unterschiedlichen Bedeutungen (zB Worte/Wörter, Bank/Bänke, Geiste/Geister, Sträuße/Strauße). Andere haben zwei Pluralformen mit der gleichen Bedeutung (zB Balkons/Balkone, Kaffs/Käffer). Man muss das alles auswendig lernen ^^
(2) Bei bestimmten Nomen (die man sich ja merken muss) ist die N-Deklination zu verwenden. Auch das wird nicht konsequent gebildet: der Mandant, den Mandanten, dem Mandanten, des Mandanten; der Name, den Namen, dem Namen, des Namens; das Herz, das Herz, dem Herzen, des Herzens.
German person: is the table masculine for feminine?
English speakers: table is table
Ich habe wirklich großen Respekt vor deinem Wissen und muss sagen, dass es mit einer der besten Kanäle auf UA-cam ist, auch wenn ich Englisch absolut nicht leiden kann. Wünsche noch einen schönen Tag! :)
Well Mädchen is actually a special form of the word Magd, which is still female. If you put a 'chen' at the end of a word it will always be neutrum.
Stocki Tell that to the Mädchen and she will slap you. ;)
CologneCarter Made my day :'D
CologneCarter well if you want to be funny mädchen is the diminutiv of "Made" like Hund - Hündchen Haus - Häuschen. Made - Mädchen ^^
Stocki In English you have the pair maid (servant) and maiden (young girl, virgin)
die Magd -> das Mägdchen -> das Mädchen
die Maid -> das Maidchen -> das Mädchen
+Morlewen
In german maiden is the plural form of maid
Super useful stuff in here, thanks man
This was very informative and interresting. Thank you. I was very surprised that in English words have also a gender, as I read something like "There was the moon. I saw her pale rays shining through the window."
Speaking of the moon as if it were a women for a poetic effect is OK, but it is not because of grammar. "There was the moon. I saw its pale rays shining through the window," would be fine. An astronomer speaking of the moon as "her" would get strange looks.
The only requirement is to speak of people as male or female. Anything but people would either be OK as "it", such as a male or female animal, or crazy to be anything else but "it," such as a chair.
But their are a very few things that often are spoken of as female, such as a ship. But there is no problem with speaking of a ship as "it."
Kenneth Florek Also, people often refer to their pets as "she" or "he".
@@kennethflorek8532 but gender of objects is only "a poetic effect" primarly everywhere, i think :> Ok, but what is it "princESS, lionESS" in English ?
@@kennethflorek8532 "astronomer speaking of the moon as "her"" - and Englishmen named ships like as "she" :>
@@peterschulze4975 .... but animals... pets... really are have sex/gender. :> if this isn't a big amoeba like as "the pets", of course :>
Super interesting video! I've been always wondering about this
Always fun and interesting stuff here folks!
Any further readings on this? Thank you so much!
The order is this :
Nominativ : der kalte Kaffee
Genitiv : des kalten Kaffees
Dativ: dem kalten Kaffee
Akkusativ : den kalten Kaffee
Just an advise from a German friend of yours who has subscribed your channel..
Thank you mate, go ahead.
You are doing a good job.
Rainer
Rainer Jahn That's how Germans order their cases, but foreigners learning German learn the cases nominative-accusative-genitive-dative. This is how other languages usually order their cases, and it's also how linguists order them.
Actually, it doesn't matter which order you put the cases in. But in this order, the endings are actually easier to learn.
Sorry, bro.
You are right, and I didn't mean any harm.
By the way, did or do you know they have 6 cases in Russian languange and even 7 in Czech .?
In Russian ( pardon, I just have the German keyboard, the German typing---you have explained it very well regarding " SZ - ß",
back to Russian :
there are 6 cases :
SAVOD - FACTORY /FABRIC/FABRIK :
Nominativ : savod
Genitive/genitival : savoda
Dative : savodye
Accusative : savodu
Prepositiv : s savodyem
Instrumental :: o savodye
-------------------------------------------------
In Czech laguage, which is a Slavonic language as well, there exists a " case 7".
When you address, or better to say when you call somebody by his/her name :
Pan --> Sir " ...
Pania --->/Madame/ Miss/Misses
Panie : to Mister/ Misses + NAME
So Genitive can be
"Genitive 1 and Genitive 2", depending on
the context.
Your skills of German language are amazing.
Almost no accent, thats really great.
If I would be able to speak your native language English half as well as you speak my native language German....I'd be happy.
But I shall improve my skills, step by step.
Dear Andrew, I beg your padon for any mistakes in grammar, writing, spelling, and ...whatever....however.
Gimme a chance :-)
Best regards from Germany,
from Bitterfeld-Wolfen ; Saxony Anhalt
Yours sincerely,
Rainer
Russian has six cases and two sub-cases (the animate accusative and the partitive genitive), as well as the remains of a vocative case (e.g. "Bog" = "God", "Bozhe moi" = "Oh my God").
rewboss They have seven as a Russian once explained me detailed.
If it comes to cases, Finnish has 16 of them and 27 less used ones.
1:37 Well, gender means 'category'. It's the same word as 'genre', after all.
Thank you very much! I really appreciated.
Very interesting! Maybe someone could help me find the answer to a related topic: when did the German language develop into one where you mostly can't tell the gender from the word ending? In most romance and most or all slavic languages, you can easily see the gender of a noun.
+TheSandkastenverbot If only....
Question is insegnante (teacher) in Italian feminine or masculine??
What about Davide/Nicola/Simone/Cesare/Gabriele/Silvia and so on ... are these names for female or male ?
I took three years of French and it's just as bad with the genders. Tables, chairs and windows are feminine. Pens are feminine but pencils are male. The nation is the Fatherland. And there is the various forms of verbs for each (4) Throw in the silent "S" that completes some of the forms and that means you must pay close attention to the conversation to know if someone went alone or with a group.
The accents like the Nordic Umlaut are helpful. In French they change the sound of a vowel or tell you whether Du is of or due. The soupcon changes a "C" sound to an "S" sound. And a Dieresis separates "OU" into two separate sounds instead of sounding like "out" or "through"
English needs to add some of these so you can know how to pronounce a word you've never read before.
As a longtime language nerd, I started studying French 7 years after I started Spanish. Even now, some 40+ years later, if I'm uncertain of a noun's gender in French, I'll do a quick mental check in Spanish. Both being Latin derived languages, it _usually_ works.
I once played around with a self-invented conlang where I had 2 genders: active and passive. All animals were [obviously?] active, and plants were mostly passive - exceptions were those like the venus fly trap LOL. To my then teenage mind, a hammer would be active, whilst a nail would be passive.
Without doubt the genders made learning German ( at least for me) much more complicated. Over the years I have asked many people, including linguists, why genders were created and I have never received a convincing explanation. It seems from this post that the answer is that nobody really knows.
If you know the emphasis there is a rule that matches most times. it the first syllable is emphased it's der (masculin), if it's the last its die (feminine) and neither of the syllables are emphased it's das (neutral). And words like Mädchen are belittled (-chen) and always neutral even like fahrzeug (-zeug) are also neutral. There are many not regular rules that say why it's this article, that's because you always hear learn all words individually. Small hint for this technique: the last word of a linked noun sets the article such as das holzfällerhemd (das holz, der holzfäller [der fall], das holzfällerhemd). And because German is full of linked nouns that can be pretty handy...
I'm currently learning German and the gendered articles drive me insane,I already speak Russian, Hebrew and English. Russian doesn't have any articles, and you can easily tell the gender of the objects in both Russian and Hebrew, and Hebrew has even less articles than English, English thankfully doesn't assign gender to non-sentient objects
I suspect it's to help with the rhythym of the language. Noun "X" would sound better if preceded by an adjective with a certain ending. Therefore that noun is ascribed the gender it needs to have for the desired adjectival ending. That's for "new" nouns. For old nouns it's anybody's guess.
very good welsh pronunciation. are you welsh?
Maximum Joy No, but thanks for the complement.
+rewboss
I have an online friend from Wales, and they told me, that there are no grammatical genders in Welsh. I am now confused, since many sources, including this video state that Welsh DOES have grammatical genders. Though I will believe my friend if they say that there are no grammatical genders in Welsh.
Welsh does have grammatical genders. If your friend speaks Welsh, they should know that feminine nouns mutate after the definite article and also cause adjectives to mutate, but masculine nouns don't.
Which means that "the black dog" is "y ci du", but "the black cat" is "y gath ddu".
rewboss
Yeah, I read that on Wikipedia as well (take that as you want).
My favourite examples for my colleagues from all over the world:
- DER Hund
- DIE Katze
- DAS Schwein
^_^
thanks. it was awesome.
I think most of languages have grammatical genders.
but Persian language (known as Farsi)as an Indo-European language hasn't any grammatical genders at all.
Same for English, which too used to have grammatical gender but lost them a while back
Good for Farsi!
More often then not specific grammatical genders are connected to phonetics. While adding some human gender characteristics to nouns doesn't make much sense, it works like a charm if you look how things are (were) pronounce. It's very easy to see that in slavic languages.
Spannend wird es, wenn das Geschlecht die Bedeutung eines Substantivs ändert:
der Leiter, die Leiter
der Teil, das Teil
die Band, der Band, das Band
der See, die See
@☢Kalle🚀 Wird aber in der deutschen Sprache verwendet.
In Swedish, we have two grammatical genders, but not Masculine and Feminine.
We have Neutrum and Utrum*, both of which are neutral and completely illogical.
For example, Tram is Utrum (The tram = Spårvagn *-en* ) but Train is Neutrum (The train = Tåg *-et* ).
*Utrum is both Masculine and Feminine, plus a lot of things that should really be Neutrum.
It's actually kind of like the original proto-indo-european system.
We split masc. and fem. up, messed it up some more and then put everything back together.
thesatanic6
Utrum probably has a bit more, but the difference isn't that big (probably something like 3:2).
There are some remnants of masculinum and femininum in Swedish too, but that's mainly in the older generation's speech.
As for how we kept Neutrum, I don't really know. The system is illogical (as many other examples of grammatical genders are too), but it works.
Latin is simpler as you can get the gender by looking at the ending.The nouns ar split into 5 declensions. Which indicate for the most part the gender.There are some slight complexities(such as the1st declensions being feminine but masculine when the noun is a profession such as the "poeta"-poet or "agricola"-farmer.
Jonathan Duffield You cannot tell for 3rd declension vox vocis- feminine, mos moris masculine, tempus temporis- neuter and some 4th declension can fool you: manus manus feminine, usus, usus masculine (usually masculine I think) and 5th declension- res rei- feminine, dies diei masculine (usually feminine)
Ñone of that really explained the origin of genders to me. What purpose is served by dividiing words into categories?
Only purpose it serves today is to trip up foreigners... It's not even completely consistent between dialects of the same language what grammatical gender something has. And it's completely understandable if using the wrong gender anyway.
Very informative, thank you! I knew PIE had to be involved somehow
Why do all people go on and on about Mädchen being neuter? It's a diminutive and they are always neuter in German. Mäd-chen, Männ-chen, Bröt-chen - all neuter, The same goes with other German diminutives, e. g., words ending with -le or -lein,
Martin Stübs That's the point I'm making, though: grammatical genders aren't the same as actual gender. But to somebody who is used to natural gender (the system English uses), the idea that a word that refers to a female is not feminine is quite bizarre, even if you do know the logic behind it.
rewboss You know the diminutive thing of course. My comment was for all those others wondering why Mädchen is neuter. I think a better example for a bizarre gender in German might be "das Weib" the old German word for woman or wife.
"Weib" seems to have beern a very insulting term in the beginning (basically, you used it to call a woman a "c*nt"), and not a proper word to refer to a woman in general. And many insulting terms are neuters in Swedish (probably because it lets a speaker dehumanize and show contempt for another person), so I presume that the same thing happens in German. So there is a story behind that word too.
Danke.
Jerrychen.
Please research again. I learnt once, the the articles are commented by the vowels in the first syllable. The rules work, but are very difficult and re taught only in linguistics. And I have forgotten them. :-(
Ovis equusque...
🤔 That didn't change a lot apparently.
The gendered noun that always amused me was la barba. Also the few words that ended in -a but were still masculine. I can't remember any words ending in -o that were feminine but I could be misgendering things in my memory.
Also:
la modelo, la testigo (when referring specifically to women)
la foto, la moto, la radio (but these are abbreviations that have simply become standard- few people say the whole words- la fotografía, la motocicleta, la radiodifusora)
thanks
We have three grammatical genders in greek too!
Most linguist propose that gender has to do with grouping things together. Most of aborignal language do these. Theres a book about this called "Women, Fire an Dangerous Things" because in some of these languages the three things have the same gramatical gender. You can see the logic behind it: We have women and men, and all things that have something to do with women have the "women-gender" and the things that have something to do with men have the "men-gender". Women prepare food and therefor use fire which is than grouped in the women-gender, but fire is als dangerous so all dangerous things have the "women-gender". There also genders that group together gods, planets and sureal things.
But for the indogermanic languages such a system is highly impossible to reconstruct.
We still have classification for animate/inanimate (very important for cases) alongside grammatical gender. So theory that it was changed one into another seems wrong to me.
So, when you cut down a tree, in one langzage it turns from living to not living thing?
In Czech, we still have this concept at masculine gender. But by dying or cutting down, nothing changes. As my teacher at elementary school said: "Even a dead rabbit is living in the language!".
Took way too long to get to a very brief theory
Zu Deiner Deklinationstabelle bei etwa 01:25 hätte ich ein Frage, die Du mir vllt. beantworten kannst: Wieso werden die Kasus in modernen "Sprachlehrwerken" in der Reihenfolge Nominativ, Akkusativ, Genitiv und Dativ angeordnet, obgleich der Genitiv doch der *2. Fall* ist? (Ergo: Nom., Gen., Dat., Akk.)
Zwar sehe ich traurig berührt ein, dass die Nutzung des Genitivs mehr und mehr verschwindet, doch sollte bei einer - vom Lateinischen so beeinflussten (wenn auch nicht romanischen) - Grammatik die "klassische Reihenfolge" nicht eher sinnvoll zu lernen sein?
Just askin' ;-)
+erm0n Es gibt eine Hierarchie der Fälle: Nominativ, Akkusativ/Ergativ, Genitiv, Dativ, Lokativ/Präpositional, Ablativ, Instrumental, Vokativ. In den meisten indoeuropäischen Sprachen (aber nicht in allen), wenn bestimmte Fälle fehlen, sind es die, die unten in der Hierarchie stehen. Das heißt, wenn eine Sprache einen Ablativ hat, hat sie meistens auch einen Lokativ bzw. Präpositional; fehlt der Dativ, kann man davon ausgehen, dass auch kein Lokativ vorhanden ist.
In welcher Reihenfolge jede Sprache seine Fälle für sich auflistet, ist eine Sache für die jeweilige Sprache selbst. Ein Sprachwissenschaftler dagegen listet sie meistens so auf, wie ich hier.
+rewboss da magst du recht haben, aber es ist dennoch so, dass man im deutschen (vielleicht nur umgangssprachlich, aber doch) die Fälle nummeriert. Daher wär es doch auch sinnvoll, für jemanden, der deutsch lernt, die Fälle in der Reihenfolge ihrer Nummerierung aufzuschreiben
+LesleyVids
klar.
andererseits ist das kein lernvideo. es geht bloß um die historischen ursachen der grammatischen geschlechter.
+rewboss
das mit der hierarchie ist sehr interessant
It is much older than PIE. Masculine and feminine genders appear in the Semitic languages. One rule you run into repeatedly in Europe is that the neuter plural is the same or quite similar to the feminine singular. The Semitic languages must have had a neuter with that rule because Arabic adjectives (so I've heard) pluralize a masculine by changing it to the feminine singular.
The higher unity of Semitic and PIE languages is called Nostratic.
The Nostratic hypothesis is not accepted by most linguists. As far as we call tell, the Semitic languages emerged some time after 4000 BC (Old Akkadian is attested from 2500 BC), while PIE appears to have emerged about 4500 BC.
The neuter plural can be said to resemble the feminine singular in German, but not, for example, in Russian. I'm not sure there's a lot of evidence to support your theory.
@@rewboss das Buch - die Bücher, das Haus - die Häuser. Article in Nominative resembles feminine singular, noun ending resembles rather masculine singular.
облако - облака, яблоко - яблоки, окно - окна, поле - поля. Neuter plural nominative in Russian usually resembles feminine singular, but there are exceptions.
oh wie glücklich ich bin, dass deutsch (schweizerdeutsch) meine Muttersprache ist ;) trotzdem sind manche grammatikalische dinge noch kompliziert wie zB konjuktiv 1 und 2 oder Nebensätze bestimmen, etc..
So the answer to the title question is, "we don't know".
didn't know that... thanks.
It's not only German, but other languages as well.
Interestingly, PIE tree names used to be (fairly uniformly) female, but later formations using _-der_ (the cognate of English _tree)_ or even more recent (and still transparent) coinages in _-baum_ took on a masculin gender. I suppose something like that happened with other categories here and there as well, plus the boundaries of such categories may change.. and presto, you end up with a veritable clusterfüque of genders
In slavic languages majority of tree names are female gender except those which have very hard and stern wood like oak and ash tree.
Those are of masculine gender.
Oh yeah, such a difficult topic for foreigners.
Wanted Adventure brought me here, after 28 years of living in Germany I finally asked myself why our language has genders though unfortunately I still have no idea which rules we follow, I just know a word's gender as if it were second nature, why is it said gender? Who the hell knows.
Yeah, but the term auf Deutsch is „Nomen _Genus.“_ If someone started taking to you about, „Nomen Geschlecht,“ you'd probably wonder why this person thought that sound have sex organs … and then start backing away slowly! 😁
Which is why I think we need to throw out the idiotic term, "grammatical gender," and start calling them what they really are: Noun Classes.
(Or maybe "Noun Categories" is clearer.)
i would think gender in language emerged from the concept of perceiving certain natural (or unnatural) objects, things, etc. as deities. As Gods, like in Greek or Roman Mythology. And as they were personified, they were attributed certain genders.
Weshalb hat Englisch alle gramatische Geschlecht weggeworfen? Das ist wirklich toll. Nachdem ich Deutsch lerne, fühle ich mich, dass Englisch ganz simpel ist.
JIYONG JEONG I assume, that was a phonological process which made it almost impossible for children to acquire the genders of the nouns because the articles became identically. At least this a process which occured in Dutch and Low German, which are more closely related to English than High German. Depending on the region, many speakers of Dutch can't distinguish between masculine and feminine because the article in both cases is "de".
stop dragon *Geschlechter, *lernte ;)
One common theory has to do with the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings, living together in Northern England, got tired of communicating with each other in similar languages but tripping over the differing assigned genders to common nouns. That's a very simplified explanation. Also, with the coming of the Normans, the gender confusion got worse, so eventually, grammatical gender disappeared. Also, "the" made a big difference, too.
just to let you know: the order of the chart of different articles is not in the usually accepted order of nominative, genitive, dativ, accusative
junk mail Nominative, accusative, genitive and dative is the usual order for English-speakers learning any language with a case system. It's also slightly easier to learn, because of the way it puts nominative and accusative next to each other, which allows you to group strong and weak adjective endings; e.g. here: image.slidesharecdn.com/germancaseendingsinaction-100201144857-phpapp01/95/german-case-endings-in-action-16-728.jpg?cb=1265057356
rewboss Interesting that we in Hungary always learnt this in the order Nom, Akk, Dat, Gen.
But as far as I can tell genitive is kind of disappearing from everyday speech, just like it disappeared from Dutch. A lot of times I see people using the von + dat. way of expressing the possessive form.
as i a german i never get the thing with the dativ akkusativ et. when it was teached at school i was ill. but i rember what my french teacher once said about female or male in french he said: every beautiful thing is male, so from that day on i called HIM Miss...
Bantu languages have about a dozen of them, in fact.
That said, this was short but well explained.
Is it just a coincidence? Polish also has a word 'dziewczę' (girl) which is neuter gender for some reason. If I were to guess is has something to do with very rare 'ę' ending that usually indicates neuter gender.
VERY interesting video. The East Asian languages don't even use articles! Everything is neuter unless specified otherwise.
Funfact: In german you write "ich" (I=ich) in small letters and "Sie" (You=Sie) with a capital letter. Could be because of modesty? Maybe? Or just because YOU are more important than I am :D
Just a thougt if anyone knows why they write this like this tell me please ;)
Man kann, man muss aber nicht, auch Du wird manchmal großgeschrieben. ;)
Das hat einfach damit zu tun, weil Namen groß geschrieben werden..
Man schreibt "Sie" in der Höflichkeitsform groß. Also z.B. in Briefen. Aber im Normalfall schreibt man "du", "sie" etc. klein.
ロシアと 日本! Россия и Япония! Aber warum wird dann "ich" kleingeschrieben?
Some Weird Hocotatian Echt? Ich dachte das war nur bei Du ^^ Naja könnte aber auch hier mit Höflichkeit zu tun haben, dass man dann den Gegenüber mit großen Buchstaben anspricht :D
Fabimann Baalmann Wegen Höfflichkeit? ;)
Ehrlich gesagt keine Ahnung..
2:11 who says that the people back then had a name for their language ---- usually that speakers of a language have a name of it is a luxury and usually geographic terms are still quite exploited for that ....... as "platt" (flat) is abused to mean actually nearly extinct versions of language(s) spoken in Northern Germany
In der Grammatik wird doch generell zwischen Genus und Sexus unterschieden.
Also Sexus ist das "wahre" Geschlecht, Genus das grammtische Geschlecht.
Und gibt es das nicht auch im Lateinischen, dass ein Wort in Genus und Sexus nicht übereinstimmt!?
TheBierschorle Als grammatische Kategorie kenne ich den Ausdruck "Sexus" nicht, sondern nur "natürliches Geschlecht", wobei das im Deutschen nur eine semantische Frage ist (ein Mädchen ist eben tatsächlich weiblich und ein Männchen männlich). Im Lateinischen hat es aber auch eine grammatische Bedeutung, sobald Adjektive oder Pronomina hinzutreten.So muss es "poeta laureatus" und nicht "laureata" heißen, obwohl "poeta" selbst wie ein Feminum dekliniert wird.Im Deutschen kann man zwar zur Not noch sagen "Ich sah ein Mädchen. Sie war hübsch", aber "Ich sah eine hübsche Mädchen" wäre definitiv falsch, denn die Deklination folgt ganz dem grammatischen Geschlecht.
+TheBierschorle Ja, z.B. "manus" obwohl die u-Deklination sonst für maskulin steht. Hast recht
When I first started learning German I tried to think of a reason why a word would have a certain gender. For example I'd hypothesize that "wurst" was die because a sausage looks like a penis and , because it's bad enough for a man to eat a sausage, naming it a she-sausage made it less gay.
yeah, no...It didn't work out.
Hey rewboss! What do you think about the debate about gendering German language like RadlerInnen, Radler*innen or Radler_innen. I read it more frequently the last few years and would like to hear your opinion on it.
I studied basic German in school but unfortunately when we learned words we were never really taught which genders belonged to which nouns. I guess it would be more beneficial to learn "die Katze" rather than just "Katze". Because there's seemingly no logic to it I kind of just said "d'..." when I didn't know the gender and hope no one noticed. Maybe in the next spelling reform they should do away with genders and just start everything with a d; d'Katze, d'Hund, und d'Meerchweinchen.
That's what happend in Swedish also works for many North German Dialects. Because "der" is often shortend to "de" and "die" can also be reduced to "de". In Swedish the process is complete, leaving only animate and inanimate genders.
Das Buch "Der Genitiv ist dem Dativ sein tot" hat ein sehr interessantes und lustiges Kapitel das sich mit Wortgeschlechtern befasst. Kann ich nur empfehlen. Also das ganze Buch. Nicht nur das Kapitel ^^. Vielleicht sogar das Hörbuch. Es ist großartig gelesen.
Also, ich habe immer, „Nomen _Genus,“_ in Grammatikbücher gelesen. „Geschlecht,“ impliziert Sexorganen … wie können Wörter ein Penis oder eine Vagina haben?!?!?!?
Auf English, linguists call them, "noun classes," most of the time, anyways.
@@John_Weiss Geschlecht impliziert nichts der gleichen. Noch nicht einmal eine adelige Ahnenreihe.
@@baronsengir187 Also, bin selbst LGBT und verstehe doch das Geschlechtsspektrum. Wusste aber nicht von der Bedeutungen unter dem Begriff „Abstammung“.
Also dann, erweiterte ich meine vorige Äußerung: ein Wort hat keine Sexorganen, keine Ahnenreihe, und keine biologische begründete soziale Rollen. 😋😉
Das Wort, daß „grammatikalische Kategorie beim Nomen“ heißt, ist *Genus*.
Only German textbooks written for English speaking learners of German use, "grammatical gender," and a literal translation thereof. Und _das_ ist, was mich nervt, weil es für Englisch-muttersprachliche Lerner europäische Fremdsprache sehr verwirrend ist.
@@John_Weiss Es ist nur verwirrend wenn man Worten mehr Bedeutung beimisst als sie haben.
I've noticed how words for Boy/Der Junge, Girl/Das Mädchen, Woman/Frau seem to vary a lot between the related languages I am familiar with, while Man/Der Mann is conserved.
It's called euphemism treatmill. For marginalized groups the words change fast. Look how fast it went from Negro (still used by Martin Luther King), to Black Person and Person of Colour.
It's the same thing with words for women. In the middle ages, the German word for woman was "wib", but nowadays "Weib" is a swear word. Wereas the the word for high ranking woman was "frouwe", whereas "Frau" today ist the standard word. Same thing, the word for girl. Which used to be "dirn" (and still is in some German dialects), but nowadas "Dirne" is a whore.
So for marginalized groups the words change quickly.
Pomp31us But what about the lost male form of frouwe, fro?
In my study we have used the political incorrect form "indo-german". My professor justfied that, not all european languages have are indo(-german) root (for example the etruscan l. or the basque l.).
So maybe the form "indo-european" is a politically correct form?
+Thomas Buschhardt Supposedly it represents the North and South extremes, I think every other language now uses Indo European
There are more language branches than just the Indo-Iranian branches and the Germanic branch, you know… 😉
So, no, not political correctness, but factual and accurate terminology.
War da ein Übersetzer im Einsatz beim Russischem? ;)
Auch da ist sowas ähnliches vorhanden, bloß nicht so nervig.
Bsp:
Какая(was für eine-weiblich)
Какой(Was für ein-männlich)
Wir haben spezielle Wörter die entweder Mann, Frau oder es ansprechen, so ähnlich wie im Deutschen mit z.b
Diese, dieser, dieses...
My hypothesis is that ancient religions were animist, such that objects were perceived to have gender (according to custom).
Just as a modern child might think of an inanimate teddy bear or GI Joe as a he, or a Barbie or Raggedy Ann doll as a she, ancient proto-Germans thought of a solid table as a he.
My guess about Mädchen (maiden / girl) being neuter (das Mädchen) is that patriarchal proto-Germans didn’t think of girls as feminine, as they hadn’t matured and developed yet, and were viewed more as tomboys (a term which also implies non-feminine gender).
Why not the same for boys, who have masculine gender? (der Junge instead of das Junge)
Patriarchal double standard.
"Man is male, woman is clearly female"
7 years later, not anymore my friend
Well, transgender still is men and women, and non-binaries have other nouns to describe them, such as humans.
Yay! You pronounce the Welsh ll correctly: excellent!! On the actual subject of the video, also excellent, though I came to the conclusion long ago that there are English-speakers who have a real blind spot about grammatical gender, and simply cannot grasp that GENDER just isn't the same thing as SEX, and never was.
G'day, Andrew! Among the "rules" of the German language I learnt whilst in grammar and high school and later, university, is the use of the polite v. familiar form of address. It was polite for superiors, elders, or people you don't know who are in professional positions and to whom you are being introduced, z.B., "Es freut mich Ihnen kennen zu lernen, Herr Professor." Familiar was for peers, friends, and those younger than you. Very well! Until I started reading words in hymns and portions of the Luther Bibel and found that God/Jesus is addressed in the familiar, not the formal or polite that I would have expected. Are you familiar at all with this and, if so, would you happen to know a reason for it? I really enjoy your videos and your sense of humour.
The Bible is translated from Old Testament Hebrew and Aramaic and New Testament Greek, and these languages didn't have "polite forms" for "you". Also, from a theological perspective, you're supposed to have a close personal relationship with God/Jesus -- at one point Jesus literally says people should call God "dad".
Basically, familiars form are actually the standard, and polite forms are special cases. Not the other way around.
@@rewboss Thank you, Andrew! I had sort of an idea about the reason being that we are to have a close personal relationship with God/Jesus and, yes, cry "Abba, Father" to Him. Thanks for confirming. God bless you.
The sound doesn't work for me on this one. I guess I'll try to read the subtitles.
le pont is actually masculine...
Unter faql.de/pc.html gibt es ein paar schöne Abhandlungen über »Gender-Probleme« der deutschen Sprache: Quintessenz: »Genus und Sexus haben in der deutschen Sprache miteinander wenig zu tun.«
Martin Steindl Gelernt hätte ich das ja schon mindestens einmal; insgesamt hatte ich etwas über 9 Jahre Englischunterricht. Das Problem ist nur, daſs das mittlerweile 15 Jahre (und länger) her ist, und das große Sprachgenie war ich eigentlich auch noch nie… ;)
Martin Steindl Genau! Grammatische „Genus“ ist bloß eine Art Klassifizierung, was
auf English “Noun Classes” heißt.
Man könnte diese Wortkategorien sogar, „Löffel“, „Gable“, und „Messer“
nennen. :D Dadurch kann man sexistische Sprache vermeiden.
[P.S.: Ich bin Amerikaner, hab' aber Germanistik an der Uni
studiert.]
John Weiss …aber aus irgendwelchen »unerfindlichen Gründen« hat man diese Wortkategorien quasi »Vater«, »Mutter« und »Kind« getauft…
Es ist manchmal zum davonlaufen, welch' unsexistische Sprachkonstrukte deswegen manchmal konstruiert werden. Ich hab' echt nichts gegen Gleichberechtigung, im Gegenteil; aber was mit dieser „gender-gerechten“ Sprache manchmal für Satz-»Konstruktionen« geschrieben werden ist einfach unleserlich. Mit dieser Meinung bin ich (Elektrotechnik-Ingenieur) nicht allein; meine Schwester (Informatikerin) sieht das ähnlich (»…ich fühl' mich auch mit ›Studenten‹ angesprochen…«). Sie hat ihrer besten Freundin (gelernte Erziehering - studiert(e) irgendwas mit Soz-Päd) sowohl die Batchelor- als auch die Master-Arbeit korrekturgelesen. Wenn Sie (die Freundin) nicht schon im Vorwort den Satz bringt, daſs mit »-en« sowohl Männlein, Weiblein und »Wasweisichnichtnoch« gemeint sind, kriegt diese sofort eine Note schlechter…
Und das schönste an der ganzen Sache ist: Dieses »Problemchen« ist selbst eingefleischten, englischsprachigen Feministinnen nicht zu erklären. ^^°
But now I have seen it on the internet, so it must be true 🤣
So people used to spoke simple and logical language. Then decided to fuck it up and now it's bit harder.
I may be barking up the wrong tree but I'm pretty sure grammatical genders are not that arbitrary. From my extremely limited knowledge of German I remember that when using the word "it" to describe a noun you use either er, sie or es depending on the gender so obviously its not just randomly calling something a gender for the sake of categorisation, the nouns have a gender innately; also I remember watching a program in which a linguist claimed that people use different attributes for nouns depending on the gender used for that noun in their language. They will give more stereotypically masculine adjectives to objects if they are in the masculine gender in that language and vice versa.
Saxo Ungrammaticus What you say is mostly true, but irrelevant to this video. Of course you use the correct pronoun to reflect the gender of the thing you're talking about: if a thing is feminine, you use the feminine pronoun. That's the same in all European languages with grammatical gender.
It's hard to make the case that nouns have "innate" grammar, though. For example, "das Haus" ("the house") is neuter, while "die Wohnung" ("the apartment") is feminine. The word for "house" is neuter in German, masculine in Russian ("dom") and feminine in French ("la maison"). In German, most nouns ending in "-er" are masculine, but "Butter" is feminine in most dialects and masculine in a few; "Blog" (borrowed from English) used to be masculine for most speakers, but is now predominantly neuter. And most famously, "die Sache" ("the thing") is feminine, while "das Weib" (an old-fashioned word for "the woman") is neuter.
rewboss Sorry I got confused, thanks for the reply though; innate was the wrong word to use. I think I was reacting to the comment by John Weiss on this page which claimed we shouldn't call them genders but noun classes. However speakers recognise the fact that nouns have genders by using the different genders of pronoun to correspond to them. In other words it was not because 19th century linguists were sexist and they were just putting them into arbitrary categories. Of course the gender of the noun is completely arbitrary in the language, I recognise that. I think the program was trying to say that arbitrary genders in languages change the way those speakers think about the object. Here is an short website which explains what I was attempting to say in a clearer less garbled way.
www.mpi.nl/q-a/questions-and-answers/how-do-gender-articles-affect-cognition
Anyway I suspect I'm way out of my depth talking about this but I was a little confused. Thanks again for the reply and the videos.
+His Most Gracious Excellency Saxo Ungrammaticus I Actually, “noun classes” is the linguistic term used when describing non-Indo-European languages. But for any Indo-European language, we start talking about, “grammatical gender,” instead.
My guess is that we use the term, “grammatical gender,” when referring to European languages because we've always used the term, “grammatical gender,” when referring to European languages. ;) The names we give those, “grammatical genders,” are likewise a matter of tradition.
Either way, the, “grammatical genders,” of the Indo-European language family and the, “noun classes,” of other languages are really All Just the Same Thing.
The other purpose of my comments are, really, to help my fellow native-English-speakers. When the new student of German [or French, or Spanish], first hears “Nouns have Gender,” they think that the Germans, French, Spanish, etc. are all nuts. If, in my first-year German class, our teacher had told us, “German grammar organizes Nouns into 3 Categories,” all of us 13-year-olds would've thought, “Well, that's odd. But, okay, it's a foreign language.” Likewise, it would've made *far* more sense had someone told us, “German doesn't have *a* word for, ‘it’ … it has *three*.” Because, really, the word „es“ means, “‘he’ or ‘she’ or ‘it’,” while the best translation of „er“ is, “anything but ‘she’,” and likewise „sie“ is, “anything but ‘he’.”
Yes, it's slightly more complicated, but makes far more sense to a native English speaker than talking about Manly Computers and Feminine Bananas.
Deutsch: Die Rhone - French: Le Rhône - English: The Rhône; Deutsch: Die Donau - French: Le Danube - English: The Danube
The locals living by the upper part of the Rhone call it der Rotten.
I'm so glad English got rid of grammatical gender, at least for the sakes of those trying to learn it as a non-native speaker. I'm studying Spanish and I have enough trouble with just masculine and feminine nouns.
Very easy. Take the habbit to alwas memorise word with the accompanying article. tree- der Baum. In Latin languages this is a bit trickier with words starting in vowels memorise with a regular adjective: tree -- l'albero bello, should work in spanisch as well.
Thankfully my native language does not have grammatical gender :-)
Ok, so can someone please explain this to me:
1) Der Löffel - The Spoon = masculine
2) Die Gabel - The Fork = feminine
3) Das Messer - The Knife = neuter
A spoon married a fork heterosexually and they had a baby knife, that is why the knife is between the spoon and the fork.
NADG charts gave me nightmares. And they say Hungarian is hard! 😉
great video!
_mädchen_ is a diminutiv. like _häuschen_ , _hündchen_ , _männchen_ and _weibchen_ . diminuitives are always neutre: das *chen oder das *lein.
A nice explanation on how the words in German got their gender is the story about the "Wipp-Wapp-Häuser", a story for children by James Krüss from the book "Mein Urgroßvater und ich". www.amazon.de/dp/3789140430/
I have been living in Brazil for the last twelveyears now and i am still struggling with the grammatical genders of the Portuguese language i thought for some time theat the word ending is a general indicator ( words ending on "a" are female and words ending on "e" are male) but that is not the case. I even found that thigs can even change their gender like e.g. a door which is a porta(F) but if it becomes a big ddoor lik a portal it becomes "o portao(M).
regarding German I would like to add that the grammatical gender can be quite important regarding words that exist twice in different genders e.g. der Schild (the shield) or das Schild(the sign, placard). Particulary directed to East Germans Das Plastik(Kunststoff) ( plastics), and "die Plastik(Kunstwerk)"which is a piece of art, and no reason to call "Plasik" " Plaste"
nemo nilnada I don't know Portuguese, but aren't "porta" and "portao" simply different words? Or could it be an augmentative (the opposite of an diminutive) which changes the gender?
the ending ao mostly indicates something big if I would e.g. add a cat flap it would be called a portinha
so as for Romance and Slavic languages you still are not that terrible wrong when words ending in "-a" are female and for the Slavic languages you gotta look on case too except for Bulgarian
hmm wenn ich an einen tisch denke... der baum aus dem der ist wäre nach der logik was lebendes der tisch ist aus holz ist der nun lebend oder unlebend? dann doch lieber was drittes. =D
"Man is clearly male, and woman is clearly female". You can tell this video was created before 2016...
😂😂😂... Please stop
Hello rewboss ,
this is another good like so much other videos by you. I would like to see, if you make a video about the different between "Wörter" and "Worte". I know the different but for your English viewers it could be interesting.
+DJKLProductions the difference between this two are Simpel. Worte (Are Spoaken Words, a person use) and Wörter (are written Words). And Worte are more used when its relied on the meanig of Words someone use (for exampel (deine verletzenden Worte) Your hurtfull words) and Wörter are more used when the Meaning is not so mutch importand but more rational and technical (Du hast die Wörter falsch geschrieben. Your write the Words wrong) But his 2 different Meanings can go mixed up today but usually ist moustly used this ways.
Technically the word girl in English used to be gender-neutral too until around a hundred something years ago
Huh? There has been no grammatical gender in English for hundreds of years. I guess you could say all English nouns are "neuter" because we use the same articles and forms of adjectives with every noun. English doesn't have feminine or masculine versions of "the", for example.
Swedish has the most logical system. In the days of yore it used to have the same three-way masculine/feminine/neuter distinction as German but at some point the masculine/feminine vanished. Now Swedish categorizes nouns into those that are either masculine or feminine (the common gender) and those that are neither (the neuter gender). (I've heard that some Swedish dialects have some vestiges of the masculine/feminine distinction but I don't know any more of that.)
If foreign speakers think German genders and cases are difficult... you should have a look at Latin!
All in all... 5 cases • 3 genders • 2 numeri = 30 possible different forms for adjectives and pronouns. Fortunately SEVERAL are the same!
Just imagine the Latin word 'hic' meaning this (like: this car ):
singular plural
m f n m f n
Nom. hic haec hoc hi hae haec
Gen. huius huius huius horum harum horum
Dat. hui hui hui his his his
Akk. hunc hanc hoc hos has haec
Abl. hoc hac hoc his his his
German has a maximum of: 4 cases • 3 genders + 4 plural forms = 16😉
Nom. dieser diese dieses diese
Gen. dieses dieser dieses dieser
Dat. diesem dieser diesem diesen
Akk. diesen diese dieses diese
Whoever came up with the word "gender" was wrong. It has nothing to do with sex. Type 1 or type 2 or type 3 nouns would be better terms.
When I had to sign a form for my kids in school I could choose between parent one and two. I crossed out the text and wrote Vater. I was tempted to add "no bu...r" My wife managed to prevent me from doing so.