I already knew what he was going to say, I honestly don't know why I watch half his videos. In fact, I actually wrote this reply before he even got to it.
There are only two genders. Dog, and Not-Dog. It's a simple language, but hey, what did you expect from dogs? No but for real, this would be an interesting if simplistic system to use in fantasy or sci-fi, where one race grammatically distinguishes between themselves and everyone else. It would work especially well if the race in question was either supremacist or isolationist or both.
Then there are only two genders: us and them. Actually, if "them" is heavily despised, the race may try hide "them" from their entire language, giving the false impression that the race (I'm trying hard not to offend "the race" by not using "t**m" on t**m) has only one grammatical gender, or rather, has no concept of grammatical gender since you need a minimum of two grammatical genders. Like, how bad could "them" be? Hmm... just uttering the word is punishable by death penalty and complete erasure from every public record in existence. Oh, and your family gets killed and they also get unperson'd. Oh, and everyone you knew gets brainwashed into forgetting your existence. Oh, and the brainwashers have to be brainwashed because the entire governmental body is that paranoid. And the fact that I referred to the unpersoned person's family as "they" was accidental but a consequence of what happens to those who sympathise with "them".
Sounds like someth8g Spartans would have done since they were “at war” with everyone else at all times because they viewed themselves as invaders descendant from a god in a foreign hostile land.
Appreciate you using the English flag for English Artifexian, so many just use the Union Jack without considering all of the Celtic national languages. Kernow bys vyken!
Dog/Cat/Oher sorts things into "it benefits me" "I benefit it" "We are of no benefit to each other" with mutually beneficial things also going in the first category because humans tend to be self centric. This is actually a very logical system and I'm surprised it's never been used.
There is a language (I forgot which one) in which things are divided into three classes: things you eat, things that eat you, and things which can't eat you nor can you eat them)
not really. It only seems like this when you're counting but those are not grammatical numbers. "One river (rzeka, singular)", "2-4 rivers (rzeki, plural)", "5+ rivers (rzek - actually genitivus pluralis form - 5 of rivers)". In all other situations the grammatical forms are just singular or plural. There is also some residual dual number for natural pairs, like eyes and ears.
Huh, that's pretty interesting. I guess you don't need to indicate that there are more than a few of a noun when it literally has 500 in front of it. Btw in Turkish the standard form of the noun can mean both a single or multiple of that noun. So for instance, "Kuş" can mean both "a bird", "the bird", "birds", and "the birds".
I've occasionally considered writing a story involving an alien race whose primary language has a grammatical number for all of something (e.g, all of the trees in the world), one for some of that thing (e.g, just some of the trees, perhaps one forest), and probably a singular form (e.g, just one tree). They would have an idiom for when they didn't want to sell something that would give a reasonable price for it, but using the all-encompassing form of the noun, essentially saying "You can get it for X times the amount of money in the world" instead of "You can get it for X monies". Then, at the start of some tense diplomatic negotiations, a translator accidentally uses the all-encompassing form of the noun in one of their requests (accidentally saying something like "we want you to decommission 50 times as many warships as you have), which those aliens understandably interpret as mockery and an unwillingness to reasonably bargain. They leave in a huff, which the other race (probably humanity) understandably interprets as mockery and an unwillingness to reasonably bargain. Then a war starts/resumes, and my idea of where the plot could go kinda fizzles out.
I think that that is a numbering system, like singular/plural in english, or a case system, not a classifying system A name can take all those forms (you can make a singular word plural and make it genitive with 's), but it will always be on the same class (excluding exceptions).
I would just like to say that this is helping me build both my gaming (dungeons and dragons, pathfinder, starfinder, ect.), and my own person novel. I owe you a big thanks for all of these videos. Keep up the great work!
+Artifexian I can't wait for you to finish your Oa videos, so either you or some of your subscribers can make a lexicon, a wikipedia page, and similar.
I was very very confused because I tried to super-impose my mother tongue's (German) grammatical gender on top of the animate/inanimate system you created. The whole time I was thinking: "Why do all this complicated stuff if I already have grammatical gender?". I love how you then tilted everything on it's head at the end and suddenly it made sense. English does not have strict noun classes but you'll see remnants. I'll try to dissect it (though, it's not my mother tongue). It seems like English seems to work based on whether something animate has a known (societal) gender or sex. If you know an animal's sex it will have a gender. My cat is a "he", because I know he is. All other animals are "it". All inanimate objects are "it" by default except if you give them a name because they are important to you (e.g. ships, cars, computers or bodyparts). There's also this thing where referring to a person as "it" is considered rude even if you don't know their gender - so there are different solutions to that. One is to say "he/she" or "he or she". The other was used just two sentences ago - singular they, which you could argue to be a 4th grammatical gender in English. The other funny thing is: Because English seems to have lost most of it's class system, grammatical gender has little consequence other than pronouns. And I envy you, I envy you so much. I wish German was this easy. In a German sentence about e.g. a teacher, you'll have to gender said teacher on average (what feels like) half a dozen time.
Direwolf202 Although I do not speak any Finno-Ugric language, I know that agglutination is extremely common to describe things that we don't have in English, and I find that quite fascinating. About gender: how important do you think gender is in natural languages? My mother language is Spanish, and throughout all of my time learning German, French, English, and Russian, I've been wondering how necessary gender actually is either semantically, linguistically, grammatically, socially, etc. My best, uninformed guess would be something to do with the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis, but the problem with that is that there is little connection between thought and action you can make once you've associated certain words to these ideas of gender. Russian, in my opinion, has got even easier ways to determine whether a noun is masculine, feminine, or neuter than Spanish. However, I've been battling with assigning gender to words in German and French because they have been strongly ingrained in my train of thought. Of course, because English has no gender system per se, it is much easier and less daunting of a language to learn, but I have yet to find whether or not a Conlang could be made (and sorry for using this subjective term) more interesting even without noun classification. Anyway, I hope I was able to get my point across, since this idea is very hard to explain unambiguously through the Internet
You do compounding in English, as well, though, just not as extensively, and it's usually not reflected in writing: line head line head line article head line article writer head line article writer position And that's pushing it too far already, but the general concept exists in English, and is quite common for compounds of two or three nouns.
varana312 In german, more than three words in a compound are rather rare, too. (Especially in spoken german.) But nothing stops yourself from usong a monsterword like "Ober-weser-dampf-schiff-fahrt" (Normally without the hyphens. But I wanted to show its 5 components.
so i ran with this and started developing a noun class system based on direction. six classes, left = feminine, right = masculine, down = animate, up = inanimate, around = all, center = none. yes, they can be mixed and matched, making for combo-classes. we don't talk about combo-classes. i am barely restraining myself from adding a formality system, for the good of my sanity. (this last part is a reminder to come back to this with the sound stuff)
Hehe, I liked this even though I wasn't surprised about the grammatical gender thing. My language, Danish, has an almost completely arbitrary binary gender system, neuter vs common. It is the ultimate shibboleth as it is not even predictably random, no, no, no, that would be too easy; You are told that it is supposed to work like animate vs inanimate and yes, it does so maybe 40% of the time, but the other 60%...well let's just look at this mess: "Bottle" is the same gender as "Man" and "Dog" (common) Rabbits, mice, hares, rats, beavers, and voles are all common , but a squirrel is neuter...... and finally, our two words for "Pig" have two different genders. "Gris" (common), "Svin" (neuter) And don't even get me started on how we assign gender to new words...
Did Danish once have a 3-gender-system? I know Dutch had but they changed it to a system like the Danish one in the Netherlands, but it's still 3 genders in Belgium. Like Dutch people would refer to milk as "he" but Belgian people would refer to it as "she". In German many animals have a grammatical gender. Like all cats are feminine, unless you specifically state that it's a tomcat. And all dogs are masculine unless you specifically state that it's a female dog.
Judith L Yes. If I am not mistaken, it's exactly the same process of masculine and feminine converging. The difference is that Danish had this happen during the 14th century and Dutch is still going through the process. Swedish has a similar system, though it still has vestiges of the old three gender system. I should also mention that not all dialects of the Nordic languages have the same gender system. For instance, in "standard" Norwegian they still have three genders, while some dialects have only two. The most extreme example must be West Jutlandic dialects of Danish, which have a universal article for all nouns, definite or not ("Æ"), while all other dialects have articles for indefinite nouns and postpositions for definite ones.
Ranâ Onety I would be interested to hear what those three grammatical genders were in Swedish as I am from Sweden and have never heard anything about them.
Artifexian, How did you determine what languages have “sex based” grammatical gender as Swedish only has two neutral genders like Ranâ Onety said about Danish?
In Japanese, 'to be' has one word for animate and a different one for inanimate things, but nouns don't change anything about themselves or agree with other verbs, and some words, like 'robot', can be used with either verb
I remember the class gave a hard time to our Japanese teacher on what is and what is not animate, or a thing that moves by itself, as commonly put. Can't remember what he answered, but the edge cases were like does a car move by itself? How about a self-driving car? A corpse? A zombie? A rock rolling down a slope?
srjskam Although most things are known on whether to say 居る iru (animate be) or 有る aru (inanimate be), the distinction is also for living ＝ iru and non-living = aru, not just animate (a car may be animate if it drives itself, however it is not alive, it is still a car, so would be refered by 有る for inanimate. It is the same for a moving rock, it would be 有る for non-living. I think the Zombie would be iru, not aru. Besides, they woukd be refered to by what they are doing most of the time instead, like 車はそこに運転している "the car is driving there". Although iru is used here but only to make the verb drive into continuous present, it wouldn't be correct to use aru Japanese also has a true abstract equivalent for the word "thing". What I mean is, while something like taberu *mono* means Food or more literally Edible things, taberu *koto* means The matter of Eating/Act of eating (but is literally neither Matter nor Act). The phrase really just means "Eating", not as the continuous present tense, but in the sense "Eating is necessary for life" not "He is eating". Koto broadly refers to both to an action or idea depending on the decriptor applied to it
8:00 one of my favorite quirks learning French is that pets (dog, chien; cat, chat) have fixed grammatical gender, but in Spanish (dog, perro/a; cat, gato/a) they match the sex of the animal.
This is most certainly a late response, but I figured I'd inform you of this since I am also learning french. French does actually have different forms for an animal with a different sex, it is just a tiny bit more difficult than the obvious spanish o to a change. Chien vs chienne and chat vs chatte per your examples.
I think the reason why corn is seen as a collective is because when corn is harvested it is an ear of corn whereas with peas they are in a pod but when the pod is opened the peas are seperate, you don't open up an ear of corn and see seperate 'corns'. Don't quote me on this though!
no, definitely not. Decent guess though. It's probably actually because "corn" used to be a generic term for any grain (as it is indeed still used sometimes in England). Although the word is now mostly used to refer to maize, it is still treated as uncountable.
Corn: it's because it has many corn kernels on the cob. A pea is just out there (except when it's in the pod, which is also a multiple. I'm talking out my ear here but it probably has to do with the time of discovery too.
Yes, "peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, ..." is a hold over from old English before "-s" was fully integrated as the plural construction. Most English speakers today would probably say "pea porridge" just as "corn relish" now that "pea" has become the singular. Also, we don't really have another descriptive word for an individual pea. We don't say "corns" because if we want to refer to only a few, we can say "corn kernels" or "kernels of corn".
Ah yes, the grammatical gender. I was initially thinking how grammatical genders stop at masculine, feminine, and neuter, and how you could go on for animate, inanimate, animal, humanoid, abstract, concrete, and so on. But then you brought up plurals... If it were me, I'd go with no distinction between singular and plural and grammatical gender of concrete, abstract, and humanoid, just to see what would happen.
Ganaram Inukshuk Xhosa used to have Noun Class 1 singular, Noun Class 1 plural, Noun Class 2 singular etc through Noon Class 10 (I think). Then the government decided that Noun Classes should be either singular, or plural, and renamed everything. andikuthetani isixhosa.
Arabic is in love with dual nouns, we even have dual verbs! Example: محمد وخالد شجاعان جداً، فقد قاتلا وحوشاً كثيرة. Muhammad and Khalid brave-(dual) very, as fought(past)-dual monsters many. Muhammad and Khalid are very brave, as they've fought many monsters.
Same with Sanskrit too... मुहम्मद् खालिद् च बहु शूरौ, यतः बहु राक्षसान् अयुध्येताम्। muhammad khālid ca bahu śūrau, yataḥ bahu rākṣasān ayudhyetām. Muhammad Khalid and very brave-(dual), as many monsters fought(past)-dual. Muhammad and Khalid are very brave, as they've fought many monsters.
Your Sanskrit is incorrect - No sandhi applied, words separated when they shouldn't be, English punctuation marks which don't belong in Sanskrit, etc. With sandhi and correct use of Devanagari it should be मुहम्मत्खालिच्चबहुशूरौयतोबहुराक्षसानयुध्येताम् । I haven't checked the accuracy of the translation though.
@@carterwood4197 No, applying Sandhi is not mandatory. I've only seen no spaces in some shlokas or poetry. Almost all the Sanskrit PROSE texts I've read have minimal Sandhi application and DO have spacing. I agree with you on the comma part though.
Only modern editions have removed the sandhi and put spaces in because Western academics are too lazy to read it as it is. It's not correct; it's just a crutch. If you look at any old manuscripts, none of them have spaces and they all have sandhi. You can't treat Sanskrit like modern Indian languages like Hindi or Marathi; many of the sandhi rules are obligatory in Sanskrit, and spaces and punctuation don't work well with sandhi and the devanagari script as they're used in Sanskrit. Also, removing sandhi of those old texts completely changes their pronunciation and therefore messes with the meter around which they're built. I find it so frustrating to read a Sanskrit text and it's littered with Western punctuation that interferes with sandhi (and therefore the way you pronounce the text) and things like that. I wish they would leave the text as it was written.
As well as singular/plural forms, you can have collective/singulative forms - this isn't the same as mass nouns. Collective/singulative systems modify the collective to form the singulative. Take Welsh: 'coed' (trees) coeden (tree) - 'coed' receives the '-en' suffix to make a singular. 'pysgod' (fish(es)) - 'pysgodyn' (fish) 'plant' (children) - 'plentyn' (child) - this example also displays the i-affection of the vowel 'a' > 'e' as a result of the '-yn' suffix. Because trees, fish and children are rarely found singularly.
Thanks for mentioning Basque, it made me really happy! I'm a native Basque speaker, so if you ever need any help or explanation for your videos don't hesitate to contact me! Eskerrik asko!
Swedish does not have sex based grammatical gender as opposed to what is show on the map at 8:12. In swedish the female and male forms converged into one animate form whilest the neuter form was kept, for example: träddet är dött=the tree is dead, han är död=he is dead and hon är död=she is dead. Same goes for norweigan and danish (i think)
A note on the Mandarin side, as I'm learning the language myself; 'ge' is more or less a general catch-all term, which can be used for counting anything, even if those things have their own classifiers. However, you should avoid using it for counting adults or people in general, as that's considered rude; rather you should use wei4 位 ("way", fourth tone).
The correlation of the word 'gender' with biological sex is a recent development anyway. As it happens, Grammatical gender is the origin of the term, and biological 'gender' came after the fact. (and gender as a cultural construct and/or description of the social element of sex is an even more recent development - but only relatively speaking. gender as cultural is about 70 years old. Gender as a sex synonym is about 150 years old. Gender as a purely grammatical concept is quite a bit older than either of these.)
YES! I tire of the unfortunate conflation of grammatical gender with sociocultural gender. That's just not what grammatical gender is, nor how it works! A much better way to accommodate various socicultural genders or gender identities is to have a very large set of pronouns or pronominal nouns which refer to each gender identity. That might seem a bit cumbersome, but it's far better than trying to have a grammatical gender system which forces unwieldy amounts of agreement morphology with such large numbers of sociocultural genders. Being able to represent different gender identities is fine, but please don't create a messy agreement system, when a simple non-gender language or animate-inanimate split would still easily accommodate.
@@tiskolin I'm not sure if two sands makes sense. The one that did make sense was "two TYPES of sand", oop, needed the word 'type'. Otherwise there's no specification on whether it is a grain or pile.
This kinda reminds me of an idea I had for a conlang, which gave nouns genders, but instead of "all bridges are male and all keys are female" the attached gender changes what something is so a bridgaa (female bridge) might be one that crosses water while a bridgou (male bridge) crosses land (and might be better translated as viaduct or overpass); while Keyou means a key used on architecture, like gates and doors, while keyaa are for containers like boxes or lockers.
The conlang I'm currently working on uses a class system based on celestial bodies: i.e. solar, lunar, and stellar classes for nouns. For example the solar motion of an arrow refers to how fast it moves (velocity), while the lunar motion refers to how fast it spins (angular velocity). I was having some difficulty with the stellar class, but this video helped me realize that stellar nouns are mass nouns (for the most part).
So a while ago I had an idea - what if there were a language where gender was assigned based on occupation rather than on sex? I tried explaining the idea to my sister and she is *so * stuck on the gender=sex thought pattern that she just could not comprehend what I was trying to describe. I imagine you similarly confused a lot of people with this video :D Basically - binary "gender" in language, similar to present-day American English, e.g. he/her, his/hers, etc, but truck drivers are always he/him, and scientists are always she/her, regardless of the physiology of their anatomy. You could describe one person by saying "He drives a truck during the day but when it comes home she cooks dinner". It's a neat idea I like toying with in my head, but I'm pretty sure nobody I describe it to would get it. (Unless they already speak a language that uses a similar type of grammatical gender.)
Some time ago, I read an interesting article about the gender system of European languages (masculine, feminine, neuter): it's actually derived from a system involving to noun classes: nouns that could act, and ones that couldn't. The latter category also involved groups of people for some reason (like "team"), and the feminine gender evolved out of the plural of this category. The animate class became masculine and the inanimate class became neuter. This is why masculine and neutral nouns in Latin are very similar in singular (o-declination), while feminine nouns are similar to the neutral plural (both are formed with -a). Also, the nominative and accusative cases of neuter are always identical, because the inanimate nouns originally didn't need a nominative because they couldn't be the subject of a sentence. Traces of this can even be seen in modern German.
Danish actually comes close to the animate/inanimate system, but it's a bit more subtle than that. Allegedly it started similar to the German M/F/N system, but over time M and F merged into one common "gender", so the nouns are still gendered, they're just referred to by "fælleskøn" (common gender) and "intetkøn" (no gender/neuter). Examples of why it's not quite an animate/inanimate system, comes from the applications of the genders: "child" is neuter (et barn), but "phone" is common (en telefon), similarly "human" is neuter (et menneske), while "person" is common (en person). The use of the genders determines how the words change. The indefinite articles (en/et) are suffixed onto the noun when definite. So "et hus" (a house) becomes "huset" (the house) and "en telefon" (a phone) becomes "telefonen" (the phone). The genders have no other use in the language, however. They do not change any of the verbs or adjectives in a word. The only thing they really affect, is how the noun behaves when glued together with other nouns, the last noun retains the gender. So for example, "the aluminium can" is "aluminiumsdåsen" despite the fact that aluminium is neuter, while can is common. TL;DR language is weird, and the gender system can be applied very limitedly
In my language Azûlara for a story I am writing, I use this mindset for the verbs. For instance: The dog slept; which is: Ríka zuianadalna. 'Ríka' is dog, 'zuinana' is the pure verb form 'to sleep', 'dal' means a thing is acting the verb in the simple past, and 'na' is saying the thing in the sentence is acting out this particular verb. "I slept" would be "Ní zuianagel." 'Ní' is similar to "na" in the previous sentence but it is saying a person is acting out the verb. Yes, it is not attached to the verb in this one. Depending on what is being talked about, they may not be attached, or used at all! It is in the beginning of the sentence because in this language, you have to articulate what the sentence is about. No sentence will start with a verb, adjective, etc. It has to be a Time (Nay), Place (Ne), Person (Ní), or Thing (Na). As in example: The dog slept there; which is: Mya zuianadalríka. 'Mya' is 'there'. 'Na' is not needed because there is a place determined at the beginning, which places the noun 'dog' with the verb where 'na' would have been. In the hierarchy, places go before things. Nay Ne Ní Na can also be used to be contextual without having to articulate everything, like how in English we say "it" or "that".
I noticed you covered noun class systems in the event that you want to do exclusively mass nouns or mostly mass nouns or etc, but what if your language only uses count nouns?
Just a neat thing I like about English: We need more rooms Vs We need more room Same can be done with all other countable nouns That sport lacks balls Vs That sport lacks ball
@Artifexian, thank you for not making any tired "did you assume my gender" jokes. Not only is it not funny, it wasn't relevant, and you broached the subject professionally. I'm trans, and I find myself wary of any subject that has to do with gender, even in a super loose way like grammatical gender, because it seems to invite assholery.
Thanks, I did try to talk about it objectively. The real test for me will be the pronouns video that I'll need to do at some stage. Fascinating stuff pronouns but a difficult subject to tackle adeptly.
Artifexian correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the whole point of pronoun to take the place of a noun (cause saying all those nouns can really get you down) Can't you remove gender entirely from a pronoun system and just use a hierarchy. (Like pn1,pn2,pn3,pn4 etc.) So a sentence like "The dog went to the park" would link pn1 to dog and pn2 to the park" While a sentence like "At the park there are many dogs" would link pn1 to park and pn2 to dog?
Otto von Bismarck Or it could invite discussion with other trans worldbuilders in the comments. Or... at least make it just feel like a friendlier place to BE trans, and talk with eachother about our experiences writing in gender systems into our worldbuilding/languagemaking without the usual 30 attack helicopter comments in a row (seriously seeing so many people in the comments just... vastly outnumbering any of the usual types. gotta say, its a nice change of pace x) )
Yes; to a degree, Navajo does this. Navajo has at least 4 types of third-person pronominal affixes (source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_grammar#yi-/bi-_Alternation_(Animacy)).
Otto von Bismarck That sounds about right. Conservatives do usually question why anyone would even mention their gender/race because they usually don't understand the context that people of those gender identities/races live in.
I think it would be more accurate to use individuality and collectivity, over individualism and collectivism. The former indicates a mode of quanifying, and the latter refers to specific political ideologies that suggests where we place responsibility, need, duty, moral agency, moral patiency etc. I could be wrong on this one (I'm honestly not 100% sure if collectivity is what I think), but people missuse individualism more often then they use "begs the question" in place of "raises the question". I'm not advocating prescriptivist language here, I think people actually fail to distinguish the concept from the ideology leading to a double-meaning (like materialism both being a metaphysical concept, and a fixation on things).
I'm of the opinion that clickbait the leads to engaging content is ok. But clickbait that leads to a contentless source is not ok. I hope this video is engaging.
I feel partly responsible because I mentioned (tongue in cheek, mind you) inflecting 'dog' -> 'doge' as a missed chance in the previous video's comments.
There's a lot of debate in linguistics as to whether grammatical gender is a form of noun class system. For one, noun class systems tend to be more logical. You can easily predict the class a noun falls into. With gender systems however, the 'class' is arbitrary and must be learned with each word. And like you said, its also true that languages classified as having noun classes have more categories than languages with gender systems. As for how the gender system got its name, honestly its just something grammarians came up with to deduce a pattern as to which nouns fell into which gender. In reality, the genders originated as separate declenations in proto-indo-european. They had three sets of endings, which were originally dictated by what the noun ended in (its believed there was once only one declenation, but sound change resulted in this being split into 3 due to nouns ending in different phonemes). At some point they started to use this for word derivation, by using the ending for a different declenation than the noun normally took. This origin is why you have illogical things like arm being masculine and leg being feminine; they're both descended from the same root, they just used different declenations. I think the Romans were the first to associate the declenations with gender, but don't quote me on that.
My language just uses 3 genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) however, instead of adding an affix depending on which one I want to use, each one of my 20 noun cases inflects the information while I don't have to write as much. Example (absolutive case): ilapa'i (man), āpa'i (woman), apa'i (human). It also has singular (no affix), dual (ti-), and plural (ati-) numbers.
Artifexian Yeah. Though, I just had a couple of ideas to improve it: split inanimate into concrete and abstract in the singular, and have the articles always reflect either masculine, feminine, neuter, concrete, or abstract, even if the dual and plural noun suffixes are merged.
Most Slavic languages have something like this. They have three genders, with an animacy distinction in at least the masculine. Russian has an animacy distinction in the masculine singular and in all genders in the plural (the plural is epicene, unlike some other Slavic languages). Bulgarian and Macedonian are exceptions. The animate/inanimate distinction is in whether the accusative matches the genitive (animate) or nominative (inanimate), but as Bulgarian has lost the accusative, it doesn't distinguish animacy in noun morphology.
I think Pea is different from Corn, is because Peas are eaten individualisitcally. Your fork grabs one pea, or more peas. Corn on the other sand is scooped up, with a spoon you eat a spoonfull of corn. With the fork you eat the pea individually. With a spoon the corn loses its individuality. I gets eaten as a "whole."
This makes my fantasy humans with the grammatical genders of masculine, feminine, and horse much more realistic than I thought, including the later derivative classes M+F, M+H, and F+H.
What about spiritual elements, such as "ka" for fire, "na" for water, "ni" for wind, "ji" for electricity and life, etc. (side note, i nearly typed -"fuck"- instead of "such")
The virgin Tom Scott: “Grammatical gender is just such a stupid concept. All bottles are female? Really? Should I dress it up in a frigging pink apron and give it a rolling pin as well?” The chad Artifexian: “It’s largely down to Eurocentric selection bias that we associate grammatical gender so strongly with biological sex.”
While the video does explicitly state that grammatical gender is different from the way we normally use gender, it, as well as some of the comments, also shows how people usually get it stuck in their heads that gender needs to be tied to sex in order to make sense. Even as someone who knows that gender is a spectrum, it was still interesting to be reminded that gender doesn't need to be tied directly to masculine or feminine concepts in the grammatical sense. Really lovely and informative video as always :>
but gender (the non-grammatical one) is definitely tied to sex, even if it's not strictly male or female in gender, for example transgender is when somebody have a gender that is not their sex due to gender dysphoria, so female gendered male, or a male gendered female Even if you believe that gender is a spectrum, which is in my opinion a stupid idea because the description of spectrum gender sounds much more connected to gender roles which are basically your personality which are definitely social constructs, which makes using the term gender useless when you can get the point across with the word personality, and you can still be a masculine female or a feminine male without changing gender, you have to agree that it at least is tied slightly to biological sex
I think that whether or not someone describes a part of themselves as being their gender, or just a personality trait, depends on the person themselves. To many people these personality traits (Which I assume you mean as in feminine males or masculine females) do in fact mean way more to them than that term would imply, and view it as something fundamental to their identity as a person, hence why many would feel the need to call it a gender. And while I would agree that psychological gender is still tied to sex, that doesn't really apply to people who describe their gender as non-binary, people who don't feel that the simple male or female gender identity applies to them. I feel that people like this have always existed, but only very recently has there been such a huge push to view their identity as valid. Not to mention that it's not exactly helpful to say that someone's identity is stupid or something that they should just use another word for. It's one of those things where if you're not the kind of person who lives with that kind of dysphoria, you're not really going to have the ability to actually feel the same way they do about these concepts. A cis-gendered person can't 100% empathize with a non-binary person, but they can sympathize. And in the long run it really doesn't hurt anyone to just accept that someone they know identifies as something other than their sex. And I'm not even touching the topic of intersex, since that'd turn this into more of a wall of text than this already is! But yeah, I don't wanna turn this into a long winded discussion, especially given the video these comments are attached to, but I hope that at least explains what I meant in a little more detail.
So all feelings, and no facts, I am not calling them stupid, I am calling the concept stupid, those people have always existed, they just didn't have tumblr and other websites telling them it's their gender, and intersex is a really simple concept, some people are born different, not normal, intersex is a genetic defect, they are not less valuable as human lives but the exception doesn't make the rule, they are very rare and most intersex people choose to live as a male or female and hate that people are treating them as a separate sex And I also have no problem with people thinking what they think as long as it doesn't harm anyone, I will never tell somebody that believes those stuff about themselves that they are fake, I would just argue with them about their feelings and if gender really is the right term to describe it, I hate misinformation, especially as someone from a religious background, misinformation may not seem harmful, but it's very much so Also people are getting harmed, look at Canada (where I live) it may not be long before misgendering someone, even if by accident, can lead you to being sued
A few things. First off, being ignorant of the actual studies that have lead and continue to lead modern science into the consensus that gender is a spectrum, doesn't mean those studies and facts don't exist. A quick goggle search will point you to multiple articles which describe, and link to, studies that have delved into the topic. It is far from "just feelings and no facts". Secondly, yes, intersex people are a rare phenomena. No, the vast majority of them don't 'choose' to be 'normal' males or females. Most of the time their parents decide to have their 'not normal' parts surgically removed so that they can continue their lives as a 'normal' male or female. I'm sure most of the time the parents have the best of intentions, but what they effectively do is literally cut out a part of a person's identity without their consent. And again, a simple google search will show you that there's literally only one type of condition that causes health problems in intersex people. Finally, the idea that someone can and will be sued for simply forgetting or assuming someone's personal pronouns is just silly. Sure, as society eventually evolves to recognize alternate genders and pronouns, assuming someone's pronouns can make you seem foolish, but it's hardly cause for lawsuit on it's own. More likely the person would be sued if they actively and methodically tried to make a nonbinary person feel as if their identity is wrong, or if the person also partook in hate speech of a certain gender. Not to sound like a broken record, but searching the bill in question (C-16, since you mentioned Canada) specifically states that gender identity and expression have been added to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act. So essentially, it prohibits hatespeech, not a simple lapse in judgement or mistake in addressing someone using their pronouns. I don't want to sound like I'm mocking you or making you out to be hateful or stupid, but if everything you've said there can be proven wrong with a few simple google search queries, that's just simple ignorance. And no, I'm not going to further explain these because that'd lead to a short novella's worth of typing that I have neither the time, nor care, nor patience to put together for people who would simply say I'm cherry picking my sources, or that I'm just saying there's information out there to cover my ass. Just google these things, and read from the source material. Read the source material instead of biased news articles, and that goes for both sides of the political spectrum. Daily wisdom.
2:26 it is grammatically correct to say "3 people", but the resulting phrase would either sound classical or adjective-like. "三人行必有我师" => classical proverb meaning "when 3(few) people are together, one must be the master", or to put more simply "there must be something to learn from one another". "三人篮球赛" => "3-on-3 basketball match" Compare with: "三个女人一个墟" => modern (Cantonese) proverb meaning roughly "women are naturally chatty when together, like a wet market". Translates directly as "3 (ge) women, one (ge) market."
Interesting video as always Edgar, and especially how it can be a companion to the previous noun case video. Though I imagine that words having multiple suffixes or prefixes might be slightly too junky, especially if the sound flow doesn't feel right for the language. Probably better to have one be prefix-centeic while the other be suffix-based. Of course, that area is simply perfect to throw in a wrench to an otherwise logical conlang just to mess with future linguists down the road.
Right, but you also don't want to use every possible feature in a single conlang. I'm only going through everything to explain things and people can pick the features they like best.
agglutinating languages tend to have lots of affixes (especially suffixes) fusional languages tend to "fuse" affixes for every class combination (not necessarily all)
Artifexian Noted, just commenting my thoughts on those parts of conlang construction, especially in working around ideas on how I might work it out. Now that I think about it, if anyone can answer this, would gender classification of nouns have any environmental and/or social/culture causes that would lead to said language to adopt such features or is it one of those "darn if I knew" answers like the noun case of the previous video. If the latter's the case, then it might as well be just as prudent to go the tabletop rout and just do a dice roll of languages that have gendered nouns or not with modifiers corresponding to the number of speakers at the height of its "popularity". Speaking of which, what is the ratio of grammical gender to non-gendered languages?
For most languages, their gender classification is too far in the past to draw any substantiated conclusions, I think. Like for Indoeuropean languages, PIE probably had an animate-inanimate distinction and the animates later were split into masculine and feminine - but most of the steps in between are not attested in actual languages, we only have a few spotlights, and it doesn't really explain how in modern gendered IE languages that retain the neuter, many inanimate objects are masculine/feminine. We only have the result of millennia of development and change, and it's hard to come to proven conclusions (instead of pure speculation). For a conlang, I'd certainly do something with that, though - why else have gender? ;) For questions like that, the World Atlas of Language Structures is a very useful toy, like so: wals.info/feature/30A#2/25.5/148.4
This is what I'm playing with at the moment. Devised a language where the classes are animate / inanimate / conceptual. Vehicles however are animate. (Plants are animate also because while they don't move they are living). It leads to an interesting concept where inanimate nouns change the verb. Because an inanimate thing has no volition, 'the door fell in' - it didn't fall by itself. Something made it do so. Thus it becomes the object of the sentence, not the subject.
I don't think the distinction is made, but different languages draw the animate inanimate in different places, so it could be drawn where they consider anything below it non-sentient
I have a question for anyone who can help me with it. Doing a conlang where nouns can have one of two forms, and there's agreement with articles, adjectives, etc. The "a form" is meant for people and personified things, while the "o form" is for things and ideas. It sounds a lot like gender, noun class. The catch is that the form is not intrinsic to the noun. This means that "doctor" and "man" use the "a form" most of the time, while "head" and "spider" use the "o form" most of the time. But you could say "the head of the company" in "a form" if you mean the person and not the role, and the same for a spider that you happen to be emotionally attached with. The "o form" could theoretically be used to refer to people in a very disrespectful way. I'm doubting on calling this a gender system because it fails the most important thing: nouns aren't strictly in one category. I just don't know what to call and haven't seen this phenomenon in any language as far as my research has gone.
Oh my gosh it's the man himself! I love your videos, they're very useful and interesting. I've been conlanging for over a year now, and your videos were my main inspiration to get started
I am currently making a language that subdivides mass nouns into finite and infinite nouns. Sometimes a noun has two forms, like how "sea" means "infinite water"
Bosnian has 234 case, along with singular and plural. (-e) ☆ gaelic, arabic, French, Spanish (2 classes ) basque has an extra syllable inserted between noun and postposition for motion with movable things and animates. The immovable don't have it (-ga-)
I can't find any source saying that Bosnian has 234 cases. Where did you get that from? Considering that Bosnian is an IE language it should have no more than 8.
Nah, we have seven cases and three genders. Also, Bosnian, Croatia, Serbian and Montenegrin are basically the same language, we can all communicate perfectly without need for translators, though Serbia and Montenegro use Cyrillic.
I feel like I just realized a LOT contemporary social issues exist in America because we are so aggressivly monolingual. If more americans were polyglots, especially in non-eurpoean languages, maybe we could get over a lot of outdated social norms a little faster.
The gender system had always baffled me in it's existence since secondary school language lessons. Thank's for finally clearing that up for me after all these years. Also, you point about how you can categorise robot as animate and computer as inanimate was really clever. Stuff like that is what makes your channel so interesting, even if I don't worldbuild much on my own
I believe it's because agreement with these two noun classes is different; so like usually adjectives or verbs only need to agree with the noun class, and not worry about plurality, or if they do the plural is treated the same way regardless of class, but in this case, the agreement of adjectives and verbs has a different way of treating plurals for each noun class.
Hmm, interesting. So the plural forms of adjectives and other alignment markers are different based on class, that's all or is there something I am missing? Well, there sure are languages that don't make class distinctions on adjectives etc. in plural, but its hardly unique or a reason to argue they are a separate class in plural when one does. Even most Romance languages do.
I won't pretend to know much about Swahili, but I can imagine a few cases where it'd be an interesting distinction, such as with verb declensions being noticeably different for each class, how case ends up working out, and so on. I do sort of agree tho; it's a strange distinction to make, and I wonder why they're considered to be separate classes. I just don't think it'd be unlikely or impossible for there to be a good reason.
109Rage If Swahili is like Xhosa, then the noun class affects subject concords, object concords, and negation indicators, and hence, the singular/plural indicator. BaNtu: People MNtu: Person And with a change of prefix, “Ntu” enters another class, with a change in meaning, that is related to the concept of “person”.
Good video, but I have to nitpick your map at 8:04. Dutch, Danish, Swedish and a few dialects of Norwegian have non-sex based gender systems. All of these languages used to have three gender masculine/feminine/neuter systems, but at various points they merged the masculine and feminine genders to form a "common" gender, resulting in two gender common/neuter systems.
Time to make vowel patterns for my six noun classes and four numbers! Also, the classes higher in animacy are nominative-accusative, but those lower in animacy are ergative-absolutive.
What with Polish? It has three classifications: masculine, feminine, neuter; animate, inanimite; personal, non-personal. All three or two if inanimite define each noun.
In my conlang, a few things have one suffix, many things have a different suffix, singular things have no suffix, and when the amount is given, you also use no suffix. I did this because any given amount can't be classified into 'many' of 'few' without context.
Peas were discovered(to Europeans) much earlier than corn So maybe people called them peas (a countable name) because they usually encountered them after being taken out of the pod, but when Europeans found the corn in America they probably found people eating it directly from the cob without being separated, so the Europeans didn't think of the grains as individuals That's my theory, but I am not sure of it's accuracy
It's a common property of most (all?) cereals - rye, barley, wheat, etc. are all mass nouns. Beans, peas, lentils, etc. are all countable. So in a rare case of language being consistent, corn being a mass noun makes some kind of sense.
In general for food words, consider how they are harvested and consumed. Peas, beans and berries are picked one at a time, wheat is beaten off the stalk. Milk is hauled out of the barn in a bucket, beef is a relatively generic term for something that comes hundreds of pounds at a time, and steaks come one by one. For everything else, in what quantity or manner is it typically handled? Cars as units, nitrogen in canisters of /stuff/, and hopefully you only need one ledger at a time. Really it's just arbitrary.
The goal I have for my world is that it doesn't have cultural distinctions for sexes. That would logically mean that they wouldn't describe gender in their languages. I haven't yet dipped my foot into conlangs yet, that's one of the only things I have for them so far. Seems like it could work.
This is not necessarily true. It's fine if you don't want to have grammatical gender in your conlang, BUT just because a people does not distinguish sociocultural gender, does not mean that the language would by default have no gender. Grammatical gender is nothing more than an agreement system between nouns and their constituents. The redundancy of the agreement often helps people to have a better idea of what was said in less than ideal conditions. In this regard, the word 'gender' means "sort, type, kind," but nothing else. You could easily have a gender system of animate vs. inanimate. In fact, about a quarter of Earth's languages has this system. And a word meaning "man" could have the same kind of agreement as a word meaning "woman," for instance. You could also base your gender system on something other than sex or animacy. You could have a natural vs supernatural vs artificial gender system, for instance. In that hypothetical language, you could have the sentence "The(NAT) man(NAT) sees a(SNT) comet(SNT) using a(ART) telescope(ART)," where (NAT) is the Natural gender, (SNT) is the Supernatural gender, and (ART) is the Artificial gender. See? Just one possible grammatical gender system which has nothing to do with sex nor sociocultural gender. Like I said, you don't have to have a grammatical gender system, but don't count it out just because the speakers don't abide a sociocultural gender system. Those are two separate things.
Well, it's good to describe the culture of your conpeople, because having that pegged down will definitely help in the long run. It's often the first step to creating a more believable conlang. But I do want to caution that a people's culture is less likely to influence the grammar of a language, than to influence the individual words.
8:00 I'm calling it, there'll be a bunch of cisnormatives yelling "SJW! Snowflake!" in the comments. EDIT: Yeah, after reading the responses I've realised that this was obnoxious of me, and I shouldn't have brought it up considering this video was about grammatical gender. Sorry. I'm not going to try to explain why I decided to say that, because that would feel like scrambling for a justification, so I'll just say that I used to be a self-absorbed asshole and while I'm trying to be better, sometimes I still slip up. Thanks for calling me out. That said, nonbinary gender identities are not "made-up garbage" and while some organisations classify being transgender as a mental illness, the only one I know for sure does that is the AMA, which apparently has been subject to controversy - that doesn't necessarily invalidate their arguments, but it does make them less reliable. Also, while I'm by no means an expert, as far as I can tell that classification is wrong. Also, gender is definitely a social construct, but it DOES exist. In my view, identities exist for one of two reasons: to help us describe ourselves in terms of the people around us (good, helps gain a sense of belonging) or to divide society into groups so that a hierarchy can be enforced (bad, very bad), and gender identity is an example of the former - not only is it real, it's important. Lastly, Elliot Loverin is right, I should have just used the term "transphobes" instead of "cisnormatives". It wouldn't have made my comment any less obnoxious, but it is the better term to use.
so we've got cisnormatives saying that none of them care because it's to do with grammatical gender and then there's a bunch of cisnormatives making original jokes about attack helicopters.
It's actually kind of like Swedish and Danish (and probably Norwegian in the future). They used to have a three-gender system like German, but all the feminine nouns turned into masculine nouns, so now they have animate/inanimate.
I've got 4 noun classes in my language; common which is used for marking inanimate objects, and things that don't incorporate gender (although nouns in this class aren't marked with anything). masculine which in-codes masculine nouns like dad and man. feminine which is like masculine but for feminine nouns like mum and woman. and lastly celestial which is used for marking nouns that exist outside our realm of understanding like gods and stars.
Hello, great video as always! I have a video request. I have been making languages for a while, too. I have been making a natlang to pair with a culture, and I have been thinking a lot about world view lately. You have brought up world view frequently in your latest video, so can you please make a video about how to design a world view? Most people who do not experience other cultures don’t really comprehend HOW the world view of cultures differ from theirs. From my experience world view and mindset is at the foundation of most things. It’d be cool to make a video on what influences world view, what world view really is, and how life and thinking changes based on a person’s world view. I understand if you want to focus on the grammar or nouns or if you have a schedule of videos, but can you please consider? Thanks.
My orcish language currently has about 17 noun classes, 6 of which refer to gender of persons (and none of these are male/female). I'm a little bit struggling to come up with well-sounding suffixes for all of them. :-D Worldbuilding is such a great tool to explore possibilities beyond heteronormativity. It's really a shame that so many people show up in the comment section only to make transphobic "jokes". I'm glad that at least my world-building community is largely free of antifeminist or anti-trans assholes. :-)
Thats a super cool system!!! I remember seeing someones take on gender and sexuality of common fantasy races and how like halfling/hobbits being community focused were very accepting to lgbtq and polyamory and stuff like that and seeing that reflected in a language is thE BEsT ThiNG
What's going on with the map at 8:04? Being a Finn I should know that Finnish isn't a language with a grammatical gender, and is spoken widely in all of Finland. So what do the orange parts in the south and west denote? If they are representations of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, that's accurate enough, but the minorities are rather small to be considered the main language in those areas.
Reminds me of a post that said "what if instead of gender we had pokemon types?"
Would we have different gender marking for dual types?
You dont????
...bionicle
@@i_teleported_bread7404 No, you would just use multiple markers.
Hm, interesting
I'm curious what type i am now-
That is some pro level clickbaiting. It's actually impressive enough that I will in fact applaud you.
Yep.
though technically he didn't lie
I already knew what he was going to say, I honestly don't know why I watch half his videos.
In fact, I actually wrote this reply before he even got to it.
@ThisIsMyRealName yeah i suppose thats also true unforrunatly
This is not clickbaiting this is Master-baiting
There are only two genders. Dog, and Not-Dog.
It's a simple language, but hey, what did you expect from dogs?
No but for real, this would be an interesting if simplistic system to use in fantasy or sci-fi, where one race grammatically distinguishes between themselves and everyone else. It would work especially well if the race in question was either supremacist or isolationist or both.
Then there are only two genders: us and them. Actually, if "them" is heavily despised, the race may try hide "them" from their entire language, giving the false impression that the race (I'm trying hard not to offend "the race" by not using "t**m" on t**m) has only one grammatical gender, or rather, has no concept of grammatical gender since you need a minimum of two grammatical genders.
Like, how bad could "them" be? Hmm... just uttering the word is punishable by death penalty and complete erasure from every public record in existence. Oh, and your family gets killed and they also get unperson'd. Oh, and everyone you knew gets brainwashed into forgetting your existence. Oh, and the brainwashers have to be brainwashed because the entire governmental body is that paranoid. And the fact that I referred to the unpersoned person's family as "they" was accidental but a consequence of what happens to those who sympathise with "them".
doges rool
@@ganaraminukshuk0 So, basically people get legally punished in that society if they misgender somebody. XD
Sounds like someth8g Spartans would have done since they were “at war” with everyone else at all times because they viewed themselves as invaders descendant from a god in a foreign hostile land.
@@tristate0mind Dogu
Appreciate you using the English flag for English Artifexian, so many just use the Union Jack without considering all of the Celtic national languages. Kernow bys vyken!
You thank my podcasting co-host for that edition. :)
Celtic Solidarity!
Cymru am byth!
Alba gu bràth!
@@wasserruebenvergilbungsvirus cheeseburge am bryth
Dog/Cat/Oher sorts things into "it benefits me" "I benefit it" "We are of no benefit to each other" with mutually beneficial things also going in the first category because humans tend to be self centric. This is actually a very logical system and I'm surprised it's never been used.
This is genius
There is a language (I forgot which one) in which things are divided into three classes: things you eat, things that eat you, and things which can't eat you nor can you eat them)
Reminds me of Dyirbal, where one of the four classes includes predatory animals and another of the classes includes edible plants
An interesting case study for plurals is Polish.
It has singular, plural for numbers less than five, and plural for five and above.
Cool.
not really. It only seems like this when you're counting but those are not grammatical numbers. "One river (rzeka, singular)", "2-4 rivers (rzeki, plural)", "5+ rivers (rzek - actually genitivus pluralis form - 5 of rivers)". In all other situations the grammatical forms are just singular or plural. There is also some residual dual number for natural pairs, like eyes and ears.
and with more copmlicated words like doba (day) and its 2 doby and 5 dób and it can sound loke 5 dup (asses)
the same in Slovak
Huh, that's pretty interesting. I guess you don't need to indicate that there are more than a few of a noun when it literally has 500 in front of it.
Btw in Turkish the standard form of the noun can mean both a single or multiple of that noun. So for instance, "Kuş" can mean both "a bird", "the bird", "birds", and "the birds".
I've occasionally considered writing a story involving an alien race whose primary language has a grammatical number for all of something (e.g, all of the trees in the world), one for some of that thing (e.g, just some of the trees, perhaps one forest), and probably a singular form (e.g, just one tree). They would have an idiom for when they didn't want to sell something that would give a reasonable price for it, but using the all-encompassing form of the noun, essentially saying "You can get it for X times the amount of money in the world" instead of "You can get it for X monies".
Then, at the start of some tense diplomatic negotiations, a translator accidentally uses the all-encompassing form of the noun in one of their requests (accidentally saying something like "we want you to decommission 50 times as many warships as you have), which those aliens understandably interpret as mockery and an unwillingness to reasonably bargain. They leave in a huff, which the other race (probably humanity) understandably interprets as mockery and an unwillingness to reasonably bargain. Then a war starts/resumes, and my idea of where the plot could go kinda fizzles out.
Don't you mean one story?
You act like that's super weird but there are human languages that do things like that.
I feel like tat is how like 90% of wars started XD
I think u told the story of the alien and life
I think that that is a numbering system, like singular/plural in english, or a case system, not a classifying system
A name can take all those forms (you can make a singular word plural and make it genitive with 's), but it will always be on the same class (excluding exceptions).
"Dog as a gender? That is a ridiculous idea!", says person whose language treats bridges as female
But, if you are speaking about french, « un pont » is masculine, « une plante » is féminin for a better exemple
@@Feu_Ghost in German bridge is female (Die Brücke).
@@RisingRose my bad, as a French myself, I have think you speak about my strange langage
@@Feu_Ghost haha, all good. languages really are weird lol
Ships and motor vehicles are female in English for some reason
I would just like to say that this is helping me build both my gaming (dungeons and dragons, pathfinder, starfinder, ect.), and my own person novel. I owe you a big thanks for all of these videos. Keep up the great work!
Well do, pal. :)
+Artifexian I can't wait for you to finish your Oa videos, so either you or some of your subscribers can make a lexicon, a wikipedia page, and similar.
+Artifexian Only then I would actually be able to learn it.
+Artifexian lol
What is your world like?
I was very very confused because I tried to super-impose my mother tongue's (German) grammatical gender on top of the animate/inanimate system you created. The whole time I was thinking: "Why do all this complicated stuff if I already have grammatical gender?". I love how you then tilted everything on it's head at the end and suddenly it made sense.
English does not have strict noun classes but you'll see remnants. I'll try to dissect it (though, it's not my mother tongue).
It seems like English seems to work based on whether something animate has a known (societal) gender or sex. If you know an animal's sex it will have a gender. My cat is a "he", because I know he is. All other animals are "it". All inanimate objects are "it" by default except if you give them a name because they are important to you (e.g. ships, cars, computers or bodyparts).
There's also this thing where referring to a person as "it" is considered rude even if you don't know their gender - so there are different solutions to that. One is to say "he/she" or "he or she". The other was used just two sentences ago - singular they, which you could argue to be a 4th grammatical gender in English.
The other funny thing is: Because English seems to have lost most of it's class system, grammatical gender has little consequence other than pronouns. And I envy you, I envy you so much. I wish German was this easy. In a German sentence about e.g. a teacher, you'll have to gender said teacher on average (what feels like) half a dozen time.
THIS.
Direwolf202
That is, because in german you can compound words. The possibillity for Schadenfreude wäre "pain-happyness".
Direwolf202 Although I do not speak any Finno-Ugric language, I know that agglutination is extremely common to describe things that we don't have in English, and I find that quite fascinating.
About gender: how important do you think gender is in natural languages? My mother language is Spanish, and throughout all of my time learning German, French, English, and Russian, I've been wondering how necessary gender actually is either semantically, linguistically, grammatically, socially, etc. My best, uninformed guess would be something to do with the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis, but the problem with that is that there is little connection between thought and action you can make once you've associated certain words to these ideas of gender. Russian, in my opinion, has got even easier ways to determine whether a noun is masculine, feminine, or neuter than Spanish. However, I've been battling with assigning gender to words in German and French because they have been strongly ingrained in my train of thought.
Of course, because English has no gender system per se, it is much easier and less daunting of a language to learn, but I have yet to find whether or not a Conlang could be made (and sorry for using this subjective term) more interesting even without noun classification. Anyway, I hope I was able to get my point across, since this idea is very hard to explain unambiguously through the Internet
You do compounding in English, as well, though, just not as extensively, and it's usually not reflected in writing:
line
head line
head line article
head line article writer
head line article writer position
And that's pushing it too far already, but the general concept exists in English, and is quite common for compounds of two or three nouns.
varana312
In german, more than three words in a compound are rather rare, too. (Especially in spoken german.)
But nothing stops yourself from usong a monsterword like "Ober-weser-dampf-schiff-fahrt" (Normally without the hyphens. But I wanted to show its 5 components.
*Oprah voice:* YOU get a gender! YOU get a gender!
Hahahahahaha
This has aged well and will continue to age better and better
Theə languagə has äи genderиtㅎ systetㅎ
so i ran with this and started developing a noun class system based on direction. six classes, left = feminine, right = masculine, down = animate, up = inanimate, around = all, center = none. yes, they can be mixed and matched, making for combo-classes. we don't talk about combo-classes. i am barely restraining myself from adding a formality system, for the good of my sanity. (this last part is a reminder to come back to this with the sound stuff)
Hehe, I liked this even though I wasn't surprised about the grammatical gender thing. My language, Danish, has an almost completely arbitrary binary gender system, neuter vs common. It is the ultimate shibboleth as it is not even predictably random, no, no, no, that would be too easy; You are told that it is supposed to work like animate vs inanimate and yes, it does so maybe 40% of the time, but the other 60%...well let's just look at this mess:
"Bottle" is the same gender as "Man" and "Dog" (common)
Rabbits, mice, hares, rats, beavers, and voles are all common , but a squirrel is neuter......
and finally, our two words for "Pig" have two different genders. "Gris" (common), "Svin" (neuter)
And don't even get me started on how we assign gender to new words...
Go Dutch. :)
Did Danish once have a 3-gender-system? I know Dutch had but they changed it to a system like the Danish one in the Netherlands, but it's still 3 genders in Belgium. Like Dutch people would refer to milk as "he" but Belgian people would refer to it as "she".
In German many animals have a grammatical gender. Like all cats are feminine, unless you specifically state that it's a tomcat. And all dogs are masculine unless you specifically state that it's a female dog.
Judith L Yes. If I am not mistaken, it's exactly the same process of masculine and feminine converging. The difference is that Danish had this happen during the 14th century and Dutch is still going through the process. Swedish has a similar system, though it still has vestiges of the old three gender system. I should also mention that not all dialects of the Nordic languages have the same gender system. For instance, in "standard" Norwegian they still have three genders, while some dialects have only two. The most extreme example must be West Jutlandic dialects of Danish, which have a universal article for all nouns, definite or not ("Æ"), while all other dialects have articles for indefinite nouns and postpositions for definite ones.
Ranâ Onety I would be interested to hear what those three grammatical genders were in Swedish as I am from Sweden and have never heard anything about them.
Artifexian, How did you determine what languages have “sex based” grammatical gender as Swedish only has two neutral genders like Ranâ Onety said about Danish?
2015: Doge is a meme
2018: Doge is gender
2021: Doge is a currency
2024: doge is a god?
2027: In the beginning there was the word, and the word was Doge
@@penbunny9078 yes
@@penbunny9078 Yes. Yes He is.
In Japanese, 'to be' has one word for animate and a different one for inanimate things, but nouns don't change anything about themselves or agree with other verbs, and some words, like 'robot', can be used with either verb
Cool!
I remember the class gave a hard time to our Japanese teacher on what is and what is not animate, or a thing that moves by itself, as commonly put. Can't remember what he answered, but the edge cases were like does a car move by itself? How about a self-driving car? A corpse? A zombie? A rock rolling down a slope?
A car without its break off on a slope moves by itself.
srjskam a non-self-driving car and a rock are inanimate no matter how they're moving. A zombie is usually animate.
srjskam
Although most things are known on whether to say 居る iru (animate be) or 有る aru (inanimate be), the distinction is also for living ＝ iru and non-living = aru, not just animate (a car may be animate if it drives itself, however it is not alive, it is still a car, so would be refered by 有る for inanimate. It is the same for a moving rock, it would be 有る for non-living. I think the Zombie would be iru, not aru. Besides, they woukd be refered to by what they are doing most of the time instead, like 車はそこに運転している "the car is driving there". Although iru is used here but only to make the verb drive into continuous present, it wouldn't be correct to use aru
Japanese also has a true abstract equivalent for the word "thing". What I mean is, while something like taberu *mono* means Food or more literally Edible things, taberu *koto* means The matter of Eating/Act of eating (but is literally neither Matter nor Act).
The phrase really just means "Eating", not as the continuous present tense, but in the sense "Eating is necessary for life" not "He is eating".
Koto broadly refers to both to an action or idea depending on the decriptor applied to it
8:00 one of my favorite quirks learning French is that pets (dog, chien; cat, chat) have fixed grammatical gender, but in Spanish (dog, perro/a; cat, gato/a) they match the sex of the animal.
This is most certainly a late response, but I figured I'd inform you of this since I am also learning french. French does actually have different forms for an animal with a different sex, it is just a tiny bit more difficult than the obvious spanish o to a change. Chien vs chienne and chat vs chatte per your examples.
4:50
*_m e a t y_* *_t r e e s_*
They look like a slim Jim at times
I think the reason why corn is seen as a collective is because when corn is harvested it is an ear of corn whereas with peas they are in a pod but when the pod is opened the peas are seperate, you don't open up an ear of corn and see seperate 'corns'. Don't quote me on this though!
no, definitely not. Decent guess though.
It's probably actually because "corn" used to be a generic term for any grain (as it is indeed still used sometimes in England). Although the word is now mostly used to refer to maize, it is still treated as uncountable.
"peas" used to be a mass noun, but at some point people began misinterpreting the s as a plural marker.
With the spelling ‘pease’, as fossilized in ‘pease pudding’.
I can see it now. A society with three noun classes
1) human
2) dogs
3) everything else
52flyingbicycles moment
Corn: it's because it has many corn kernels on the cob. A pea is just out there (except when it's in the pod, which is also a multiple. I'm talking out my ear here but it probably has to do with the time of discovery too.
Yes, "peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, ..." is a hold over from old English before "-s" was fully integrated as the plural construction. Most English speakers today would probably say "pea porridge" just as "corn relish" now that "pea" has become the singular. Also, we don't really have another descriptive word for an individual pea. We don't say "corns" because if we want to refer to only a few, we can say "corn kernels" or "kernels of corn".
If "peas" were still a mass noun, we would probably invent something such as "peas seed" to refer to a single one.
Ah yes, the grammatical gender. I was initially thinking how grammatical genders stop at masculine, feminine, and neuter, and how you could go on for animate, inanimate, animal, humanoid, abstract, concrete, and so on.
But then you brought up plurals...
If it were me, I'd go with no distinction between singular and plural and grammatical gender of concrete, abstract, and humanoid, just to see what would happen.
Sounds solid.
Ganaram Inukshuk Xhosa used to have Noun Class 1 singular, Noun Class 1 plural, Noun Class 2 singular etc through Noon Class 10 (I think). Then the government decided that Noun Classes should be either singular, or plural, and renamed everything.
andikuthetani isixhosa.
@@Artifexian Like...
*Concrete?*
3:51
Okay, so Bantha comes under Animals, and your abstract ideas are Fear, Anger, Hate and Suffering? Nice.
Yeah I know I’m late but I was wondering why there wasn’t more comments pointing out the reference!
Arabic is in love with dual nouns, we even have dual verbs!
Example:
محمد وخالد شجاعان جداً، فقد قاتلا وحوشاً كثيرة.
Muhammad and Khalid brave-(dual) very, as fought(past)-dual monsters many.
Muhammad and Khalid are very brave, as they've fought many monsters.
Awesome!
Same with Sanskrit too...
मुहम्मद् खालिद् च बहु शूरौ, यतः बहु राक्षसान् अयुध्येताम्।
muhammad khālid ca bahu śūrau, yataḥ bahu rākṣasān ayudhyetām.
Muhammad Khalid and very brave-(dual), as many monsters fought(past)-dual.
Muhammad and Khalid are very brave, as they've fought many monsters.
Your Sanskrit is incorrect - No sandhi applied, words separated when they shouldn't be, English punctuation marks which don't belong in Sanskrit, etc. With sandhi and correct use of Devanagari it should be मुहम्मत्खालिच्चबहुशूरौयतोबहुराक्षसानयुध्येताम् । I haven't checked the accuracy of the translation though.
@@carterwood4197
No, applying Sandhi is not mandatory. I've only seen no spaces in some shlokas or poetry. Almost all the Sanskrit PROSE texts I've read have minimal Sandhi application and DO have spacing. I agree with you on the comma part though.
Only modern editions have removed the sandhi and put spaces in because Western academics are too lazy to read it as it is. It's not correct; it's just a crutch. If you look at any old manuscripts, none of them have spaces and they all have sandhi. You can't treat Sanskrit like modern Indian languages like Hindi or Marathi; many of the sandhi rules are obligatory in Sanskrit, and spaces and punctuation don't work well with sandhi and the devanagari script as they're used in Sanskrit. Also, removing sandhi of those old texts completely changes their pronunciation and therefore messes with the meter around which they're built. I find it so frustrating to read a Sanskrit text and it's littered with Western punctuation that interferes with sandhi (and therefore the way you pronounce the text) and things like that. I wish they would leave the text as it was written.
As well as singular/plural forms, you can have collective/singulative forms - this isn't the same as mass nouns. Collective/singulative systems modify the collective to form the singulative.
Take Welsh:
'coed' (trees) coeden (tree) - 'coed' receives the '-en' suffix to make a singular.
'pysgod' (fish(es)) - 'pysgodyn' (fish)
'plant' (children) - 'plentyn' (child) - this example also displays the i-affection of the vowel 'a' > 'e' as a result of the '-yn' suffix.
Because trees, fish and children are rarely found singularly.
Cool!
dog is a gender. both in a funky linguistics way and also in a funky identity way
Thanks for mentioning Basque, it made me really happy! I'm a native Basque speaker, so if you ever need any help or explanation for your videos don't hesitate to contact me! Eskerrik asko!
I made a gender system based on honor (honorable and dishonorable)
This is because honor and balance are big parts of the speakers culture
Swedish does not have sex based grammatical gender as opposed to what is show on the map at 8:12. In swedish the female and male forms converged into one animate form whilest the neuter form was kept, for example: träddet är dött=the tree is dead, han är död=he is dead and hon är död=she is dead. Same goes for norweigan and danish (i think)
I pulled that map for a language resource online perhaps it was not the most accurate. I'm sorry.
Completly fine! Did not mean to be rude :)
A note on the Mandarin side, as I'm learning the language myself; 'ge' is more or less a general catch-all term, which can be used for counting anything, even if those things have their own classifiers. However, you should avoid using it for counting adults or people in general, as that's considered rude; rather you should use wei4 位 ("way", fourth tone).
I keep forgetting wei and thought of the (I presume potentially ruder) use of 口 as a counter word for people
The correlation of the word 'gender' with biological sex is a recent development anyway.
As it happens, Grammatical gender is the origin of the term, and biological 'gender' came after the fact. (and gender as a cultural construct and/or description of the social element of sex is an even more recent development - but only relatively speaking. gender as cultural is about 70 years old. Gender as a sex synonym is about 150 years old. Gender as a purely grammatical concept is quite a bit older than either of these.)
YES! I tire of the unfortunate conflation of grammatical gender with sociocultural gender. That's just not what grammatical gender is, nor how it works! A much better way to accommodate various socicultural genders or gender identities is to have a very large set of pronouns or pronominal nouns which refer to each gender identity. That might seem a bit cumbersome, but it's far better than trying to have a grammatical gender system which forces unwieldy amounts of agreement morphology with such large numbers of sociocultural genders. Being able to represent different gender identities is fine, but please don't create a messy agreement system, when a simple non-gender language or animate-inanimate split would still easily accommodate.
KuraIthys Well said man
Sovairu Also well said man
And now I realized I assumed both of your genders… I’m going to get out of here before I start a flame war
@@Myrus_MBG Thank you! Also, I am a man, so it's fine.
1:18 I think the reason for this is that peas used to be a mass noun like corn, but then it go reinterpreted as a plural rather than a mass noun.
I appreciate the Star Wars reference at 3:42
This guy gets it! :)
3:43
FEAR LEADS TO ANGER LEADS TO HATE LEADS TO SUFFERING
0:25 Sand in some cases can actually be a count noun. For example, "the *sands* of time."
How many.
I mean there it is pluralized but it's not exactly "counting"...
@@tldoesntlikebread Say I have two types of sand, red sand and blue sand. I have two sands.
@@tiskolin I'm not sure if two sands makes sense. The one that did make sense was "two TYPES of sand", oop, needed the word 'type'. Otherwise there's no specification on whether it is a grain or pile.
@@tldoesntlikebread True. Using "types" would be more proper, but I think I've used people use it in that way before
This kinda reminds me of an idea I had for a conlang, which gave nouns genders, but instead of "all bridges are male and all keys are female" the attached gender changes what something is so a bridgaa (female bridge) might be one that crosses water while a bridgou (male bridge) crosses land (and might be better translated as viaduct or overpass); while Keyou means a key used on architecture, like gates and doors, while keyaa are for containers like boxes or lockers.
Just noticed the colours of the pattern in your video intro equate to the planets XD
Bingo!
Oh my God your right
Why do you know this??
*:0*
Woah
The conlang I'm currently working on uses a class system based on celestial bodies: i.e. solar, lunar, and stellar classes for nouns. For example the solar motion of an arrow refers to how fast it moves (velocity), while the lunar motion refers to how fast it spins (angular velocity). I was having some difficulty with the stellar class, but this video helped me realize that stellar nouns are mass nouns (for the most part).
So a while ago I had an idea - what if there were a language where gender was assigned based on occupation rather than on sex?
I tried explaining the idea to my sister and she is *so * stuck on the gender=sex thought pattern that she just could not comprehend what I was trying to describe. I imagine you similarly confused a lot of people with this video :D
Basically - binary "gender" in language, similar to present-day American English, e.g. he/her, his/hers, etc, but truck drivers are always he/him, and scientists are always she/her, regardless of the physiology of their anatomy. You could describe one person by saying "He drives a truck during the day but when it comes home she cooks dinner". It's a neat idea I like toying with in my head, but I'm pretty sure nobody I describe it to would get it. (Unless they already speak a language that uses a similar type of grammatical gender.)
i get it, soudns cool
Some time ago, I read an interesting article about the gender system of European languages (masculine, feminine, neuter): it's actually derived from a system involving to noun classes: nouns that could act, and ones that couldn't. The latter category also involved groups of people for some reason (like "team"), and the feminine gender evolved out of the plural of this category. The animate class became masculine and the inanimate class became neuter.
This is why masculine and neutral nouns in Latin are very similar in singular (o-declination), while feminine nouns are similar to the neutral plural (both are formed with -a). Also, the nominative and accusative cases of neuter are always identical, because the inanimate nouns originally didn't need a nominative because they couldn't be the subject of a sentence.
Traces of this can even be seen in modern German.
8:11 Why the areas near Helsinki and Vaasa are orange? They speak Finnish too.
Danish actually comes close to the animate/inanimate system, but it's a bit more subtle than that.
Allegedly it started similar to the German M/F/N system, but over time M and F merged into one common "gender", so the nouns are still gendered, they're just referred to by "fælleskøn" (common gender) and "intetkøn" (no gender/neuter).
Examples of why it's not quite an animate/inanimate system, comes from the applications of the genders:
"child" is neuter (et barn), but "phone" is common (en telefon), similarly "human" is neuter (et menneske), while "person" is common (en person).
The use of the genders determines how the words change.
The indefinite articles (en/et) are suffixed onto the noun when definite. So "et hus" (a house) becomes "huset" (the house) and "en telefon" (a phone) becomes "telefonen" (the phone).
The genders have no other use in the language, however. They do not change any of the verbs or adjectives in a word.
The only thing they really affect, is how the noun behaves when glued together with other nouns, the last noun retains the gender.
So for example, "the aluminium can" is "aluminiumsdåsen" despite the fact that aluminium is neuter, while can is common.
TL;DR language is weird, and the gender system can be applied very limitedly
Did you just assume that gender's dog? Wait... I mean... Did you just gender the do-- no that's not it... I'll get back to you...
Haha.
It's obviously a corgi. No wait I mean it's... never mind
Bishop Gilchrist Church lol
Bishop Gilchrist Church Whyu Isu au churcho inu theu chato
Did you just misdog the gender?
In my language Azûlara for a story I am writing, I use this mindset for the verbs. For instance: The dog slept; which is: Ríka zuianadalna. 'Ríka' is dog, 'zuinana' is the pure verb form 'to sleep', 'dal' means a thing is acting the verb in the simple past, and 'na' is saying the thing in the sentence is acting out this particular verb. "I slept" would be "Ní zuianagel." 'Ní' is similar to "na" in the previous sentence but it is saying a person is acting out the verb. Yes, it is not attached to the verb in this one. Depending on what is being talked about, they may not be attached, or used at all! It is in the beginning of the sentence because in this language, you have to articulate what the sentence is about. No sentence will start with a verb, adjective, etc. It has to be a Time (Nay), Place (Ne), Person (Ní), or Thing (Na). As in example: The dog slept there; which is: Mya zuianadalríka. 'Mya' is 'there'. 'Na' is not needed because there is a place determined at the beginning, which places the noun 'dog' with the verb where 'na' would have been. In the hierarchy, places go before things. Nay Ne Ní Na can also be used to be contextual without having to articulate everything, like how in English we say "it" or "that".
I noticed you covered noun class systems in the event that you want to do exclusively mass nouns or mostly mass nouns or etc, but what if your language only uses count nouns?
Just a neat thing I like about English:
We need more rooms
Vs
We need more room
Same can be done with all other countable nouns
That sport lacks balls
Vs
That sport lacks ball
@Artifexian, thank you for not making any tired "did you assume my gender" jokes. Not only is it not funny, it wasn't relevant, and you broached the subject professionally. I'm trans, and I find myself wary of any subject that has to do with gender, even in a super loose way like grammatical gender, because it seems to invite assholery.
Thanks, I did try to talk about it objectively. The real test for me will be the pronouns video that I'll need to do at some stage. Fascinating stuff pronouns but a difficult subject to tackle adeptly.
Artifexian correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the whole point of pronoun to take the place of a noun (cause saying all those nouns can really get you down)
Can't you remove gender entirely from a pronoun system and just use a hierarchy. (Like pn1,pn2,pn3,pn4 etc.)
So a sentence like "The dog went to the park" would link pn1 to dog and pn2 to the park" While a sentence like "At the park there are many dogs" would link pn1 to park and pn2 to dog?
Otto von Bismarck
Or it could invite discussion with other trans worldbuilders in the comments. Or... at least make it just feel like a friendlier place to BE trans, and talk with eachother about our experiences writing in gender systems into our worldbuilding/languagemaking without the usual 30 attack helicopter comments in a row
(seriously seeing so many people in the comments just... vastly outnumbering any of the usual types. gotta say, its a nice change of pace x) )
Yes; to a degree, Navajo does this. Navajo has at least 4 types of third-person pronominal affixes (source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_grammar#yi-/bi-_Alternation_(Animacy)).
Otto von Bismarck That sounds about right. Conservatives do usually question why anyone would even mention their gender/race because they usually don't understand the context that people of those gender identities/races live in.
I think it would be more accurate to use individuality and collectivity, over individualism and collectivism. The former indicates a mode of quanifying, and the latter refers to specific political ideologies that suggests where we place responsibility, need, duty, moral agency, moral patiency etc. I could be wrong on this one (I'm honestly not 100% sure if collectivity is what I think), but people missuse individualism more often then they use "begs the question" in place of "raises the question". I'm not advocating prescriptivist language here, I think people actually fail to distinguish the concept from the ideology leading to a double-meaning (like materialism both being a metaphysical concept, and a fixation on things).
No clickbait
I'm of the opinion that clickbait the leads to engaging content is ok. But clickbait that leads to a contentless source is not ok. I hope this video is engaging.
I actually liked the video.
The only thing that i don't like is the clickbait.
Artifexian I think you're kinda just baiting the wrong type of person
I feel partly responsible because I mentioned (tongue in cheek, mind you) inflecting 'dog' -> 'doge' as a missed chance in the previous video's comments.
I would agree with you however i think it does need to indicate somewhat clearly what the video is about otherwise it would be misleading.
There's a lot of debate in linguistics as to whether grammatical gender is a form of noun class system.
For one, noun class systems tend to be more logical. You can easily predict the class a noun falls into. With gender systems however, the 'class' is arbitrary and must be learned with each word. And like you said, its also true that languages classified as having noun classes have more categories than languages with gender systems. As for how the gender system got its name, honestly its just something grammarians came up with to deduce a pattern as to which nouns fell into which gender. In reality, the genders originated as separate declenations in proto-indo-european. They had three sets of endings, which were originally dictated by what the noun ended in (its believed there was once only one declenation, but sound change resulted in this being split into 3 due to nouns ending in different phonemes). At some point they started to use this for word derivation, by using the ending for a different declenation than the noun normally took. This origin is why you have illogical things like arm being masculine and leg being feminine; they're both descended from the same root, they just used different declenations. I think the Romans were the first to associate the declenations with gender, but don't quote me on that.
Cat is a gender too
_edit: why does this have so many likes?_
Actually thought about using that title.
Sure, I'm the frog gender tho.
Did you just assume my grammatical gender?
Oh, wow, hahahahahahaha, assuming gender jokes, wow that's so funny.
sure
My language just uses 3 genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) however, instead of adding an affix depending on which one I want to use, each one of my 20 noun cases inflects the information while I don't have to write as much. Example (absolutive case): ilapa'i (man), āpa'i (woman), apa'i (human). It also has singular (no affix), dual (ti-), and plural (ati-) numbers.
I have an animate class and an inanimate class. The animate class splits into masculine, feminine, and neuter in the singular.
I believe some natlangs do this but can't think of them off the top of my head.
Artifexian Yeah. Though, I just had a couple of ideas to improve it: split inanimate into concrete and abstract in the singular, and have the articles always reflect either masculine, feminine, neuter, concrete, or abstract, even if the dual and plural noun suffixes are merged.
Most Slavic languages have something like this. They have three genders, with an animacy distinction in at least the masculine. Russian has an animacy distinction in the masculine singular and in all genders in the plural (the plural is epicene, unlike some other Slavic languages).
Bulgarian and Macedonian are exceptions. The animate/inanimate distinction is in whether the accusative matches the genitive (animate) or nominative (inanimate), but as Bulgarian has lost the accusative, it doesn't distinguish animacy in noun morphology.
6:20 did anybody get hit by a random wave of awe and feelings when he classified stars as animate because i did
3:42 Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.
Sounds familiar...where have I heard that before. :P
Shut up, Yoda.
I think Pea is different from Corn, is because Peas are eaten individualisitcally. Your fork grabs one pea, or more peas. Corn on the other sand is scooped up, with a spoon you eat a spoonfull of corn. With the fork you eat the pea individually. With a spoon the corn loses its individuality. I gets eaten as a "whole."
You eat peas with a fork?
What I was expecting: nihilistic gender humor or an anti-sjw rant
What I got: colang guide
The good ending
Rare YT W
This makes my fantasy humans with the grammatical genders of masculine, feminine, and horse much more realistic than I thought, including the later derivative classes M+F, M+H, and F+H.
What about spiritual elements, such as "ka" for fire, "na" for water, "ni" for wind, "ji" for electricity and life, etc.
(side note, i nearly typed -"fuck"- instead of "such")
The virgin Tom Scott: “Grammatical gender is just such a stupid concept. All bottles are female? Really? Should I dress it up in a frigging pink apron and give it a rolling pin as well?”
The chad Artifexian: “It’s largely down to Eurocentric selection bias that we associate grammatical gender so strongly with biological sex.”
Thanks for these videos, Artifexian! Now I'm learning how to create and perfect my conlangs in a much easier way! Thank you!!!
While the video does explicitly state that grammatical gender is different from the way we normally use gender, it, as well as some of the comments, also shows how people usually get it stuck in their heads that gender needs to be tied to sex in order to make sense. Even as someone who knows that gender is a spectrum, it was still interesting to be reminded that gender doesn't need to be tied directly to masculine or feminine concepts in the grammatical sense. Really lovely and informative video as always :>
but gender (the non-grammatical one) is definitely tied to sex, even if it's not strictly male or female in gender, for example transgender is when somebody have a gender that is not their sex due to gender dysphoria, so female gendered male, or a male gendered female
Even if you believe that gender is a spectrum, which is in my opinion a stupid idea because the description of spectrum gender sounds much more connected to gender roles which are basically your personality which are definitely social constructs, which makes using the term gender useless when you can get the point across with the word personality, and you can still be a masculine female or a feminine male without changing gender, you have to agree that it at least is tied slightly to biological sex
I think that whether or not someone describes a part of themselves as being their gender, or just a personality trait, depends on the person themselves. To many people these personality traits (Which I assume you mean as in feminine males or masculine females) do in fact mean way more to them than that term would imply, and view it as something fundamental to their identity as a person, hence why many would feel the need to call it a gender. And while I would agree that psychological gender is still tied to sex, that doesn't really apply to people who describe their gender as non-binary, people who don't feel that the simple male or female gender identity applies to them. I feel that people like this have always existed, but only very recently has there been such a huge push to view their identity as valid. Not to mention that it's not exactly helpful to say that someone's identity is stupid or something that they should just use another word for. It's one of those things where if you're not the kind of person who lives with that kind of dysphoria, you're not really going to have the ability to actually feel the same way they do about these concepts. A cis-gendered person can't 100% empathize with a non-binary person, but they can sympathize. And in the long run it really doesn't hurt anyone to just accept that someone they know identifies as something other than their sex. And I'm not even touching the topic of intersex, since that'd turn this into more of a wall of text than this already is! But yeah, I don't wanna turn this into a long winded discussion, especially given the video these comments are attached to, but I hope that at least explains what I meant in a little more detail.
So all feelings, and no facts, I am not calling them stupid, I am calling the concept stupid, those people have always existed, they just didn't have tumblr and other websites telling them it's their gender, and intersex is a really simple concept, some people are born different, not normal, intersex is a genetic defect, they are not less valuable as human lives but the exception doesn't make the rule, they are very rare and most intersex people choose to live as a male or female and hate that people are treating them as a separate sex
And I also have no problem with people thinking what they think as long as it doesn't harm anyone, I will never tell somebody that believes those stuff about themselves that they are fake, I would just argue with them about their feelings and if gender really is the right term to describe it, I hate misinformation, especially as someone from a religious background, misinformation may not seem harmful, but it's very much so
Also people are getting harmed, look at Canada (where I live) it may not be long before misgendering someone, even if by accident, can lead you to being sued
Gender is a spook, m8.
A few things. First off, being ignorant of the actual studies that have lead and continue to lead modern science into the consensus that gender is a spectrum, doesn't mean those studies and facts don't exist. A quick goggle search will point you to multiple articles which describe, and link to, studies that have delved into the topic. It is far from "just feelings and no facts".
Secondly, yes, intersex people are a rare phenomena. No, the vast majority of them don't 'choose' to be 'normal' males or females. Most of the time their parents decide to have their 'not normal' parts surgically removed so that they can continue their lives as a 'normal' male or female. I'm sure most of the time the parents have the best of intentions, but what they effectively do is literally cut out a part of a person's identity without their consent. And again, a simple google search will show you that there's literally only one type of condition that causes health problems in intersex people.
Finally, the idea that someone can and will be sued for simply forgetting or assuming someone's personal pronouns is just silly. Sure, as society eventually evolves to recognize alternate genders and pronouns, assuming someone's pronouns can make you seem foolish, but it's hardly cause for lawsuit on it's own. More likely the person would be sued if they actively and methodically tried to make a nonbinary person feel as if their identity is wrong, or if the person also partook in hate speech of a certain gender. Not to sound like a broken record, but searching the bill in question (C-16, since you mentioned Canada) specifically states that gender identity and expression have been added to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act. So essentially, it prohibits hatespeech, not a simple lapse in judgement or mistake in addressing someone using their pronouns.
I don't want to sound like I'm mocking you or making you out to be hateful or stupid, but if everything you've said there can be proven wrong with a few simple google search queries, that's just simple ignorance. And no, I'm not going to further explain these because that'd lead to a short novella's worth of typing that I have neither the time, nor care, nor patience to put together for people who would simply say I'm cherry picking my sources, or that I'm just saying there's information out there to cover my ass. Just google these things, and read from the source material. Read the source material instead of biased news articles, and that goes for both sides of the political spectrum. Daily wisdom.
2:26 it is grammatically correct to say "3 people", but the resulting phrase would either sound classical or adjective-like.
"三人行必有我师" => classical proverb meaning "when 3(few) people are together, one must be the master", or to put more simply "there must be something to learn from one another".
"三人篮球赛" => "3-on-3 basketball match"
Compare with:
"三个女人一个墟" => modern (Cantonese) proverb meaning roughly "women are naturally chatty when together, like a wet market". Translates directly as "3 (ge) women, one (ge) market."
Interesting video as always Edgar, and especially how it can be a companion to the previous noun case video. Though I imagine that words having multiple suffixes or prefixes might be slightly too junky, especially if the sound flow doesn't feel right for the language. Probably better to have one be prefix-centeic while the other be suffix-based.
Of course, that area is simply perfect to throw in a wrench to an otherwise logical conlang just to mess with future linguists down the road.
Right, but you also don't want to use every possible feature in a single conlang. I'm only going through everything to explain things and people can pick the features they like best.
agglutinating languages tend to have lots of affixes (especially suffixes)
fusional languages tend to "fuse" affixes for every class combination (not necessarily all)
Artifexian Noted, just commenting my thoughts on those parts of conlang construction, especially in working around ideas on how I might work it out.
Now that I think about it, if anyone can answer this, would gender classification of nouns have any environmental and/or social/culture causes that would lead to said language to adopt such features or is it one of those "darn if I knew" answers like the noun case of the previous video.
If the latter's the case, then it might as well be just as prudent to go the tabletop rout and just do a dice roll of languages that have gendered nouns or not with modifiers corresponding to the number of speakers at the height of its "popularity".
Speaking of which, what is the ratio of grammical gender to non-gendered languages?
For most languages, their gender classification is too far in the past to draw any substantiated conclusions, I think. Like for Indoeuropean languages, PIE probably had an animate-inanimate distinction and the animates later were split into masculine and feminine - but most of the steps in between are not attested in actual languages, we only have a few spotlights, and it doesn't really explain how in modern gendered IE languages that retain the neuter, many inanimate objects are masculine/feminine. We only have the result of millennia of development and change, and it's hard to come to proven conclusions (instead of pure speculation).
For a conlang, I'd certainly do something with that, though - why else have gender? ;)
For questions like that, the World Atlas of Language Structures is a very useful toy, like so:
wals.info/feature/30A#2/25.5/148.4
This is what I'm playing with at the moment. Devised a language where the classes are animate / inanimate / conceptual. Vehicles however are animate. (Plants are animate also because while they don't move they are living). It leads to an interesting concept where inanimate nouns change the verb. Because an inanimate thing has no volition, 'the door fell in' - it didn't fall by itself. Something made it do so. Thus it becomes the object of the sentence, not the subject.
Is there a different between animate/inanimate and sentient/non-sentient?
I don't think the distinction is made, but different languages draw the animate inanimate in different places, so it could be drawn where they consider anything below it non-sentient
I have a question for anyone who can help me with it. Doing a conlang where nouns can have one of two forms, and there's agreement with articles, adjectives, etc. The "a form" is meant for people and personified things, while the "o form" is for things and ideas. It sounds a lot like gender, noun class.
The catch is that the form is not intrinsic to the noun. This means that "doctor" and "man" use the "a form" most of the time, while "head" and "spider" use the "o form" most of the time. But you could say "the head of the company" in "a form" if you mean the person and not the role, and the same for a spider that you happen to be emotionally attached with. The "o form" could theoretically be used to refer to people in a very disrespectful way.
I'm doubting on calling this a gender system because it fails the most important thing: nouns aren't strictly in one category. I just don't know what to call and haven't seen this phenomenon in any language as far as my research has gone.
meaty trees
Om nom nom
Oh my gosh it's the man himself! I love your videos, they're very useful and interesting. I've been conlanging for over a year now, and your videos were my main inspiration to get started
I am currently making a language that subdivides mass nouns into finite and infinite nouns. Sometimes a noun has two forms, like how "sea" means "infinite water"
Bosnian has 234 case, along with singular and plural. (-e) ☆ gaelic, arabic, French, Spanish (2 classes ) basque has an extra syllable inserted between noun and postposition for motion with movable things and animates. The immovable don't have it (-ga-)
Really! Epic. :P
I can't find any source saying that Bosnian has 234 cases. Where did you get that from? Considering that Bosnian is an IE language it should have no more than 8.
All I can think of is that they mean to say Bosnian has 234 case forms, depending on case, number, class, etc.
Nah, we have seven cases and three genders. Also, Bosnian, Croatia, Serbian and Montenegrin are basically the same language, we can all communicate perfectly without need for translators, though Serbia and Montenegro use Cyrillic.
I feel like I just realized a LOT contemporary social issues exist in America because we are so aggressivly monolingual. If more americans were polyglots, especially in non-eurpoean languages, maybe we could get over a lot of outdated social norms a little faster.
3:32 I was designing a con langue to dothis and I thoughtIwas being unqiue :(
Nothing is ever unique you just need to be sufficiently different.
The gender system had always baffled me in it's existence since secondary school language lessons. Thank's for finally clearing that up for me after all these years.
Also, you point about how you can categorise robot as animate and computer as inanimate was really clever. Stuff like that is what makes your channel so interesting, even if I don't worldbuild much on my own
Wait but why are the plural/singular forms of the same noun class getting treated as separate classes in the Swahili here?
I believe it's because agreement with these two noun classes is different; so like usually adjectives or verbs only need to agree with the noun class, and not worry about plurality, or if they do the plural is treated the same way regardless of class, but in this case, the agreement of adjectives and verbs has a different way of treating plurals for each noun class.
Hmm, interesting. So the plural forms of adjectives and other alignment markers are different based on class, that's all or is there something I am missing? Well, there sure are languages that don't make class distinctions on adjectives etc. in plural, but its hardly unique or a reason to argue they are a separate class in plural when one does. Even most Romance languages do.
I won't pretend to know much about Swahili, but I can imagine a few cases where it'd be an interesting distinction, such as with verb declensions being noticeably different for each class, how case ends up working out, and so on.
I do sort of agree tho; it's a strange distinction to make, and I wonder why they're considered to be separate classes. I just don't think it'd be unlikely or impossible for there to be a good reason.
109Rage If Swahili is like Xhosa, then the noun class affects subject concords, object concords, and negation indicators, and hence, the singular/plural indicator.
BaNtu: People
MNtu: Person
And with a change of prefix, “Ntu” enters another class, with a change in meaning, that is related to the concept of “person”.
That savage move of putting family in inaccurate is so maddeningly funny
Good video, but I have to nitpick your map at 8:04. Dutch, Danish, Swedish and a few dialects of Norwegian have non-sex based gender systems. All of these languages used to have three gender masculine/feminine/neuter systems, but at various points they merged the masculine and feminine genders to form a "common" gender, resulting in two gender common/neuter systems.
Private video? I'm surprised
I send out the video a day or two early to the patrons. Hence the privacy.
Ah
Time to make vowel patterns for my six noun classes and four numbers! Also, the classes higher in animacy are nominative-accusative, but those lower in animacy are ergative-absolutive.
modern hebrew has the dual numbers form
one year = "shana"
two years = "shnataeem"
years = "shanim"
What with Polish? It has three classifications: masculine, feminine, neuter; animate, inanimite; personal, non-personal. All three or two if inanimite define each noun.
Gotta love youtube autogenerated captions. You said, "...your conlang." What it thought you said: "York online." XD
In my conlang, a few things have one suffix, many things have a different suffix, singular things have no suffix, and when the amount is given, you also use no suffix.
I did this because any given amount can't be classified into 'many' of 'few' without context.
ears of corn
Right which makes corn a mass noun. And why corn is mass and peas are countable is weird to me.
Peas were discovered(to Europeans) much earlier than corn
So maybe people called them peas (a countable name) because they usually encountered them after being taken out of the pod, but when Europeans found the corn in America they probably found people eating it directly from the cob without being separated, so the Europeans didn't think of the grains as individuals
That's my theory, but I am not sure of it's accuracy
It's a common property of most (all?) cereals - rye, barley, wheat, etc. are all mass nouns. Beans, peas, lentils, etc. are all countable. So in a rare case of language being consistent, corn being a mass noun makes some kind of sense.
how many peas in a pod? How many kernels on a cob? Which is served loose more often? I feel that this is a good explanation.
In general for food words, consider how they are harvested and consumed. Peas, beans and berries are picked one at a time, wheat is beaten off the stalk. Milk is hauled out of the barn in a bucket, beef is a relatively generic term for something that comes hundreds of pounds at a time, and steaks come one by one.
For everything else, in what quantity or manner is it typically handled? Cars as units, nitrogen in canisters of /stuff/, and hopefully you only need one ledger at a time.
Really it's just arbitrary.
Video: "Robot" being animate and "computer" being inanimate is such a weird idea!
Russian: * sweats nervously *
One could even create a noun class for women, fire, and dangerous things, for example.
Lol, yes women and fire are dangerous things.
The goal I have for my world is that it doesn't have cultural distinctions for sexes. That would logically mean that they wouldn't describe gender in their languages. I haven't yet dipped my foot into conlangs yet, that's one of the only things I have for them so far. Seems like it could work.
This is not necessarily true. It's fine if you don't want to have grammatical gender in your conlang, BUT just because a people does not distinguish sociocultural gender, does not mean that the language would by default have no gender. Grammatical gender is nothing more than an agreement system between nouns and their constituents. The redundancy of the agreement often helps people to have a better idea of what was said in less than ideal conditions. In this regard, the word 'gender' means "sort, type, kind," but nothing else. You could easily have a gender system of animate vs. inanimate. In fact, about a quarter of Earth's languages has this system. And a word meaning "man" could have the same kind of agreement as a word meaning "woman," for instance. You could also base your gender system on something other than sex or animacy. You could have a natural vs supernatural vs artificial gender system, for instance. In that hypothetical language, you could have the sentence "The(NAT) man(NAT) sees a(SNT) comet(SNT) using a(ART) telescope(ART)," where (NAT) is the Natural gender, (SNT) is the Supernatural gender, and (ART) is the Artificial gender. See? Just one possible grammatical gender system which has nothing to do with sex nor sociocultural gender. Like I said, you don't have to have a grammatical gender system, but don't count it out just because the speakers don't abide a sociocultural gender system. Those are two separate things.
Yeah, I know. =p I watched the video. I was just making a comment about something else for some reason. At 3 in the morning. :
Well, it's good to describe the culture of your conpeople, because having that pegged down will definitely help in the long run. It's often the first step to creating a more believable conlang. But I do want to caution that a people's culture is less likely to influence the grammar of a language, than to influence the individual words.
8:00 I'm calling it, there'll be a bunch of cisnormatives yelling "SJW! Snowflake!" in the comments.
EDIT: Yeah, after reading the responses I've realised that this was obnoxious of me, and I shouldn't have brought it up considering this video was about grammatical gender. Sorry. I'm not going to try to explain why I decided to say that, because that would feel like scrambling for a justification, so I'll just say that I used to be a self-absorbed asshole and while I'm trying to be better, sometimes I still slip up. Thanks for calling me out.
That said, nonbinary gender identities are not "made-up garbage" and while some organisations classify being transgender as a mental illness, the only one I know for sure does that is the AMA, which apparently has been subject to controversy - that doesn't necessarily invalidate their arguments, but it does make them less reliable. Also, while I'm by no means an expert, as far as I can tell that classification is wrong.
Also, gender is definitely a social construct, but it DOES exist. In my view, identities exist for one of two reasons: to help us describe ourselves in terms of the people around us (good, helps gain a sense of belonging) or to divide society into groups so that a hierarchy can be enforced (bad, very bad), and gender identity is an example of the former - not only is it real, it's important.
Lastly, Elliot Loverin is right, I should have just used the term "transphobes" instead of "cisnormatives". It wouldn't have made my comment any less obnoxious, but it is the better term to use.
This is grammar not real life we don't really care
Grammatical gender ≠ Reality gender, so I don't care at all.
Found them! ^
so we've got cisnormatives saying that none of them care because it's to do with grammatical gender and then there's a bunch of cisnormatives making original jokes about attack helicopters.
call them what they are, transphobes
8:09 the nordic languages don't have a sex based grammatical gender, it's en-nouns and et-nouns
I'm becoming aware of this. Lots of people have pointed this out. Sorry.
haha no worries
Ett land
Ah the comments
fr tho gj on making this video & also just being PC!
Mitä ihmettä nämä jenkkiläiset sekoilijat taas trollailevat?
It's actually kind of like Swedish and Danish (and probably Norwegian in the future). They used to have a three-gender system like German, but all the feminine nouns turned into masculine nouns, so now they have animate/inanimate.
Oh no. I don't think any good can come from this.
Comments will be fun. :)
Artifexian LE ATACK HELICOBER XD
never mind that the video is about noun classes
Not really fun for trans worldbuilders like me though.... urgh, youtube comments.
Oh no I'm not brave enough for politics.
Nicole Richwine hélicoptéres militaires
I've got 4 noun classes in my language; common which is used for marking inanimate objects, and things that don't incorporate gender (although nouns in this class aren't marked with anything). masculine which in-codes masculine nouns like dad and man. feminine which is like masculine but for feminine nouns like mum and woman. and lastly celestial which is used for marking nouns that exist outside our realm of understanding like gods and stars.
Hello, great video as always! I have a video request. I have been making languages for a while, too. I have been making a natlang to pair with a culture, and I have been thinking a lot about world view lately. You have brought up world view frequently in your latest video, so can you please make a video about how to design a world view? Most people who do not experience other cultures don’t really comprehend HOW the world view of cultures differ from theirs. From my experience world view and mindset is at the foundation of most things. It’d be cool to make a video on what influences world view, what world view really is, and how life and thinking changes based on a person’s world view. I understand if you want to focus on the grammar or nouns or if you have a schedule of videos, but can you please consider? Thanks.
You tricked us into putting grammatical gender into a conlang and then explained it. Well played.
My orcish language currently has about 17 noun classes, 6 of which refer to gender of persons (and none of these are male/female). I'm a little bit struggling to come up with well-sounding suffixes for all of them. :-D
Worldbuilding is such a great tool to explore possibilities beyond heteronormativity. It's really a shame that so many people show up in the comment section only to make transphobic "jokes". I'm glad that at least my world-building community is largely free of antifeminist or anti-trans assholes. :-)
Thats a super cool system!!! I remember seeing someones take on gender and sexuality of common fantasy races and how like halfling/hobbits being community focused were very accepting to lgbtq and polyamory and stuff like that and seeing that reflected in a language is thE BEsT ThiNG
Your wideos are awesome, they really help me creating my own language for the story Im working on. Keep up your good work!
Wa50 wapeople wadownvoted wawithout kiwatching the kivideo.
On the corn/peas thing, it may have something to do with the cob, which contains a couple hundred kernels. Just saying.
Watch out people might think this video is political people can be very stupid these days
Comments will be...um...interesting.
What's going on with the map at 8:04? Being a Finn I should know that Finnish isn't a language with a grammatical gender, and is spoken widely in all of Finland. So what do the orange parts in the south and west denote? If they are representations of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, that's accurate enough, but the minorities are rather small to be considered the main language in those areas.