Timeline for Why do I intuitively seem to know the gender of inanimate objects?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
9 events
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| Sep 26, 2023 at 12:30 | comment | added | fdb | @HolyKnowing. " but for languages where careful research has been undertaken, gender is always predictable from a set of assignment rules, for at least 85% of the noun inventory ". This is manifestly wrong. | |
| Sep 26, 2023 at 3:39 | comment | added | Wtrmute | Note that things do not have genders, nouns do. For example, what is the gender of “stone” in Latin? It depends on whether you call it lapis (masculine), rupes (feminine) or saxum (neuter). | |
| Sep 25, 2023 at 5:21 | comment | added | CosmicGenis | Source that for every language if said language grammatical gender on nouns then it also has well-defined and not very large rules for gender assignment: wals.info/chapter/32 | |
| Sep 25, 2023 at 2:53 | comment | added | CosmicGenis | According to the WALS, every language with grammatical gender has very well-defined rules for determining the gender of a noun, and the rules are not very large (so nothing like Risch's Algorithm involved). | |
| Sep 25, 2023 at 1:40 | comment | added | jlawler | German has three genders and native speakers are significantly more likely to agree on what the gender of nonsense words would be (or is, if you prefer -- gender is a slippery business and so is modality). | |
| Sep 24, 2023 at 21:11 | answer | added | user6726 | timeline score: 2 | |
| Sep 24, 2023 at 11:51 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | This is actually quite a good question. In many cases, morphological clues help (e.g., words ending in -o being masculine and those in -a feminine in Spanish); other times, especially with loanwords, an existing native equivalent provides a hint (perhaps Betelgeuse is masculine because the Hindi words for ‘star’ are masculine); or sometimes one gender is just generally the default. But sometimes, even though there doesn’t seem to be anything specific in favour of any particular gender for a new (or even fictitious) word, native speakers will overwhelmingly agree on one. | |
| S Sep 24, 2023 at 8:46 | review | First questions | |||
| Sep 24, 2023 at 15:11 | |||||
| S Sep 24, 2023 at 8:46 | history | asked | VVidyan | CC BY-SA 4.0 |