McWhorter contends that English and Afrikaans are "easier" to learn because they lost gender, a "difficult" feature. Given "the tendency for speakers to default to real-world gender when making reference to animate objects", isn't real-world gender more intuitive than grammatical gender? If so, why did languages start with grammatical gender, when real-world gender is easier?
Even if some "long-extinct tribe" commenced this "cosmological division of nouns into masculine, feminine, and neuter classes based on folk conceptions forever lost in time", why didn't newer languages "default to real-world gender when making reference to animate objects" earlier?
Like modern Germanic languages, Old English employed a system of inflexional endings that distinguished number (singular, plural, and the dual—used to refer to two and only two) and four cases: nominative (subject), accusative (direct object), genitive (possession), dative (indirect object). Old English also had a system whereby nouns were classified into three separate categories, known as genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter; this three-way grammatical gender system is still found in Modern German. The choice of category had nothing to do with sex, or real-world gender, so that the noun wif, ‘woman’, was neuter (just as German Weib ‘woman’ is also neuter), while wifmann, the origin of Modern English woman, was masculine. Old English also attests to a system of ‘agreement’; where Modern English has just one definite article, the, Old English had alternative forms to enable the article to agree with its corresponding noun according to case, gender, and number.1
The English Language: A Very Short Introduction (2018), p 17. All boldenings mine.
By the end of the Old English period, Anglo-Saxon manuscripts show considerable blurring of these distinctions; by 1500 the majority of the endings had been lost entirely. The only traces of the system of noun inflexion that remain today are the ‘s’ ending added to indicate possession (the genitive case) —the boy’s book—and the ‘s’ added to mark plurality—the books (alongside the much less common ‘-en’ ending preserved in oxen and children).
The erosion of these inflexional endings also triggered the breakdown of the grammatical gender system, which relied upon this system. A further contributing factor was the tendency for speakers to default to real-world gender when making reference to animate objects; rather than referring to a woman as it, it became common for speakers to use the feminine pronoun she.
Op. cit. 22.
French’s distinction between le livre and la lune, then, traces all the way back to Proto-Indo-European and beyond, most likely beginning as a long-extinct tribe’s cosmological division of nouns into masculine, feminine, and neuter classes based on folk conceptions forever lost in time (some descendants of the language this group spoke, like German and Russian, retain all three classes, whereas many others including French have collapsed them into two). Even when these distinctions corresponded to real-world conceptions of speakers, this was incidental to the essential requirements of a language. After all, most humans lead full lives without making sure to always refer to the moon as a lady or genuflecting to the manliness of their feet. The finer-grained distinctions in Cantonese and Swahili are just as much add-ons to a language: the flatness and horizontalness of a table is too obvious and exception-less to require regular address (concave tables set perpendicularly to the ground are a tough find). Even at its outset, then, gender marking indicates a certain benignly obsessive-compulsive corner of linguistic habit. Where there is no longer any perceptible link between the marking and the world as its speakers now conceive it (male forks, female spoons, and knives that never develop the urge), we are faced with a sterling demonstration of how the human mind can handle a great deal of linguistic sludge superimposed on what a grammar is really for.
The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language (2003) by John McWhorter, pp 187-8.
English’s autumnal leaf-dropping quality involves even more cases,6 but I need not list them all: you get the point. No Germanic language has shed as much of what Proto-Germanic passed down to it as English, by a long shot. Of course some drop a stitch here and there more than others. Afrikaans has no gender, because it is what happened when Dutch was learned by so many Africans that, unlike any Germanic language on the Continent, it went as far as English did and lost gender. However, in terms of the many other features that make a language a descendant of Proto-Germanic, Afrikaans is very much a card-carrying member: in Afrikaans, you “remember yourself,” you come hither, there is a nice man pronoun, a be-perfect, and the V2 tic. Swedish, as noted, has lost its be-perfect (although it holds on in Norwegian and Danish). However, Swedish is otherwise as Germanic as, well, German.
English’s grammar, then, is “easier” than the other Germanic languages’. The Grand Old History of English describes these “difficult” features as just mysteriously melting away. But none of these authors have had occasion to consider how very many such features just melted away, and that nothing similar was happening in other Germanic languages. The question beckons: why has English been so strangely prone to just letting it all go?
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English by John McWhorter, 104
English’s simplicity is, in terms of explanation rather than mere documentation, weird. It is evidence of a blind-siding by adults too old to just pick up English thoroughly the way children of immigrants do. The Scandinavian Vikings left more than a bunch of words in English. They also made it an easier language. In this, in a sense, they clipped Anglophones’ wings. The Viking impact, stripping English of gender and freeing us of attending to so much else that other Germanic speakers genuflect to in every conversation, made it harder for us to master other European languages.
Op. cit. 135.
So speakers of languages with gender, deep down inside, have a sense that objects are boys and girls. It is also documented that a Spanish speaker, if asked to imagine a table (la mesa) as a talking cartoon character, is likely to imagine the table’s voice being high and sweet because in their language table is feminine.
However, in real life it is very, very rare that we go about imagining inanimate objects talking at all. In general, speakers of languages that assign gender to nouns do not on an everyday basis see inanimate objects as sexed “men” and “women.” The gender class of objects is something lying deep in their psyches, which we can tease out with careful experiments. However, it has nothing to do with the immediacy of daily experience. For anyone who has been close to a speaker of a language with gender, think about it—do they give any evidence of thinking of chairs and toothbrushes as “God’s creatures,” with a sex and the traits traditionally associated with it?
Op. cit chapter 4. Anyone know which page?
kl-words.