50
votes
Is there a technical name for when languages use masculine pronouns to refer to both men and women?
This strategy to deal with person groups of mixed gender or with single persons of unknown or undetermined gender is named generic masculine. It is quite frequent among languages with grammatical ...
- 31.1k
47
votes
Accepted
How did the generic masculine emerge?
In many Indo-European languages, like Latin, the masculine is less "marked" than the feminine, meaning that it's the more basic or fundamental form: the one you use by default unless there's ...
- 69.6k
44
votes
Since when did Indo-European languages start associating noun genders with male/female sexes?
Short answer: the association between the grammatical genders and sociological genders happened very early in Indo-European, but it was an association rather than an equivalence and had many ...
- 69.6k
33
votes
Is there a language where there are personal pronouns for the first or second person that have gender?
In Thai, 1st person singular pronouns differ by gender:
Masc.: ผม [pʰǒm]
Fem.: ดิฉัน [dìʔt͡ɕʰán]
- 8,641
30
votes
Is there a language where there are personal pronouns for the first or second person that have gender?
Coming at this from a different direction, Japanese personal pronouns (*) are an open class, with many variations in meaning and connotation.
So while there's no official "first-person masculine ...
- 69.6k
29
votes
Is there a language where there are personal pronouns for the first or second person that have gender?
Proto-Afro-Asiatic likely marked gender on second-person pronouns, and many of its descendants do the same.
For example, second-person singular masculine is אַתָּה (ʔattāh) in Hebrew, أَنْتَ (ʔanta) ...
- 69.6k
28
votes
Why do some Indo-European languages have genders and some don't?
The origin of grammatical gender is not necessarily well understood, but presumably it originated like any other inflectional feature and then became associated with gender when it was noticed that ...
- 2,427
26
votes
Accepted
In romance languages, are there examples of male names that derive from female names?
The first thing I thought of was names derived in antiquity from the names of ancient Greek goddesses.
For example, the French male name Hercule is ultimately from the name of the Greek goddess Hera (...
- 18.7k
21
votes
Since when did Indo-European languages start associating noun genders with male/female sexes?
The association was certainly firmly in place already during the time that ancient Greek and Latin grammarians were writing about grammatical gender, so the fact that genus can be translated as "...
- 18.7k
21
votes
Accepted
Why do we use the names we do for grammatical genders?
The names currently used for French are inherited from Latin, which had three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. (Some ancient grammarians added "common" and "epicene" to ...
- 69.6k
21
votes
How do native speakers control gender distinction?
Do native speakers naturally "feel" the need to articulate feminine instead of masculine?
Your assumption regarding how speech works is not quite right regardless of whether a language is ...
- 747
19
votes
Do all languages distinguish between persons and non-persons?
The relevant linguistic concept is animacy, but what is considered animate or inanimate can vary significantly across the languages of the world. Besides humans, animals, gods, some objects in nature ...
- 31.1k
18
votes
Is there a language where there are personal pronouns for the first or second person that have gender?
In Spanish that happends for plural:
nosotros (1st person plural masculine)
nosotras (1st person plural femenine)
In Japanese there are several forms for the first form depending on gender or even age!...
- 181
13
votes
Since when did Indo-European languages start associating noun genders with male/female sexes?
Some time after the middle of the 4th millenium BC. As discussed in this article by Luraghi, IE did not develop sex-based gender distinctions until the Anatolian branch split off, which is typically ...
- 83.4k
12
votes
In romance languages, are there examples of male names that derive from female names?
In Italian there are a number of historically female names which are occasionally used as male names, e.g.
Celeste, Amabile, Fiore, Diamante
In many Romance languages the female name Maria (or some ...
- 3,132
12
votes
Is there a technical name for when languages use masculine pronouns to refer to both men and women?
The masculine gender/noun class in many languages will be the unmarked option, with other genders/classes being marked. It is often (though not always) possible to use a less marked gender/class. ...
- 6,337
11
votes
Accepted
Why has the neuter gender disappeared from almost all the modern Romance languages?
I've read that even in Latin, we see some variability in the declension of words as neuter or masculine. Sometimes the use of the masculine where neuter would be expected is attributed to "...
- 18.7k
11
votes
Accepted
Are there languages that inflect adverbs for gender
Although adverb agreement in gender/noun class is far from ubiquitous, there seem to be (apparent) examples of this kind of agreement in a fair number of languages. I am most familiar with examples of ...
- 18.7k
11
votes
Accepted
Why there is a neuter gender in some Indo-European languages, and others apparently dropped it?
The three genders are found in all the oldest Indo-European languages we know (Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Gothic, Old Irish, Old Church Slavonic, Old Norse) with the exception of Hittite.
Hittite had two ...
- 7,504
10
votes
Accepted
What is the function of a gender distinction in nouns?
Assigning nouns to a certain noun class, with other words taking various forms by agreeing with that noun class (e.g. adjectives, determiners, or verbs marking the noun's gender) allows you to spread ...
- 9,880
9
votes
Languages with masculine nouns for various female entities, or feminine nouns for male entities
In German, diminutives are almost always neuter, even when they refer to humans, like Mädchen "girl". In Ancient Greek, similarly, παιδίον "child". German also has some non-diminutive neuter words for ...
- 69.6k
9
votes
Is there a language where there are personal pronouns for the first or second person that have gender?
In Polish, pronouns are used much less than in English, since their role is largely subsumed by the verbs inflecting for person, and in 1st and 2nd person, past tense has different inflection ...
- 191
9
votes
If the definiteness of a noun is dependent on the article that introduces it, can the gender of that noun also depend on that article?
First, English has no gender in articles, it cannot be compared.
German has gendered articles, but gender in German is considered an intrinsic property of the noun, and the noun governs the gender of ...
- 31.1k
8
votes
Accepted
Does plural count as a grammatical gender?
To some extent, this is just a question of terminology. In some languages, it is conventional to speak of "genders"; in others, "noun classes"; in some languages, the plural is considered to be one of ...
- 18.7k
8
votes
Why do we use the names we do for grammatical genders?
Imagine if every French speaker suddenly agreed that nouns were one of 'animate' and 'inanimate', or 'chocolate' and 'strawberry', or 'A' and 'B' instead of 'masculine' and 'feminine'. The language ...
- 18.7k
8
votes
How do native speakers control gender distinction?
The linguistic answer is that speakers learn the gender of words from experience, they devise rules, and apply those rules. You have to know the grammatical rules of a language to speak the language.
...
- 83.4k
8
votes
How do native speakers control gender distinction?
As a German native speaker, I find the gendering of nouns something that happens absolutely automatic and with no thought whatsoever, like most other aspects of talking in a natural, un-forced manner. ...
- 197
7
votes
Why are definite articles generally used for learning gendered languages?
It's all simple: you cannot put an indefinite article before every noun, but definite articles have no limitations, every noun can have a definite article.
The point is, in most European languages ...
- 18.6k
7
votes
Accepted
How did these feminine mutations originate in Welsh?
Long ago many words ended in sounds which were for some reason lost. It was those now lost sounds that triggered different kinds of assimilation and other consonant changes in the words that followed ...
- 18.6k
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