[Multilingual Monday] Grammatical Gender
Today the topic is grammatical gender. If you've ever studied a language like German, Russian, or Spanish, you know about grammatical gender. While, in English, we think of everything as "it" except for living beings (which then become "he" or "she"), in several languages like Spanish your only choices are é and ella, or "he" and "she". This means, then, that everything is assigned a gender -- el libro, "the book" (masculine), la fruta, "the fruit" (feminine). certain signs usually indicate whether a word, in Spanish, is feminine or masculine (though plenty of exceptions exist -- usually words ending in -o are generally masculine and -a are feminine, yet el mapa, "the map," is masculine and la foto, "the photo". These genders are then "matched" with the appropriate article ("a/an" or "the": un/el for masculine words, una/lafor feminine) and adjectives (el libro rojo, "the red book" vs. la fruta roja, "the red fruit"). Depending on the language, the gender might even be "hard-coded" into the verbs that you use.
Several other languages feature THREE genders -- masculine, feminine, and neuter. This doesn't mean, however, that the arbitrary assignment of gender doesn't happen here Indeed, you might be familiar with The German Awful Language by Mark Twain, where Twain mocks such seemingly random gender assignments (why IS das Mädchen, "the girl", neuter???). But German is NOT alone here for many languages exhibiting grammatical gender have at least SOME oddballs lying about. After all, one of the more common words for "penis", verga, is feminine, and that's just bizarre to me, even if its meaning developed from other meanings (like "rod"). ^^;;;;
Certain languages have had their genders "condense"; Swedish used to have masculine, feminine, and neuter, but now has neutrum, "neuter", and utrum, "common", but this means that nouns still have seemingly random assignment of words of these two "genders"(and there's really no way to differentiate them) -- en stol, "a chair" is "common" and ett bord, "a table", is "neuter". It should be noted, though, that gender doesn't play AS big of a role in sentence formation as it would in, say, Spanish, as adjectives and the like don't depend on the gender of a noun of which they're modifying.
Certain languages exhibit NO gender at all. While it might be tempting to say "English," keep in mind that there are "he", "she", "him", "her", etc. Also certain times inanimate objects may be referred to as "she," like a boat or the Enterprise. :: laugh :: But languages like Turkish don't even specify that -- its third person singular pronoun is o, which could be he, she, or it; in other words, the gender isn't even specified HERE, let alone in verb, adjectives, or anywhere else, and this is true for several other languages (Basque, Hungarian, Finnish, and others).
So everyone: let me hear your tales or insights on grammarical gender! I'd love to hear them.
Several other languages feature THREE genders -- masculine, feminine, and neuter. This doesn't mean, however, that the arbitrary assignment of gender doesn't happen here Indeed, you might be familiar with The German Awful Language by Mark Twain, where Twain mocks such seemingly random gender assignments (why IS das Mädchen, "the girl", neuter???). But German is NOT alone here for many languages exhibiting grammatical gender have at least SOME oddballs lying about. After all, one of the more common words for "penis", verga, is feminine, and that's just bizarre to me, even if its meaning developed from other meanings (like "rod"). ^^;;;;
Certain languages have had their genders "condense"; Swedish used to have masculine, feminine, and neuter, but now has neutrum, "neuter", and utrum, "common", but this means that nouns still have seemingly random assignment of words of these two "genders"(and there's really no way to differentiate them) -- en stol, "a chair" is "common" and ett bord, "a table", is "neuter". It should be noted, though, that gender doesn't play AS big of a role in sentence formation as it would in, say, Spanish, as adjectives and the like don't depend on the gender of a noun of which they're modifying.
Certain languages exhibit NO gender at all. While it might be tempting to say "English," keep in mind that there are "he", "she", "him", "her", etc. Also certain times inanimate objects may be referred to as "she," like a boat or the Enterprise. :: laugh :: But languages like Turkish don't even specify that -- its third person singular pronoun is o, which could be he, she, or it; in other words, the gender isn't even specified HERE, let alone in verb, adjectives, or anywhere else, and this is true for several other languages (Basque, Hungarian, Finnish, and others).
So everyone: let me hear your tales or insights on grammarical gender! I'd love to hear them.