[Multilingual Monday] Grammatical Gender

[aadroma]

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

Comments

[dodgingwndshlds]

ASL has no gender... Which always makes interpreting fun..As I am sure you know, pronouns are indicated by referring to the person in space by assigning the person a space and then pointing to that spot. Sometimes, if you're a lucky interpreter, the signer refers to the person by a name when they are assigning the space... Sometimes, you can even know by the name what the gender is.... Other times, the signer might sign something like:

#MY FRIEND (point to place, setting "My friend" there in space). #YESTERDAY (point to spot) #US TWO ARGUE (points to spot) #ANGRY

Which usually comes out of the interpreter as "Yesterday, my friend and I had an argument. My friend was angry." This sounds weird as the average speaker would say "Yesterday, my friend and I had an argument. He/she was angry."

Makes for some good times.

[dodgingwndshlds]

Oh.. And I have a great story about interpreting from ASL-Spanish contact variety sign into spoken Spanish and getting all flustered because I was using the first person, as is appropriate in interpreting, and I kept putting everything into the masculine while voicing for my decidedly FEMALE client.

Try as I might, I just couldn't seem to talk like a girl.

Which is so weird for me.....

[muckefuck]

German gets a bad rap for the whole Mädchen thing, but actually this is one of the few truly consistent gender rules of the language: All diminutives formed with -chen or -lein (and their dialectal variants like -ke and -li) are grammatically neuter. In fact, I joke with learners that if gender causes them headaches, the easiest solution is to make everything diminutive. So the real question isn't "Why are Mädchen neuter?" but "Why aren't young boys Knäblein?"

Moreover, German isn't the only language to do this. Irish has two common diminutive endings, -óg, which is always feminine, and -ín, which is always masculine. But only the latter is productive. So this means that cailín "girl" (source of the name "Colleen") has the same problems as Mädchen. Of course, referring back to a woman with a masculine bzw. neuter pronoun causes too much cognitive dissonance for modern speakers so they always substitute feminines, e.g. "Is í an cailín is cliste sa rang í" ("She's the cleverest girl in the class"), where strictly speaking the pronoun

[aadroma]

The Irish example reminds me of one of the grammatical rules of Swedish, which is that traditionally groups of mixed gender people or people of unknown gender are labeled as FEMININE, as opposed to masculine in many other languages.

Thus you get Den tidiga människan och hennes verktyg, "The Early Man and HER Tools".

[gorkabear]

Hey
English calls "it" to babies, whereas we distinguish their gender/sex from the moment they're born (tradition includes puncturing girls' ears also)

[gullinbursti]

Ojibwe is gendered, but along an animacy/inanimacy axis. There is no difference in the 3rd person verb forms when a man is the subject vs. when a woman is the subject, but the verbs change drastically if something grammatically animate is the subject vs. when something inanimate is the subject. I think I remember reading that this is a feature in the whole Algonquian family.

(edited because I can never remember the Algonquin/Algonquian difference)

[aadroma]

The one Amerind language I DO have experience with, Cherokee, differentiates between an animate and inanimate in a healthy number of verbs ("I-find-him/her" vs. "I-find-it"), but would this count as being a gendered language?? Rarely is gender otherwise mentioned, even with siblings (which use words depending on the speaker -- you would refer to your sister as "the sibling of opposite gender of me").

[muckefuck]

As pgdudda points out, "grammatical gender" can be just another ways of saying "noun class". Some linguistics differentiate the two by reserving "grammatical gender" for any system requiring agreement with parts of speech other than nouns. In such a view, English would be said to have noun class but not grammatical gender because the only kind of agreement that exists is between nouns and pronouns (which in English are a type of noun). To the extant that Cherokee verbs show agreement with nouns according to some sort of class membership, it could be said to have both

[aadroma]

... and I understand that, and have seen several languages that make non-gendered noun class differentiations and it affects multiple levels of the grammar.

My question is whether or not certain aspects of Cherokee indeed count as a noun class. Do inanimate objects count because, when made the object of a minority of verbs, they use a different object pronoun than animate objects? Do animals count because they specifically have no plural forms themselves? Do liquid objects count because they have specific forms in certain verbs like "to have"?

[jawnbc]

In Canadian colloquial French (the standard is standard French), often words are re-gendered to give them a wholly different meaning. Examples are:

Le main=the hand la main=the main/high street in a city

and

La Québec=the city of Quebec Le Québec=the province of Quebec

This latter one doesn't strictly make sense though. La ville de Québec is feminine, hence la Québec. But la province de Québec should also be feminine. Unless you mean le pays de Québec, the country of Quebec,,,,,

[gorkabear]

For Spanish speakers, not matching the gender is the key to know that a person is a foreign speaker. It's also a lot of fun, because you find women speaking in masculine and men speaking in feminine. I mean, gheyz speak in feminine, so it's more "fun". German gheyz also do that (At least I read it in Ralf König's comics