Latin: why aren't all objects and abstract ideas neutral words?

Question

French doesn't have any neutral gender!

Answer 1

Because "gender" in the Indo-European languages does NOT historically represent semantic distinctions, but phonological ones. It is only historical accident that many semantically masculine nouns wound up being inflected in the same way and many semantically feminine nouns wound up being inflected in another way. This accident led to some masculine and feminine nouns changing the way they were inflected, but there are many naturally masculine and feminine nouns that are neuter, like "child" in many of the Indo-European languages. If I remember my Proto-Indo-European correctly, nouns that ended in consonants wound up being "masculine" nouns and nouns that ended in vowels wound up being "feminine" nouns. It's a bit more complicated than that, but I think that is the fundamental basis of the division into "masculine" and "feminine" nouns in Proto-Indo-European. All the modern Indo-European systems are just historical developments of that original system.

Answer 2

Grammatical "genders" don't necessarily coincide with natural genders. If a language has 3 genders to choose from new words will be put in a category often not for logical reason but because it "feels" right for most speakers. Quite a few abstract ideas like "truth" and "justice" were also seen as real powers pervading the world and personified as a kind of deity or aspects of a divine being.

Answer 3

Because grammatical genders are different from "natural" genders (to cal it some way). Confusion arises as in describing people and some animals they are the same. But what about things? you can't tell a female table from a male table! lol sounds stupid.. but.. grammatical gender is only a way to classify nouns according to their grammatical behavour. It's be better if we'd call them "noun classes" instead of "genders", to avoid this confusion.
And.. it is more shoking when you analyse Xhosa, for example, where our concept of grammatical gender fails. They have like 22 or 23 noun classes. When someone approaching this languages feels that only feminine, masculine and neuter exist... it is a shock!

Answer 4

this question comes up plenty. i will in basic terms respond to it with some questions of my personal: 'precis' signifies that the difficulty (merchandise) has been 'pulled out,' would not it? And from what's it pulled out? in case you answer that 'it really is pulled out of truth,' isn't its degree of truth really diminished? Does George Washington fairly exist? isn't it glaring that any truth that holds human beings in it may produce any type of idealities? you do not prefer to bypass outdoors truth to discover the acceptable-turbines. Any human can make metaphysics; and everybody make a minimum of one. N. B!: the precis gadgets and recommendations we create do not ought to make experience! Dedicatedly rational human beings oftentimes overlook this major reality. in the experience that your question is taken as, 'Are there observables that are inevitably linked with the leisure of recommendations and precis gadgets?' the answer is certain, as some previous solutions educate. Does this fairly answer your question? easily the tortuous direction from phenomena said to particular end about gadgets that are by employing definition circuitously observable might want to leave me itchy throughout.

Answer 5

The same reason that people sometimes call countries or America "her" or a car, their laptop, that sort of stuff. I don't really have any better explanation than this.

Answer 6

For the exact opposite reason that English has become the predominate language in the world. We thought it was stupid, the French did not.