What is the reason for engendering nouns?

Question

English seems to be the exceptional case but other languages I know of engender nouns as feminine and masculine and the assignment of gender is not consistent from language to language.

A German table is masculine while the same table in French is feminine.

I think the most authoritative answer, so far, has rather put the cart before the horse. There is a discrete consistency of gender assignation to nouns derived from other types of word but that, surely, is a logical consequence of an established phenomenon.

Obviously, before asking a question here, I will have made some effort to find an answer on my own. That has yielded some ideas, but even the expert opinions aren't very confidently professed. No-one seems to actually know.

My own attempt to see the correlations of gender assignation collapse as soon as I look at synonyms. If there originally were conceptual categories or genre, their definitions have long since been forgotten and hopelessly corrupted....and I think I know where the corruption has come from.

It's almost chaotic, now, and absolutely archaic. I blame religions for side-swiping the original associations and something of the sort is even mentioned in the bible (Babylon). Gods (religions) have a nasty habit of screwing things up, then making out it was deliberate. My theory is, religions assumed the associative aspect as dedications to primitive gods arbitrarily, changing the concepts locally and ruining the language's comprehensibility to others.

Answer 1

Of course it started in the Proto-Indoeuropean language. Perhaps at the beginning they had a system of noun classes like many languages of black Africa. (E.g. classes of living beings, long things, short things, liquids and so on.) Some scientists think Indoeuropean started with the two classes of living beings and things, and then the creatures were split into male and female, the things became neutral. At first sight it seems natural to make differences between male and female creatures. But the the question is, why things that have no gender got grammatical gender. Personally I could think of two possibilities: First similarity of form (nouns of similar roots got the same gender), second emotional classification. For example in German: A dog is male (except for when you know it is a female one and you choose to express this fact), a cat is female (same exception the other way round). Because a dog obeys orders and learns tricks and does work, this must be a man. A cat does what it likes and cares for its body all day long, this must be a woman. Okay, seriously: a dog is dangerous, a cat is cute. Something like that or perhaps not.

Answer 2

As an Anglophone who has repeatedly tried to learn French, it drives me crazy as well. I'm also an English teacher so I know that while English avoids that particular trap, it has plenty of peculiarities of its own.

I would have to guess that it was merely an arbitrary convention that someone liked and it stuck. Since its an arbitrary choice, at least in my mind, it doesn't seem strange that German and French would make different choices.

Like most Anglophones, I think its arbitrary but most Francophones that I've come accross will swear up and down that there is a logical connection between gender and function but I fail to see that.

Answer 3

"Gender" is common in the Indo-European languages (about 250 languages), but not at all common in the rest of the languages of the world (about 6000 others). It evolved as a system to disambiguate adjectives, so that it was clear in a sentence Noun Adjective Noun Verb which Noun the Adjective went with. Most languages rely on strict word order restrictions to carry that information.

Answer 4

English used to, back when it was Anglo-Saxon (a.k.a. "Old English"), but it has now been dropped. German, I had a teacher tell me, was kind of in the process of going away from them; new words are almost always assigned as "neuter".

I don't think anyone really knows why words got grammatical gender; but I'm with you, without them, learning a language is easier. This was something Zamenhof got from English and used when he created Esperanto: no grammatical gender.

Answer 5

The reason why Romance language nouns have the genders they do is because in Latin every noun was masculine of feminine. It makes many statements more comprehensible.

In other Indo-European languages, the nouns are masculine, feminine or neuter. This is true of Slavic languages like Russian, Teutonic languages like German, and Albanian and Greek.

English is a fusion of Celtic languages like Briton and Welsh, Teutonic languages like Anglo-Saxon and Danish, as well as Latin and Norman French. The genders are different in these languages, and English lost a strictly gendered form for what it has today because of the confusion of the varied languages that contributed to English.

In English nouns have four genders.

Words that refer to feminine entities are feminine: woman, girl, hen, ewe, goose.


Words that refer to masculine entities are are masculine: man, boy, rooster, gander.


Words that refer to entities that have no gender are neuter: chair, table, tree.

Words that describe animals that actually have gender, but no one cares about: spider, dog, cat, ape are common gender.

Answer 6

I don't know but like you said there is nothing consistent about it so I understand why we English speaking people don't waste our time doing so accept in TV shows where we give non living objects names like in the TV show Roy Rodgers where his side kick named his car Nellie Bell and in another show there was a rifle called Ol Betty. I think most objects were given a feminine name. We also call the US the mother country and we also say Mother Earth. We do say Father Time.

Answer 7

I know of three; Welsh,French and Portuguese.
Welsh : One is the same for both genders:Un bachgen(one boy);
Un eneth (one girl). Two ,three and four change with gender;
Dau fachgen,...Dwy eneth..(two boys..two girls)
Tri bachgen.....Tair geneth.(3)
Pedwar bachgen...Pedair geneth.(4) Five onwards is the same for both...Pum bachgen...pum geneth;(5) chwe bachgen ..chwe geneth.(6)

French: One changes all the others stay the same:
Un garcon..(.one boy); ...une fille...(one girl).All other numbers stay the same: Trois garcons...Trois filles.(3)

Portugues; One and two change three onwards stay the same:
Um menino(one boy)...Uma menina.(one girl)Dois meninos....Duas meninas.(2)
Tres meninos...Tres meninas.(3)

Each language has different ideas on which nouns are masculine and which feminine....Table
French...La table...(F)

Portuguese A mesa (F)

Welsh ; Y bwrdd (M) North Wales Y ford (F) South Wales.

There are many other examples where different languages agree and disagree with each other...it is a matter of taste.

Answer 8

I think that you will need to look to the root language; Greek, Latin... for your answer

Answer 9

i didn't realise nuns were endangered, whatever next, who would have thought it.
the reason for it? well, they have bad habits don't they.
ps. you really should do a spell check on your questions.