Can you tell me WHY some languages have Masculine, Feminine and some Neutral.?

Question

What I mean to ask is why is it LA voiture in French opposed to LE voiture? Why do some Languages feel the need to have gender and some don't. How did the original speaker arrive at whether it is male/female. With some words Father/Mother, Brother/Sister, Husband/Wife of course it is self explanatory, but what about those words that are not so obvious?

Answer 1

I have my own hypothesis about that, as any other linguist I asked the same question and never got a satisfying answer.
I think our ancestors who spoke the first form of the "Indo-European" (then probably East Asian) language were people with few artifacts, living in a natural environment where most things were believed to be animated by spirits even if they did have no discernible live of their own. So they categorised them into male, female and none of the above, and these categories became such an integral part of the language that they kept being tradited to our present day. English is the only one of all the Indo-Europena languages to have got rid of it, probably bercause the Normans found it too hard to change their French habits and the natives followed suit, after all, the Normans were now the posh ones.

Answer 2

Beyond things that are naturally male/female, there's little logic in it; it's just arbitrary. A lot of linguistic rules are arbitrary, though, just convention. Why say 'get in the car' but 'get on the bus'?

English and French are descended from a common source, called Indo-European, which had (as far as we can reconstruct) three genders and at least six cases.
English used to have grammatical and not natural gender, but the endings for masculine and feminine things started sounding the same due to sound changes.

English tends to accent on the first syllable of words, so the endings tended to be less and less stressed, making them sound more similar. (It's for this reason that we have no case markers for nouns, too.)

In French, where everything but some personal names are accented on the last syllable, the distinction between genders was easier to maintain.

Answer 3

The way languages find their structure is rooted in history, and the majority of Indo-European languages (not just Spanish) have grammatical gender as a result of the way the language developped. Grammatical gender has nothing to do with sex - the terms masculine, feminine and NEUTER (not neutral) are just convenient ways of labelling them. You make the observation that terms like "Father", "mother" and so on are obvious - but not necessarily so. In German, the most commonly used word for "girl" - "Das Mädchen" - is neuter. In Spanish and French, the words for "sentry" - a role traditionally carried out by men - are feminine: ("la sentinela/ la sentinelle" respectively). In Romanian, the word for Father, "tata" - behaves like a feminine word - although it does take a masculine adjwective and personal pronoun. Indeed, of all the languages I am aware of, English is the only one that restricts the use of "he" to male living beings, "she" to female living beings, and "it" to everything else.

In fact, until the middle ages, English nouns were divided into 3 genders - masculine, feminine and neuter but the difference has been eroded away over the centuries and now the distinction is made only between masculine and feminine living beings (he, she) and inanimate nouns (it). But all the Western European Latin-based languages - French, Spanish, Cataln, Italian, Portuguese, Galician, Occitan(Langue d'Oc/Provençal) still continue to have masculine and feminine nouns and no neuter ("it") nouns, although Latin did have a neuter gender.

The Celtic languages, (Welsh, Scottish and Irish Gaelic, Breton, Manx, Cornish) as well as Arabic and Hebrew and also Albanian, all have masculine and feminine but no neuter, as do most Northern Indian languages, Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu, etc, whilst Gujerati (which is otherwise quite similar to Hindi and Punjabbi) has masculine. feminine and neuter. But Bengali and Persian, 2 very different languages which are nonetheless still related both to the other Northern Indian languages, and to the Western European languages, has no grammatical gender at all, and does not even distinguish between "he" and "she".

Other modern languages - the Slavic languages (Russian, Ukrainean, Polish, Czech, Serbian, Bulgarian, Croatian, and so on) have three genders - masculine/feminine/neuter and so do Greek and German. Dutch - which is closely related to German - used to have 3 genders, but now only has two "common" and "neuter", and so do the Scandinavian languages, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian - (although Norwegian hasn't quite made up its mind yet, as some dialects also have a feminine gender).

Other European languages - Hungarian, Finnish, (and I believe Estonian) and Turkish have no grammatical gender and do not even have different words for "he" and "she"; it shares this characteristic with Basque, even though Basque is not related to any other of the languages mentioned.

Answer 4

Change your question to : Why JUST ONLY English have no genders at all. The other languages have it, and they change from language to language. By example In French and Spanish sea is female but in Portuguese is male. German is a language of its own kind. Probably culture plays a major role.

Answer 5

Just to add to your other answers, I have noticed that in French it might not actually be anything to do with why something should be male or female, but the word itself - so, baguette for example is female, as seem to be all the other words ending in -tte. So groups of words that have the same endings would automatically be either male or female, depending on the spelling. Bouteille is another example, -lle being female, as is feuille (leaf), whereas feuillet (leaf) is male.

The male/female thing can be bizarre - 'mouse' is feminine so in Disneyworld I heard Mickey referred to as 'she'!

Answer 6

I am a linguist and a polyglot and have discussed this with people of most languages. The answer is NOBODY KNOWS!
You might as well ask why do some books have 40 pages and others have 50 pages!

Answer 7

In English, men have decided that their cars are feminine! "She's a beauty, can get her up to 120 on the motorway"!!!!
But I've always wondered this, too, as I love languages and have studied several over the years. In Dutch, they have neutral and "common gender", where masculine and feminine nouns have merged into one.

Answer 8

Well there are some languages like sanskrit which have feminine masculine and nuetral..... feminine is used when u talk abt a person whoz a female or when u talk abt something that is considered feminine in tat language (eg river is considered feminine in sanskrit.).....masculin is used when you talk abt some1 or something masculin .....and nuetral when you talk abt something tat is neither considered feminine or masculin (eg fruits are considered nuetral in sanskrit)..... its just that way in some languages ...... dunno the real reason but thats the best i can explain.........

Answer 9

it is really so hard to learn them for a foreign.
i try to learn greek and there is same rule.world is feminine,love is feminine,book is neutral,wall is masculine,cat is feminine,dog is masculine,.......

ah,it is so hard to learn!

it is not difficult for a foreign.they have started to hear when they were a baby.

my native language doesn't have this rule.

Answer 10

it might sound dumb or lame but someone just did it that way ... the founders of the language thats how it began ,,, we justa have to follow them