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Why do some languages use gendered nouns?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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Okay, thank you. Anyway: is here somebody who actually knows WHY this happened? What was the underlying cause for our ansestors to start using it? What were they trying to achieve or solve? (UNINTENTIONALLY, okay, we got it.)
I'm just speculating, but I could imagine they personfied objects and maybe transfered gender to objects that way?
That seems like the most likely reason for why it happened
While I don't actually know a goddamn thing about the history of this, that doesn't seem to work too well once you look at more languages. While a male/female or male/female/neuter system is common in Indo-European languages, other language groups use versions that have more distinctions and haven't traditionally been associated with gender. Most languages in the Atlantic-Congo group that a lot of the southern half of Africa speaks have between ten and twenty different categories of noun in that sense. That's why they're more formally called "noun classes" rather than "grammatical genders"
We don’t have a lot of records of what speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language were thinking because they lived c. 4500-2500 BC and didn’t have their own writing. I think the for the earliest writing we have of an Indo-European language gendered nouns had already been invented.
I can say that having gendered nouns does add a little bit more information to communication. Like if we are talking about a man and a woman and we’re using pronouns, then “he spoke to her” is unambiguous as to who is doing what. Likewise, if all nouns have a gender, you encounter more situations where the gender adds some extra context and leads to marginally less ambiguity. So if you’re at a bakery and there are two adjacent items behind the counter, one with masculine gender and one with feminine gender, and you point and say “can I have her please”, there is no need for the baker to ask if you mean this one or that one, they know based on gender.
Not saying this makes gender “worth it”, but in an emergent system, small things like this might have given it enough of a foothold to exist.
Most things humans do are to solve things, but how they do that is a mix of trying to solve the thing and humans just latching on to random stuff and it sticking around. Especially when it comes to language.
Being able to communicate complex concepts made it easier for them to work together. Once the hominids became apex predators, their main adversaries were other hominids. Again, in that case, the better you can communicate, the better your chances for survival are.
These bits of grammar don't always actually communicate any extra information about anything other than the grammar of the language you're speaking, though. The "gender" of the thing in question can't reliably be distinguished from grammar since even in the Indo-European languages where the noun classes are typically thought of as masculine or feminine, the word's grammatical gender can contradict its actual gender. The Old English word for "woman", back when English had grammatical gender, was masculine.
So is "das Mädchen" in German, it is a young female but it's neutrally gendered.