masculine and feminine nouns

Message Bookmarked

Bookmark Removed

Couldn't we just call these 'group A and group B'? Or is there something in the notions of masculine and feminine here?

― Daniel (dancity), Tuesday, 4 March 2003 12:21 (twenty-three years ago)

Table is masculine in German, but feminine in French. Bridge is feminine in German, but masculine in Spanish, etc etc.

― Daniel (dancity), Tuesday, 4 March 2003 12:23 (twenty-three years ago)

You can often guess a word's gender from its construction, rather than its meaning.

― N. (nickdastoor), Tuesday, 4 March 2003 12:25 (twenty-three years ago)

This is an interesting topic. It struck me when I was learning German that although we discriminate between nouns on the basis of gender there's really something else entirely going on there.

I talked to someone once about this, and he mentioned research about whether words get their "gender" in a language from the way they sound or from what they are. I can't remember how this research went.

― DV (dirtyvicar), Tuesday, 4 March 2003 12:30 (twenty-three years ago)

There is more to it. Nick says you get the gender from construction, rather than meaning. This is true, but why is this masculine or feminine and not wibble and wobble? Final 'a' in Portguese makes things feminine (most of the time). But compare banco (bank, bench) with banca (stand, kiosk etc).

― Daniel (dancity), Tuesday, 4 March 2003 13:06 (twenty-three years ago)

I think we have masuline and feminine nouns in english. Consider: crankshaft - definitely male, pamphlet - definitely female.

― SittingPretty (sittingpretty), Tuesday, 4 March 2003 13:54 (twenty-three years ago)

gender·less adj.
Usage Note: Traditionally, gender has been used primarily to refer to the grammatical categories of “masculine,” “feminine,” and “neuter,” but in recent years the word has become well established in its use to refer to sex-based categories, as in phrases such as gender gap and the politics of gender.

― minna (minna), Tuesday, 4 March 2003 13:59 (twenty-three years ago)

n 1: a grammatical category in inflected languages governing the agreement between nouns and pronouns and adjectives; in some languages it is quite arbitrary but in Indo-European languages it is usually based on sex or animateness

― minna (minna), Tuesday, 4 March 2003 14:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I believe the meaning of the word "gender" used to be closer to "genre" than to "sex". So strictly speaking it does just mean type A and type B. Obviously there was overlap in the meanings though: un homme vs une femme etc. but I think people only started using gender to apply to people when the word sex became rude.

Damn you minna.

― Sam (chirombo), Tuesday, 4 March 2003 14:02 (twenty-three years ago)

Masculine, feminine, neuter
I went for a ride on my scooter
Bumped into the queen
Said "sorry, old bean"
And forgot to toot-toot on my hooter

― kate, Tuesday, 4 March 2003 14:09 (twenty-three years ago)

There are definitely some masculine and feminine nouns in English, eg. ship = always she.

― Madchen (Madchen), Tuesday, 4 March 2003 15:03 (twenty-three years ago)

Only if you are an old fart.

― N. (nickdastoor), Tuesday, 4 March 2003 15:07 (twenty-three years ago)

Or the queen or a naval officer in pristine white bellbottoms.

― Madchen (Madchen), Tuesday, 4 March 2003 15:20 (twenty-three years ago)

The French word for "penis" is feminine.

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Tuesday, 4 March 2003 19:55 (twenty-three years ago)

Final 'a' in Portguese makes things feminine (most of the time). But compare banco (bank, bench) with banca (stand, kiosk etc).

yeah, but it might be some property of the bank/bench concept as opposed to the stand/kiosk concept that determines which is masc and which feminine.

are there languages with more than three genders?

Apparently Finnish has no genders, which means Finnish people speaking in English are always saying things like "I will be meeting my husband later this evening. She has booked a table in a nice restaurant for us". Apparently.

― DV (dirtyvicar), Tuesday, 4 March 2003 20:22 (twenty-three years ago)

There are languages with so many genders you will just close the dictionary and walk away, hoping nobody even saw you taking an interest. Think more than ten.

Genderless Finnish isn't so weird... English is pretty much genderless except for pronouns, and even with those you can use the genderless "they" as third person singular. It riles people up when you discuss it in terms of style and sexism, but everybody does it all the time when they're speaking.

― fortunate hazel (f. hazel), Tuesday, 4 March 2003 20:35 (twenty-three years ago)

finnish, like hungarian, uses a single third person pronoun which can mean 'he' or 'she'. swedish has two genders, which are designated simply 'neuter' and 'non-neuter'.

― cameron, Tuesday, 4 March 2003 20:36 (twenty-three years ago)

Zulu, for example, is a language with more than ten genders.

― fortunate hazel (f. hazel), Tuesday, 4 March 2003 20:43 (twenty-three years ago)

There was some research done in which Germans and Spaniards were asked to describe the word 'bridge'. The word is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish. Lo and behold the Germans used words like 'sleek' 'elegant' 'nice' etc, while the Spanish thought bridges were 'big' 'bulky' and so on. I'm paraphrasing but that was the thrust of it.

― Daniel (dancity), Friday, 7 March 2003 22:29 (twenty-three years ago)

How many did Latin have?

― Mr Noodles (Mr Noodles), Friday, 7 March 2003 22:34 (twenty-three years ago)

3: m/f/n. I may be thinking of something else, but I think they had subsets in some contexts too.

― Graham (graham), Saturday, 8 March 2003 03:41 (twenty-three years ago)

six months pass...

I wonder if this is a weird thing for me to say on my very first post here, but this discussion reminded me of something I learned in a human sexuality class last semester.
There is a third gender in the Domincan Republic (hope I remembered that correctly) - and I'm not talking with nouns. I mean people. There are chicks who turn into dudes when they hit puberty...not a lot, but enough that it's just accepted as a new type of gender. They're not hermaphrodites or anything, and I wish I could remember the name they're given, but I guess I can't.
Anyways, interesting, huh?

― Laura "Slave" Fager, Monday, 6 October 2003 08:23 (twenty-two years ago)

"Third gender" isn't that a peculiar phenomenon, it was known amongst North American Indians as well as some other cultures, also in Europe. Actually, we should speak of many different "third genders", since the gender specifications used to vary form culture to culture. It was only during the 19th century that Western psychopathology established the clear gender types we know now, and the Westernization of the world has helped to spread those types. But transgenderism still exists, and has nowadays found (at least some) acceptance in the West also, alongside the gay/lesbian movement.

Yes, this has happened to me at least. Also, it's not uncommon for one to read a Finnish translation of an English book, and at first have no idea of the sex of some of the characters, since the third person pronoun is the same for the male and the female ("hän"). This can be used for effect as well. There is at least one Finnish novel where the main character has a made-up name, and his/her sex is never established in the story, so it remains decidedly ambiguous.

― Tuomas (Tuomas), Monday, 6 October 2003 09:13 (twenty-two years ago)

There is a third gender in the Domincan Republic...chicks who turn into dudes when they hit puberty

"Guevedoche" or "machi-emhra," according to this article. However, I'm not sure if this refers to gender (which I always understand as a social, not biological concept) as much an intersexual condition that seems to have a higher rate of occurence in the Dominican Republic.

Has anyone read Middlesex yet? Supposedly it's about someone with a similar intersexual condition.

― j.lu (j.lu), Monday, 6 October 2003 12:54 (twenty-two years ago)

Spoken Chinese reveals no gender, although the characters for he/she use gender radicals. Still they're spoken identically. But then, Chinese is such a spare, elegant (in the computer-speak sense) language, it really doesn't have grammar at all in the western sense.

― Skottie, Monday, 6 October 2003 13:48 (twenty-two years ago)

You must be logged in to post. Please either login here, or if you are not registered, you may register here.