Re: Gender in language
- From: benlizross <benlizro@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 08:36:55 +1200
foggytown wrote:
Richard Herring wrote:
In message <1159415188.210497.285940@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes
Picasso wrote:
What is the purpose of gender in language? It only makes it harder to
learn, particularly for English speakers that don't have to deal with
this nuisance. Who gives a damn if a house in French or Spanish is
feminine or a poem is masculine???
For one thing, so that you can tell which adjective goes with which
noun.
... but only when the nouns are of different genders in the first place,
which is not something you can rely on in languages with only two or
three to choose from. You need languages with lots and lots of genders
for that to become a compelling reason.
Not every language requires words to appear in as rigid a sequence as
English does.
--
Richard Herring
Back on point . . . I think the real question is condensed to: why was
the concept of gender established (by whatever language did it first)
to begin with? (Disregarding the improbability of parallel language
evolution, some culture was most likely the first to catagorize nouns
into "x" different types, albeit possibly not intentionally or even
consciously.)
No, gender-type systems have evolved in many different parts of the
world, and there's no reason to think it all started in just one place.
Greville Corbett's book in the Cambridge red series is a good survey.
What purpose was served? What factors could make a
culture actively decide, or even passively accept, that it was a "good"
thing to make their language more difficult for their young to learn
and for, say, foreign trading partners to understand?
Because they can. Because it makes your own language more distinctive
from your neighbours'. Because it makes it harder for outsiders to
understand. See Thurston on "esoreric" vs "exoteric" languages in
Melanesia.
But on the specific question of gender, let's look at what makes it seem
difficult. You can learn the words for "spoon" and "plum" and "library"
in French without having to worry about gender. It's when you have to
put them in phrases that things get tricky, because words associated
with them (articles, demonstratives, adjectives) have to vary their form
according to the classes of noun that we call "genders". This means
that, a long time ago, somebody started tagging these associated words
to indicate what kind of noun they were modifying. This may often be
redundant, but redundancy is a normal feature of language. (Why do we
have to change "this" to "these" in "this dog/these dogs"?) And as
others have pointed out, it has some advantages. It allows for greater
flexibility of word order. And the copying of information makes the
tagged words richer in information, so for example if we dispense with
the noun, "this/feminine" is more informative than just "this".
Just some ideas.
Ross Clark
.
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