Re: Gender in language

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.)

Why do you think that parallel language developments (I'd rather not use the term "evolution" here) are unlikely? It may just be that gender reflects something that most humans have in common about the way they construct their mental categories.

Gender in many European languages is expressed in the morphology of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles.

In Arabic, gender also affects the morphology of verbs and is relevant to how plurals are formed.

On the other hand, the functional equivalent of gender in the modern Chinese languages, which do not use morphological modification to express syntactic relationships, are noun classifiers (themselves originally nouns), which are appended to numbers and to demonstrative pronouns. Most of these classifiers are clearly measure words--the equivalent of English "bottle of" (milk), "length of" (hose), "bunch of" (grapes), "*** of" (paper), etc. Unlike English, classifiers are used with all nouns, and no additional function word, like "of", is required.

Classifiers provide a way of dividing up the world of nouns into categories--genders. ("Gender" is related, more or less distantly, to words like "gene", "genre", and "kind". The modern use of "gender" to mean "sex" probably comes from associating grammatical gender with sex on the part of students of European languages like Spanish.)

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?

What makes you think that children have any particular difficulty learning gender-related issues in their native languages? And, perhaps the understanding of foreign trading partners is no more important than the prevention of understanding on the part of foreign enemies?

Whatever the reasons behind the origins of gender mechanisms, a likely factor in the survival of such mechanisms is the increase in redundancy--however slight--that they provide. Redundancy not only aids in perceptual error reduction; it may also increase processing speed. When I hear <yi4zhang1> in Mandarin, I already know that the upcoming noun is going to be something that is flat. When I hear <san1liang4>, I know that I'm about to hear something about three vehicles of some kind. (I don't mean to imply that I'm particularly conscious of this, but that my language processing mechanisms may be able to better anticipate the upcoming noun.)

--
Mike Wright
http://www.raccoonbend.com
.

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