Is there an actual purpose for gendering in languages, beyond obsessing over sex? What purpose does it serve? Are languages without gender somehow less powerful or efficient or expressive (or romantic ;)?
Wikipedia’s article on grammatical gender offers some strong reasons, the main one being disambiguation of antecedents (for example, which of multiple objects in the sentence the subject or verb is referring to) and homophones (different words with the same spelling or pronunciation).
I don’t think it’s an obsession with sex per se, as much as just a legacy many thousands of years old. Some suggest it didn’t even start as a male/female thing, but perhaps animate/inanimate. It’s worth noting how many very different languages globally have grammatical gender, and that in many of them, the gender of words frequently contradict what you’d guess, as well as reverse gender in many situations. Learning languages like German and Icelandic, you’ll be warned not to think of words as gendered so much as just categorized arbitrarily, because grammatical gender and natural gender so often have nothing to do with each other.
Anyway, the rest of the article is pretty interesting too!
Another interesting thing about language differences, is that some languages don't have articles (like "the" in English - if I remember my English grammar [1] and my Hindi and Sanskrit [2] correctly, heh).
[1] Slightly funny anecdote: When in school (maybe class 5 or 6), I once mixed up the dates of the English Grammar and English Composition semester exams (they were within a day or two of each other), and thought that the next day's exam was Composition, so did not prepare (because you do not prepare for composition a.k.a. essay writing, you just do it on the spot). Turned out that it was actually the Grammar exam, for which you can prepare. I was surprised and pleased to learn later, that I got as good a grade / mark on it - a high one (as I could guess) as if I had actually prepared for it :) I think I had and (still have) some natural aptitude for English grammar, and maybe of some other languages too, for which I am thankful. Good fun.
[2] I studied both Hindi and Sanskrit for many years in school (and did well on both), but don't remember all the grammar rules now, I just speak Hindi naturally, same for English grammar. Native Hindi speakers have told me in the past that my Hindi is pretty much indistinguishable from that of a native speaker.
I speak Persian quite fluently and Persian is completely free of articles. It is also an absolutely gender neutral language (Persians really have to ask if you are talking about a woman or a man if they need context). Besides that, there are no irregular verbs at all. I love it.
Cool. Interesting. Then it must have diverged somewhat in that respect from Sanskrit, because both are descended from Proto-Indo-European languages, I've read. Sanskrit does have genders, IIRC - masculine, feminine and neuter. Sanskrit is also supposed to be a very regular language. I studied it for 3 or 4 years in high school. After you know the basics of some vocabulary and some grammar and some rules for joining words (called sandhi), you can easily understand compound words and even make up your own, like in German. Also, Sanskrit poetry can sometimes have good wordplay because many words have many different meanings (each).
Articles seem completely pointless to me as a Slavic speaker. In my language you can specify the a/the distinction if you want by using equivalents of "this/some", but it's optional and most of the time you just use the nouns alone.
Also it's not really about sex. It's just an arbitrary division. For example one rare synonym for "a girl" (dziewczę) is neuter in Polish :) Male mouse is still a "mysz" which is feminine (it makes every kid in Poland think Mickey Mouse is a girl), there are more such examples :)
For me it's like articles in English - they have some use, but making them mandatory seems like a lot of boilerplate for little reason. What's wrong with saying "some book" vs "this book" if you care about definitiveness of a noun, and skipping it when you don't :)
One theory is that gender in languages aids in first langauge acquisition (while making second language acquisition more difficult). Children learning their first language are helped when there are multiple, redundant ways to recognize words and phrases.
Gender in modern European languages is primarily not about sex; in addition, the word itself just means "kind", in the same sense as "generic". Historically, there was only an "animate" vs. "inanimate" gender. The feminine gender developed from a couple suffixes (think -ic, -al, etc. though these are different suffixes) reanalyzed into a separate gender. Unfortunately nobody really knows why female names are feminine and male names masculine, unfortunately, since we don't have any evidence of PIE names.
> Unfortunately nobody really knows why female names are feminine and male names masculine
It was always kinda suspicious to me that in Polish (and other Slavic languages I think) feminine nouns end in -a, and genitive of masculine nouns also ends in -a.
Genitive denotes belonging among other things. So, if you have name "Mirosław" the female version is "Mirosława", and accusative for something that belongs to Mirosław is also "Mirosława" (for example "Mirosław's car" is "samochód Mirosława", and "Mirosław's wife" is "żona Mirosława").
It's kinda fucked-up, but it's not something people consciously think about, and at this point I think it's harmless.
Yes, this similarity between a suffix that eventually came to characterize the feminine gender and the male genitive was present since Proto-Indo-European. Some hypothesize a connection. Similarly, the feminine and the neuter plural in languages that still have the neuter plural usually have the same form, since the neuter plural and the feminine both evolved from a collectivizing suffix (transform a noun for sth. to a group for sth.).
