The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter
dannybate.com
dannybate.com
Edit: why on earth is this being downvoted? Seriously confused - is something here wrong or controversial?
Not to get too off topic, but I got snippy because I just don't understand what standards comments are sometimes held to. Mine may not have been the most interesting comment in the world, but when I go to the trouble of making what I think is a reasonable contribution to the discussion, and then some people decide it's so bad I should do karmic penance, it hurts my feelings. I apologize once again for taking it out on you.
It's not as though you can trade the upvotes for prizes anyway.
I agree that avoiding "i am surprised" generally works well for me, as i find ppl can be prickly toward a subtle one-ups-manship vibe. Personally, I often try to find an and-yes angle before adding something I know (esp negating), and it seems like it works alright :)
Anyhow, I appreciate how humble and thoughtful you seem, in making sense of this wierd "up/down vote" system we're compelled to sift meaning from in digital spaces heh
It's also true that "lo" is seldom used in Spanish and there are almost no neutral nouns (like in german).
> The issue is that these nouns do not behave like a fully-fledged gender. Importantly, there are no dedicated neuter endings for adjectives; instead, when a Romanian ‘neuter’ noun combines with an adjective, that adjective will be either masculine or feminine.
That is, “lo” is a remnant of the neuter but because it is accompanied by a masculine adjective (there is no such thing as a neuter adjective), it does not constitute a true gender.
Does it? Spanish articles derive from Latin ille / illa / illud ["that", as contrasted with "this"]. The neuter (nominative) form is illud. It is not obvious how this would have resulted in the form lo. Wiktionary suggests ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lo#Spanish ) that it derives from the masculine form illum, which makes much more phonological sense. (-m was already so weak in Latin that a syllable ending in -m completely disappeared when followed by a vowel.)
> From a Vulgar Latin *lo, *illu. Masculine pronoun from Latin illum, singular masculine accusative of ille. Neuter article and pronoun form from Latin illud, neuter of ille. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lo#Spanish
That means some uses of "lo" are derived from masculine ille while others are indeed from neuter illud. To answer your phonological uncertainty, the entry shows derivation from illud > *illu > lo.
> Distinct but unofficial Romance languages like [...] Asturian (spoken in Asturias, a part of Spain) seem to have definite articles (equivalent to English the) for three genders, not two. Asturian has el for masculine nouns, la for feminine and lo for those nouns termed ‘neuter’. [...] The key question is whether these supposed neuter definite articles demonstrate the existence of a neuter gender. Again, sadly, the answer is no. These definite articles and the nouns they are used with (no matter what their origins) seem not to constitute a neuter gender, but rather to signify that the noun is something abstract or a physical mass – that is, an indivisible substance, like water or gold. [...] Why does this contradict the existence of a neuter gender? Because we find this “mass gender” (Harmon 2007) used with nouns that were not neuter in Latin, and because nouns in these languages can appear both with and without the feature, according to whether they have a mass meaning or not. This is therefore not a grammatical feature on the same level as the masculine and feminine genders; instead, the mass gender is a feature of nouns determined by semantics – to what sort of thing the noun refers.
If you wanted to talk about "lo" in standard Spanish, it would make more sense to start from the starting point of what's discussed in the article -- e.g., "The 'lo' construction actually exists in standard Spanish as well, although it's more restricted than in Asturian; rather than being used with any mass noun, it's used to mean..."
"Te deseo lo mejor"
"I want the best for you"
In that phrase, the speaker doesn't know what gender "the best" is, so neuter is used.
That is super interesting to me. But I wonder how they defined moving versus non-moving things? At first I was thinking moving meant living things like animals, but a car moves. Of course, they didn't have cars/trains/etc. back then. But they did have boats (probably). Are boats moving or non-moving? And there are certain animals that don't ever move (especially in the oceans). Would they be moving or non-moving?
I’ll say: el clítoris.
“When asked by an English poet who was at the table to read the ancient couplet Discite grammatici cur mascula nomina cunnus/ Et cur femineum mentula nomen habet [Teach us, grammarians, why vagina (cunnus) is a masculine noun/ And why penis (mentula) is feminine], Giacomo answered it with a witty pentameter of his own invention: Disce quod a domino nomina servus habet [It is because the slave always takes the name of his master].”
"Key" in Italian and Spanish comes more or less directly from Latin 'clavis' (fem), I guess, they are being romance languages; in German however it may have a different root (aber https://www.dwds.de/wb/Schl%C3%BCssel#etymwb-1 says something about Latin origin too). Most likely its form was more similar to other masculine words when its gender stabilized.
The arbitrarity is among naturally gender-less things, as I observed. People, professions, animals have the "right" grammatical gender overwhelmingly. There was also a process in Romance languages. Neuter words tended to become masculine because many of them behaves more like masc than fem in most cases. thats why some woman body parts are grammatically masculine.
It doesn't say that "Schlüssel" has a Latin origin (see also https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Schl%C3%BCssel for an etymology). It says that some terms related to Latin "clavis" have corresponding German terms formed by somewhat analogous derivation from "Schlüssel". Most prominently "Schlüsselbein", literally "key bone", from "clavicula" (clavicle).
Schlüssel basically is a combination of schließen (close) and the ending -el. Here this is the third meaning of -el listed on wiktionary: "suffix in agent and instrumental nouns". (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-el#German). As far as I can see all of the words that have this version of the -el suffix are masculine.
Languages are full of those rules that just are not apparent anymore, because they are so deeply layered and often apply to only a few words that they are not useful to learn.
die Wurst, das Würstchen (the sausage, the small sausage)
der Mann, das Männchen (the man, the little man)
der Becher, das Becherchen (the cup, the small cup; this is an example in which the first vowel is phonetically close enough to the following "e" in "-chen" that no vowel change occurs (we do not even have umlauts for "i" or "e" in german)).
I just think it's an unimpeachable example of the disconnect between biological and grammatical gender.
“In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl.”
Despite its age the essay* is well worth a read for native English speakers struggling to learn German.
* https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html
His conclusion would also be wrong, since the grammatical gender has nothing to do with he biological gender - it's the gender assigned to all diminutive forms, regardless of grammatical gender.
E.g. "der Vater" (the father) becomes "das Väterchen" just as well without loosing his proverbial balls in the process.
But as others have noted, even in ancient times, the relationship between the gender of the word and the thing it represented in the real world was highly fossilized and often arbitrary outside of personal pronouns and a few animal names of agricultural importance (cow vs. bull).
Is this supposed to be weird? A grindstone won't do anything unless you put considerable effort into making it move. But you can go look at the sea and watch it constantly crashing into the shore, to say nothing of rising and falling with the tides.
It got me thinking about what sort of language a descendent of bonobos might develop, and even whether proto humans conceived of gender in a more fluid way during co-evolution of language and our biology that allowed for language. Wondering if there's anything here like the original sort of QWERTY entrenchment
Feel free to investigate stability theory and specifically duality in dynamical systems (living cells themselves are dynamical systems, and I would venture human society could also be described as one)
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Moshe-Farjoun/publicati...
http://home.eng.iastate.edu/~ugvaidya/papers/Vaidya_Allerton...
1. Farsi has two suffixes that make a noun plural (I am going to write things semi-phonetically): huh and un. Huh can be used for absolutely everything. Un can only be used for living things, e.g.: derakht-un (trees), daneshamouz-un (students), baradar-un (brothers, and its similarity to brethren has caught my eye).
2. You can use third person singular verb conjugation for third person plural subjects, but only if the subject is non-living.
This does seem likely to be a relic of something in the past, since nearly the same thing is true in classical Greek - neuter plural subjects agree with singular verbs, not plural verbs. (You weren't clear about whether singular conjugation is required for nonliving subjects in Farsi. I believe singular agreement for neuter plural subjects is mandatory in Greek.)
The actual distinction according to this theory (or to my favourite flavour of this theory) was: “able to act willfully” – “unable to act willfully”. The distinction was quite logical. Cp.:
(A) “Susan runs down the hill.”
(B) “Water runs down the hill.”
(C) “Susan drinks water.”
A speaker of Proto-Indo-European might have said, learning English: “This is strange – as if these were somehow the same acts or events. ‘Susan runs’, OK, but water does not run – it is dragged down. It does not act, something happens to it.” (And then the PIE-speaker might have speculated that anglophone people have an animistic worldview or so.)
In PIE the subject of a sentence seems to have denoted an actual agens; and there seems to have been a class of nouns for things unable to act willfully, hence unable to be the subject. So that the subject in (A) and (C) would have been a subject in the nominative, denoting an agens, whereas in (B) “water” would not have been seen as subject; the sentence would have been constructed differently and “water” would have been put in the same case as “water” in (C).
Because all over the old IE languages, neuter nouns have the same form for the nominative and the accusative, and it seems to have been rather the form for the accusative: Cp.
Latin masc. nom. sg. ‑us
Latin masc. acc. sg. ‑um
Latin neutr. nom. sg. ‑um
Latin neutr. acc. sg. ‑um
There is further evidence, too.
In principle, the distinction was quite logical, but its application is difficult and gets easily messed up over time until the old semantic distinction has become a mere formal one.
The lack of distinction between neuter nominative and neuter accusative is not just true of nouns in old IE languages. It's true of all grammatical categories in virtually all modern IE languages too (with some very obscure exceptions). Consider German articles der/den vs. das/das. Or English pronouns she/her vs. it/it.
More info: https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/18/accusative-equa...
https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/9105/why-do-...
Apparently one of the obscure exceptions is the Russian word оно - but they are indeed quite rare.
It is wonderful that this formerly semantic system (if the theory is correct) has left its formal trace over millennia and a range of thousands of miles.
Such preservation was likely in so far as otherwise a new suffix-inflectional distinction had to be introduced in order to distinguish the nominative neuter from the accusative neuter; and in the history of the IE languages, suffix-inflectional distinctions are rather removed than built.
Their concept of "moving things" was what is often translated as "self-movers" in translations of works like those of Aristotle. The idea was that they were things that could move without anything else controlling them. Cars and boats don't move unless humans are controlling them. But animals do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animacy
It isn’t always equivalent to gender though.
It's das Haus (the house), das Kind (the child)
So, Latin generally had M, F and N. Modern French (Romance language du jour) ostensibly has M and F. Modern Germanic languages have .... OK:
- German M,F,N. - English - nouns don't have a gender - Dutch - I don't know - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Dutch_grammar could be complicated - I've run out of language knowledge here
So that was scientific.
The article notes that proto-indo-european only had animate and inanimate and that is not the same as gender. Animate here is "alive". A human and a tree are animate but a rock is inanimate. Rocks (outside of Terry Pratchett books do not procreate).
Grammatically, it is the same. Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex, but rather a categorization system of nouns and their associated inflection patterns.
> Animate here is "alive". A human and a tree are animate but a rock is inanimate.
Outside of words for humans (and even there there are exceptions), the application of these categories is pretty random. For example, the Latin word for rock, petra, is feminine, not neuter.
Yep, a chair is male in Slovenian, but tree is neuter. Cats are feminine, dogs are male.
Studying German and French I quickly learned that their categories are different. You have to memorize the gender together with noun. Often you can guess correctly based on the suffix.
Funny story: I've always remembered my german teacher getting flaberghasted at our inability to gender a table (as english speakers).
She was all: "Come on! what kind of qualities do you think a table has!"
And us high-schooler english speakers were just sitting there all :|
What I'm trying to say is that logic has nothing to do with it.
I'm quite aware of that, especially after an unfortunate encounter that never happened with a table. She claimed to be French but it turned out to be German.
That all sounds a bit crap in English. I don't really know how "gender" for nouns feels or works in languages that emphasise it. We do ascribe gender to some nouns in English, such as boats/ships: "she".
Why on earth is petra feminine? I've been to Petra (capital P) and it is an incredible place.
Baseless speculation: I think I can see how gender might develop out of this paradigm. Far as I remember, there's the sky father and earth mother, and the sky impregnates the earth to create life. The animate/active is associated with the masculine, and the inanimate/passive with the feminine.
I've read a little about alchemy and the various ways one might determine the elemental nature of a thing, and this process was much more involved than one might expect, leading to a variety of interesting conclusions. I can imagine something similar behind the genders of things, at least at the beginning.
Danish and Swedish are both common/neuter
Norwegian depends on the dialect. The dialects with more Danish influence may drop the feminine (or they may use masculine adjectives/determiners with feminine nouns), but certain words will still more commonly be used with feminine determiners, even if it might be OK to use masculine. E.g., 'boka mi' ('my book') and 'kona mi' ('my wife') is more idiomatic than 'boken min' and 'konen min' (I'm not a native speaker, so I can't be entirely certain about this).
Icelandic has m/f/n, as does Faroese I believe.
Look at the map here: https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danske_dialekter#/media/Fil:De...
Ordinary nouns might not appear to, but pronouns do; in fact, you can see two different gender distinctions in the English pronouns.
"Plain" pronouns have masculine, feminine, and neuter genders, he / she / it.
Interrogative/relative pronouns don't, but they do exhibit a gender distinction between who (for people) and what (for everything else). And since relative pronouns are applied to ordinary nouns, you can use relative who to identify which nouns belong to the people gender and, by implication, which don't.
(As a technical matter, you could also classify nouns into the masculine / feminine / neuter genders by looking at which pronouns substitute for them. This isn't really going to work in English. But the rules for who are strict enough to reflect a robust grammatical distinction in the language.)
The person/nonperson gender distinction is frequently read back into the plain pronouns, with it being reserved for nonpeople.
Hungarian has no gender and doesn't even have distinct pronouns for he and she, but it does have a distinction between the pronoun ő (he/she/sentient animal/sometimes informally for inanimate objects) on the one hand and the determiners (?) ez/az (literally this/that, for inanimate objects) on the other hand. There is also a clear distinction between ki/mi (who/what). I've never heard of this being analyzed as a "gender" distinction, but I guess if the definition of gender is along the lines of "a group of words that behave in a distinct way", then it applies.
The relative pronouns are qui (masculine) / quae (feminine) / quod (neuter); again I don't think any distinction is available to be made between people and nonpeople. You have to use the pronoun that matches m/f/n gender.
> I guess if the definition of gender is along the lines of "a group of words that behave in a distinct way"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender :
> In linguistics, grammatical gender is a specific form of noun class system in which the division of noun classes forms an agreement system with another aspect of the language, such as adjectives, articles, pronouns, or verbs.
In this case, we have an agreement system between nouns and pronouns.
There is another very significant division of noun classes in English, the division between mass nouns ("stuff"; "ice cream") and count nouns ("things"; "ice cube"). This has effects in several areas of the grammar (e.g. mass nouns do not have plural forms), and it does have some agreement effects also (you could analyze many and much as the same word in agreement with a count noun (for many) or a mass noun (for much)), but this distinction for whatever reason usually wouldn't be thought of as a "gender". The people/nonpeople distinction, which is reflected only in agreement effects, is much more typical of the terminology "gender".
I've heard it explained by saying that "they're typically men's spheres" as rationale from my brief exposure to the language, but this seems deeply unsatisfying for a variety of reasons - id est, in comparison to something along the lines of loanword/archaism/evolution of root/evolution of grammatic gender.
In Latin, those nouns are grammatically feminine and would be referred to with feminine pronouns and modified with feminine adjectives. There are a handful of first-declension names that take masculine pronouns and adjectives, none of which spring to mind at the moment.
This is not correct; dnautics mentioned a set of nouns which are common and always masculine. Textbooks generally cover this set specifically. Wheelock provides a list and the acronymic mnemonic UNUS NAUTA, which -- it points out -- doubles as a way to emphasize that nauta is masculine, not feminine.
Another factor is that all three of those nouns are loanwords from Ancient Greek, which had quite a few 1st declension nouns that are masculine. Agricola (“farmer”) is an example of a native Latin masculine noun ending in -a.
You are right that occupational words that were typically associated with men tend to be masculine. Generally, nouns that describe people do match the gender of the person, though there are some exceptions.
Note: you’ll also find some -o nouns in Italian and Spanish that are feminine (e.g. la mano “the hand”).
Weeeellll... Latin doesn't distinguish nounal case endings from adjectival case endings. (I believe Russian does, which makes resolving certain grammatical questions much easier.)
But the gender of a noun is defined by the gender of an adjective that agrees with the noun. So quercus alta, a tall oak tree, is unambiguously feminine, despite ending in -us, because we can see that the adjective agreeing with it is feminine.
How do we know the adjective is feminine? That's easy, it ends in -a, and -a means feminine.
This tends not to support the theory that "-a does not mean feminine". :-/
"abl. sing. only pinu; gen. and abl. plur. pinorum and pinis)", but then it goes on to cite the accusative plural pinos in Virgil. And that note implies a strict distinction between dative plural pinibus and ablative pinis, which seems weird. Not that the rest of it isn't weird, I guess.
(As an aside, the note for quercus that "dat. and abl. plural do not occur"... I can believe that a lack of genitive and dative forms for vis is a fact about the language. Dative and ablative plural forms existing for pine trees, but not oak trees, feels more like a coincidence of the historical record than a fact about the language.)
No, I'm not sure. See the sibling subthread. They're not less weird in the fourth declension, which is itself overwhelmingly masculine or neuter.
That said, second declension forms do seem to be attested for nearly every case of pinus.
> The number of surface realizations of genders (target genders) can be different from types of agreement (controller genders). In Rumanian nouns divide into three gender classes. There are two surface markers of genders in singular and two in the plural, but three combinations of these … Thus, there are two target genders and three controller genders (or agreement classes).
It’s worth noting that such systems are not at all unusual, unlike what the article implies: Telugu, Somali, Khinalug and Burmeso all provide examples of such systems. I certainly don’t agree with the article that the Romanian neuter isn’t a ‘proper’ gender: it’s just that it’s a controller gender rather than a target gender.
Sanskrit and Hindi have no equivalent of the English word "the" (and, I think, of "a" either).
Sanskrit and Hindi have no concept of upper case vs. lower case letters, just a concept of letters.
Also, a vertical bar is the equivalent of the period or full stop of English.
Just realized (IIRC) that neither language has the concept of single or double quotation marks either :)
The lack of spacing also led to an interesting phenomenon where most (perhaps nearly all) Romans could not read silently, and had to process written text by reading it aloud to themselves. There are some recorded instances of figures from Greek and Roman antiquity reading silently, but it’s generally remarked on as being surprising to those around them, and attributed to individuals that are otherwise attested to have been exceptionally intelligent (Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Saint Ambrose).
There are many other points in common, such as similar-sounding everyday words like mother/ mata/mater, father/pitr/pita/pater, deci/dasha, brother/bhrata, deva/deus, and many more, although all may not have been derived through the common ancestry route; some can be loanwords or other,e.g. via Hindi -> Arabic -> European.
Edit: I just had to read further :)
But I’m not convinced by the author’s argument that Romanian neuter is not a real gender.
I believe it's to phonetically make it separate from "aroma".
You could say the same as "o libro" mentioned a paragraf below, which is spelled "o libbrõ" while libro is, and was, masculine
And it needs to be discussed why german, greek and slavic kept it, and why the most modern, english, stripped all genders, but came from one of the most conservative family, german. In fact northern german is much more modern than the others. It did several radical simplifying transformations, leading to english in the end. (Simplifications = modern) Even leaving the modern roman languages behind. Which probably has Rumanian as it's most modern part. Simpler than french, italian, spanish.
[0]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Russian_nouns_by_gen...
I know Russian isn't a Romance language, but it is Indo-European in origin, and I was wondering if maybe there was some parallel process that ended differently there.
But I suppose you're right, it's reasonably outside the scope of this article.
The phenomenon this article talks about seems specific to Latin:
> To trace the decline of the neuter, we can begin with a theoretical principle: the process must have begun early, at a time when Latin was still a unified language. If we do not accept this as a first premise, it becomes very difficult to explain why the neuter is absent from the whole Romance family – why its decline was so uniform. This is not to say that the neuter had died completely when Romance languages first emerged, only that the seeds had already been sown and the die already cast.
Though I suppose your observation that Russian (and I think other Indo-European languages) still have the neuter gender kinda confirms that.
But Slavic languages are very much a different part of the Indo-European family with most of them having bucked the trend of dropping declension of nouns and adjectives (Bulgarian has largely lost its declensions).
The argument of the article that the adjectives or articles are either masculine or feminine doesn't hold water for me because the neuter nouns behave differently from either masculine or feminine ones.