> Grammatical gender, as in a whole lot of European languages
“In german, a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has.”
Imagine if Twain knew about some of the several-hundred-gender languages…
“In german, a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has.”
Imagine if Twain knew about some of the several-hundred-gender languages…
Edit: Since I am being downvoted it would be great if they understood the reference first. It is the Mark Twain humorous article on trying to learn the German language and in response to the above Mark Twain German language reference.
I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing. My understanding is that Fula, with ~24 noun classes, is widely agreed to have the most number of genders. A language with several hundred genders really would be unlearnable!
To the extent that genders are idiosyncratic, they are hard to learn. Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 of them.
https://medium.economist.com/we-went-in-search-of-the-worlds...
Interesting. Wikipedia says that Bora has more than 350 "classifiers", but that doesn't seem to be the same concept as genders. There is a specific section at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_(linguistics)#Noun_... contrasting classifiers and "noun classes", of which grammatical genders are a special case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_g... lists one language with "50–140 noun classes", several Bantu languages with 16-20 of them, and apparently all other languages of the world have significantly fewer. (I am not a linguist.)
• Noun classes/genders: usually a fairly small set (<7 in most cases outside Africa), are marked on multiple words at once, commonly distinguishes male/female or animate/inanimate
• Noun classifiers: commonly small (<20) but may be a larger set, most commonly occur as free words next to the noun
• Numeral classifiers: can be a very large set, occur next to numerals to specify what you’re counting
• Possessive classifiers: occur in a possessive construction to show the exact relationship between two nouns
• Verbal classifiers: incorporated into the verb to show what kind of object it’s acting on
• Deictic classifiers: incorporated into deictic words (like ‘this’ or ‘that’) to precisely specify the kind and orientation of the object you’re referring to
And then of course these overlap somewhat. Tuyuca — the language with ‘50–150 noun classes’ — has a set of classifiers which act simultaneously as numeral classifiers, possessive classifiers and deictic classifiers, as well as modifying adjectives. GP’s example of Bora seems to use numeral classifiers.
(All this is taken from Aikhenvald’s Classifiers, which is probably the best resource if you want to know more about this.)
Greville Corbett, for example, who has written a textbook about "Gender" (in the linguistic sense), defines gender as a type of noun classification which triggers agreement. In that sense, he doesn't require that it be centered around male/female or animate/inanimate. Other linguists will use different terminology.
Aargh… I don’t want to think about it. Just don’t get me started on the literature on SVCs, alright?
(My favourite linguistics quote, from Anderson’s A-Morphous Morphology: ‘Linguistics will become a science when linguists begin standing on one another's shoulders instead of on one another's toes.’ Oddly enough, he spends the rest of the book stepping on the toes of everyone else.)
> Greville Corbett, for example, who has written a textbook about "Gender" (in the linguistic sense), defines gender as a type of noun classification which triggers agreement.
Aikhenvald concurs, though she prefers the term ‘noun class’ over ‘gender’.
Yeah, that seems like a huge minefield. Another one is anything related to aspect, Aktionsart and any combination thereof. Or, one of my favourites, active-stative/split intransitivity/split-S/semantic alignment.
> ‘Linguistics will become a science when linguists begin standing on one another's shoulders instead of on one another's toes.’
That's a nice quote. One reason why I became annoyed with linguistics is exactly this feeling that there wasn't enough progress because people couldn't even agree on basic definitions.
Oh yes, that confused me for a very long time. Thankfully I mostly understand it now (with the help of the good people at https://www.verduria.org/index.php), but no-one seems to be able to agree on terminology.
> Or, one of my favourites, active-stative/split intransitivity/split-S/semantic alignment.
Ooh, I wrote a whole series of essays on that! [0] Morphosyntactic alignment is a favourite topic of mine. (I perhaps didn’t spend as much time on split intransitivity as I should have… I really should write an addendum or something which properly covers split intransitivity. Know any good resources, by any chance?)
I'll have to check your essays too!
edit: just had a quick look (not in detail yet). I love that you're using basically the same example sentences from Dixon that I also used in my thesis.
(And, yes, there’s only so many example sentences to go around :) )
It's quite impressive how much you know without formal training. I spent years learning about these subjects. However, since graduating in 2013, I haven't really done anything with linguistics.
Oh, I completely agree. I personally quite like Deal’s ‘ergative’ and ‘absolutive properties’ [0] as a first attempt; but I haven’t yet seen Lazard and Haspelmath, so I should look into that more.
[0] http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~ardeal/papers/Deal-ergativi...
> It's quite impressive how much you know without formal training. I spent years learning about these subjects.
Why, thank you! But I don’t think I’m so different in this respect: I spent a good portion of my spare time last year reading everything I could find about ergativity, and had read lots about linguistics even before that. (What can I say; it’s an interesting subject!)
turnip = (die) Rübe
(for those wondering)
When I learned that “-chen” is a diminutive („Hund” = “dog”, „Hündchen” = “puppy”), I assumed there must be a “Mad*” as a non-diminutive alternative word for women. Turns out, there’s an archaic root in „Magd”, which also became the English “maid”.
Many people confuse the grammatical genus (as used in practice in contemporary German) of German words with the biological concept of sex. This is made even more complicated by SJWs who confuse these two unrelated concepts (genus, sex) with their concept of gender.
So, it is better to imagine the genus of German word as something like the "'color' of a word" ("color" in the sense of the "color charge" of quarks).
this lasted as long as it took for someone to tell him he sounded like a toddler. “do you have any mitten-wittens? my handsie-wandsies are coooooold” was i think what convinced him otherwise.
It's the people who complain about "SJWs" who say sex and gender are the same.
still, the grammatical sense predates the sex sense by a bit, and has always been around to mean “genre”. So you always have to disambiguate usage
And then people usually get very huffy about which non-sentient nouns “share” “their” “gender”.
> And then people usually get very huffy about which non-sentient nouns “share” “their” “gender”.
Seems rare to me.
Ironically, you've just confirmed what GP said by confusing the concept of grammatical gender with the modern social studies concept of gender.
People described by their opponents as SJWs are more likely than, well, pretty much everyone else on the planet to distinguish biological sex, gender identity, socially ascribed gender, and grammatical gender.
The people who use “SJW” as a dismissive epithet, on the other hand, are most likely to fail to distinguish those things.
People described by their opponents as SJWs don't describe themselves as SJWs except ironically occasionally. People who want a neutral or positive tone use other terms like social justice advocates.
If people really confused grammatical gender with "the biological concept of sex", then we'd have a lot more arguments about random nouns needing to have feminine gender instead of masculine (there's this famous joke about "die Salzstreuerin"). But that's not really what happens. Nobody seems to care about the table being masculine.
What the argument is mostly about is that we use words that, by themselves, refer to masculine people and pluralise them to denote a possible mixed-gender group. This has everything to do with semantics (and so with how concrete biological/social gender expression is encoded in the words of a language), and isn't really that much concerned with grammatical gender, which after all disappears anyway as a distinctive feature once you're in the plural.