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Comment by Kye | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there are any examples of this in languages from the many cultures past and present that always recognized more than two sex-derived genders.

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English, for example, has two pronoun genders: animate and inanimate. The animate gender is further subdivided into two subgenders: masculine and feminine. Of course, none of this has anything to do with sex, unless you prefer to attempt reproduction with inanimate objects as many have instructed me to do using the imperative mood (literally "fuck it").

Slavic languages have both 3 classic genders and grammatical animacy for masculine. I.e. if you view an object as an inanimate object, it will have a slightly different declension in accusative compared to animate objects. But it only works for words of masculine gender.

Russian also has this for feminine plural accusative.

Doesn't 'it' refer to both inanimate objects and animate objects (animals)? Or is 'inanimate' a kind of term of art here refering to humans and human-like beings (instead of the more common meaning of 'non-living')?

Yes, it's a linguistics term. Animate things are perceived as having human-like agency. Many languages have a grammatical category clustering things like large non-human animals, the weather, or fire, or trees, together with humans. Animate. Everything else is inanimate and presumably less alive.

In English, many animals are referred to with "he" or "she". Being a mammal, large, being domesticated, being familiar, are all more likely to be animate rather than inanimate. A pet mare is going to be "she". Insects are always "it". Livestock or a reptile might get either. Babies sometimes get treated as inanimate. ("Is it a boy or girl?")

When I first learned English in school (almost 40 years ago) I was told that very young babies were grammatically neuter. Now I never hear anyone using “it” for a baby. Has English changed in the last decades, or was my teacher wrong?

I was loudly corrected on this subject (that is, I had used "it," and he asserted that I was wrong) by a drill instructor in Marine Corps basic training a little more than a decade ago.

I'm not quite sure how much credence to give his opinion considering that his expertise was in pain, misery, and shooting guns rather than linguistics and grammar, but he certainly had strong beliefs on the subject, and I wasn't going to try to convince him otherwise.

It can be considered an insult to get the sex of a baby wrong because males are generally considered more valuable than females. It's socially better the refer to an infant as inanimate than to mistakenly refer to a male child using the female gender. That said, as soon as one knows the correct sex (often indicated by the colour of cloth used in swaddling or clothing, or other markers like design patterns of trucks or ponies, as appropriate) it's important to start using the corresponding grammatical gender otherwise the early indoctrination lacks the enforcement required for a lifetime of identity with arbitrary social constructs like masculinity and femininity.

It's not a grammar rule, it's a social rule.

Most languages with grammatical gender have a distinct third class which linguists usually call "neuter". Languages like French are somewhat unique in having lost that third gender

It's important to note that neuter is distinct from "gender"-less nouns

> Most languages with grammatical gender have a distinct third class

There are thousands of languages. They have all kinds of different noun class systems including none at all. By “most languages” you probably mean “most of the widely-known Indo-European languages”.

No I said and I meant "most languages with grammatical gender". Other languages have different noun class systems, but these are not generally called "grammatical gender" if they're not tied to feminine, masculine, etc.

I like the fact that in most languages with 3 genders, the word kid is neuter: German "das Kind", Slavic "ditia", Greek "teknon".

I guess that's because a child is not a fully developed man/woman, so it's assumed genderless.

This feels like cherry-picking. There are non-neuter ways to refer to kids, including in those languages. Also, the diminutive (at least in German) is neuter, and is often used with children. Some of these terms are specifically neutral (i.e. not "boy" or "girl"). So the reasons are much more likely linguistic than ..sociological.

It's not cherry-picking, it's a well-known fact in Indoeuropean studies, and this interpretation is supported by some linguists.

For example (Luraghi 2018): "More than simply indicating referential sex, Luraghi (2009b: 127 and 2011) makes the argument, with which Melchert (2014: 264) agrees, that an involvement in procreation may have played a role in gender assignment in PIE. It may have been a key factor motivating the split between masculine and feminine. Nouns that referred to male or female humans/animals were, for the most part, assigned to masculine and feminine, respectively (Lundquist and Yates 2018: 2095). For example, there was the masculine noun ph2tḗr ‘father’ beside feminine méh2tēr ‘mother’ and wĺ̥kwos ‘(he-)wolf’ beside wl̥kwíhxs ‘she-wolf’ (Lundquist and Yates 2018: 2095). However, words that indicated children and young animals were often neuter in the IE languages (Melchert 2014: 264), e.g. Gk. téknon, OHG kind, and OCS dětę (Lundquist and Yates 2018: 2095). The humans/animals to which those nouns refer are too young to procreate, so, despite being physically animate, they are grammatically neuter.

A questionnaire experiment determined that feminine anaphors were used more if Mädchen referred to, for example, an eighteen-year-old girl “as opposed to a two- or [twelve]-year-old one, where neuter pronouns were more frequent. These results show that speakers perceive biological sex as more important for adults than for children” (Corbett and Fedden 2016: 522). This supports Luraghi’s theory that involvement in procreation was a factor—alongside individuation—in gender assignment in PIE"

Words that refer to children and which aren't of neuter gender today may simply be of later origin, when the system stopped being productive. For example, the Russian word for "child" is rebenok, which today has masculine gender, but stems from earlier "rebia" which was neuter (a synonym of another word, "ditia", also neuter).

Thanks for the citations. I'm always wary of this sort of reasoning since people often arrive at it via folk etymology, but this was very informative

Kgeist gives citations to the more general trend here, but in Modern Greek, terms for children of particular genders often also don't have matching grammatical genders. Thus, το παιδί and το τέκνο (child, nonspecific) are both neuter. But το κορίτσι (girl) and το αγόρι (boy) are also neuter.

If I'm not wrong it's feminine in Ukrainian (dytyna). Not sure what it is for all Slavic languages (I think it's neutral in Croatian). Also not sure what is the history for the Ukrainian version.

Just adding some info maybe others can comment.

The declension of "ditia" is not very productive (gen "ditiati" etc.) Usually a noun with a rare declension is moved to a different, more conmon declension by assigning a certain productive suffix which uses a common declension. Such suffixes have their own assigned gender.

Same for Russian "rebia" (rare declension) which became rebenok (common declension) by assigning -ok suffix which happens to be masculine. Or in Greek, masculine "pais" had unproductive declension (gen. paidos) so it was assigned diminutive suffux -ion which happens to be neuter, hence modern Greek "paidi" is neuter.

Danish have two grammatical genders, "neuter" and "common". Male and female have same grammatical gender. So conflating gender and sexual identity becomes really confusing!

There are languages like German or Estonians where gender and sex have the same meaning, or rather term gender and the idea of it simply don't exist.

That's interesting considering Germany had (more or less) one of the first queer centers in roughly the form we think of them now. I wonder what could have led to that and a diversifying concept of gender being wiped out of the language and culture...

I kid. Of course it was the purges leading up to WW2. I think they would have eventually developed as robust a concept of gender as we have today. It wasn't that long ago that we only had a concept in English of two binary sexes with gender being bound to secondary sexual characteristics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen...

German

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