English has something that looks like animacy: the rules about when you can use "who", rather that "which"/"what"/"that". You can call people "who" but you don't usually call objects "who".
I was thinking that there's another very niche place in English usage, and I've no idea if it counts as animacy linguistically but it seems in the same conceptual ballpark: the use of "they" or "it" for a collective. For instance, you can talk about "the government" as a grammatically singular noun, but which is understood to be a group of individual people. And you can assign a level of animacy to it/them by using grammar that lines up with "they" or "it". If you say: "The government is bringing in tax reforms" you are emphasising the monolithic, inanimate thing-ness of the institution. If you say: "The government are bringing in tax reforms" the essential meaning is the same, but you are emphasising the collection of individuals who make up the government, who collectively _are_ the government, and ascribing a sort of animacy to them. Now usually it can be used interchangeably to emphasis the animate individuals or the inanimate collective, but I think there are times when it does cross into a question of grammar, and people find grammaticalness in both directions. Some people will complain that you can't ever use "are" with a singular noun, but on the other hand when my English ears hear an American broadcaster saying "Liverpool is playing at home to Manchester United" that's an unquestionably ungrammatical stick in the wheels of my linguistic bicycle! The reason I wonder if it's something to do with animacy is that I can't think of instances where the same goes for collectives of definitively inanimate objects. In the same way that for groups of people either form is grammatical (at least for many people), you can say "The herd is mooing" or "The herd are mooing" for animate, if non-human, animals. But you can't say "The anthology are well-written", "The collection are on display" or "The housing estate are built of red brick". In fact, if you were to say the latter, I think the understanding that your brain would instinctively try (and fail) to make sense of would be to understand a collective reference to "the housing estate" as meaning the group of people living there, rather than a collective of inanimate houses. But people aren't normally made of brick!
I think Zak is just talking about plurality and our conventions for assigning something to singular or plural. What Simon is speaking about is "humanity": is the noun a label for a person or otherwise? A dog is animate but we don't say "a dog who is eating". We can go two ways with "its" versus " her / his", depending on how well we are acquainted with the dog; "my dog chewed her bone" vs "the dog in the street chewed its bone".
@@zak3744 This difference and the choice therein may well exist in British English, but in American English we do not have this option as far as I can tell. A collective noun is always treated as singular if there is just one collective. We will always say, for example, "The government is..." or "The band is..." If we want to assign agency to the members of the collective, we will have to be more specific: "Politicians are..." or "The band members are..."
In the possessive case, you can refer to objects with "who". For example: Congress passed the statute, whose purpose was to raise taxes. (Yes, there is an alternative -- Congress passed the statue, the purpose of which was to raise taxes -- but you won't win any style points for that.)
You know, Simon, there is more to a RU-vid channel than just “content”. There’s your voice, interesting digressions, non-content scenery and sounds, and quirky graphics. Those things work together to get my thumb up.
I thought it a bit more comprehensive as well. Luke did a very "Hollywood" video, whereas Simon looks like he just came from the pub and has a genuine interest in what he is talking about.
Agreed, there's something precious about this style, that will hopefully endure the test of time. No one dares say "authentic" online, but my initial reaction to discovering him (on the subject of Old English) was: "Finally! The good stuff that nerds out for real." The overall atmosphere of the videos is like the icing on top.
"...having said that." *Proceeds to show trees on a window*. You've got my view. BTW: as a Spanish speaker myself, it was kind of unexpectedly thrilling listening to you speaking some Spanish here. Very nice pronunciation for someone who only studied Spanish some time in their life :).
Exactly what I needed today. I just had an exam on linguistics and I messed up a bit. These videos always manage to spark my interest so I don't come to hate linguistics in times of frustration.
There is no proof that items are ‘inanimate’ because one simply cannot know for sure such things, so the terms moving vs non-moving elements / things / beings etc are more suitable than animate vs inanimate! Maybe every single particle / chemical element is just as alive as hum’ns, but cannot express it in obvious ways, because only moving organisms can express things in very obvious ways! And hum’ns could never know for sure, so it’s better to assume that every particle is alive!
Plants / trees / flowers are very much living beings (non-moving organisms) with a known gender, and are above hum’ns - so those ‘hierarchies’ were _ed and made no sense! The only correct hierarchy is: 1. Me/Myself/I & my protectors (us Gods) and other pure elements such as flowers / trees / plants and birds / bees / butterflies / fish / ladybirds / snails etc 2. Then, the hum’n guys that are pure / v!rgin by choice and on my side who aren’t one of my protectors (the protectors are the ones closest to me) aka my supporters 3. Then, the other non-hum’n animaIz that are not mammaIz 4. Then, non-hum’n mammaIz that are herbivores 5. Then, hum’n animaIs that aren’t an impztr and do not consume animaI products / meats 6. Then, non-hum’n animaIz that are non-herbivores 7. Then, impztrz and other zynnerz, which is technically, most hum’ns
An interesting feature (I personally think anyway) is that in Italian grammatical gender is sometimes used to create semantic variety. The most classic example is that fruits generally have feminine grammatical gender (“mela” apple, “pera” pear, “pesca” peach etc) while the same word root but with masculine grammatical gender indicates the tree (“melo” is the apple tree, “pero” pear tree, “pesco” peach tree etc). Sometimes the two variants of grammatical gender aren’t so clearly distinct. I remember a friend of mine who was quite frustrated by the pair “tavolo” (masculine) and “tavola” (femminine). Both those words mean “table” but are used in different contexts and semantic expressions.
I think this is a not at all uncommon (and very interesting!) method of word formation, and even more common in languages with many grammatical genders (or classes as they're called when there's more than 3 of them/it's not an indo-european language). Swahili uses "ndege" for both 'bird' and 'aeroplane' and they're distinguished by how other words in the sentence agree with them. I have heard of using this kind of system to produce new ways of insulting someone too - by talking about someone using lower animacy forms than you usually use for a person, for instance.
There's this cool language in Pamir, Roshani, that uses the feminine for speaking of something undeterminately and the masculine for something determinately! So cool
In French, there is un destin, une destinée; un espoir, une espérance. I don’t really know the subtle differences between the two, but maybe a native speaker would say they have different “flavors”
I watched Luke's video a couple of days ago, and while it was very well produced, I find your video much more enlightening on the subject. Also, your production values have been increasing markedly. Keep up the good work.
I literally just got through reading the section in The Nature of Middle Earth, where Tolkien mentions that the Elvish languages distinguished between animate and inanimate rather than masculine or feminine
Thank you very much for this information. Between your video and Luke's which you referenced, I have a much better understanding of the concepts, but I am sure I will have to watch again to really get it. I just spent a week in a Gaeltach working on my Irish language skills (which are barely more than beginner) and I kept wondering what was up with this gender stuff because it was so different from Spanish.
I'm a secondary school French teacher and I get the question "Why are there genders?" so, so often. Finally, I can frame some kind of answer. Thank you 👏🏻
unfortunately the french language messes up the gender distinction, but back in latin it was so regular and beautiful. it is still so in italian and spanish at some degree.
@@cleitondecarvalho431 I'm intrigued by what you mean...I've spoken French fluently for so long I just take its gender distinctions for granted; they make implicit sense to me because I'm so used to them. I'm learning Spanish and I'm always surprised by the times when Spanish nouns take different genders to French, when in other ways the languages are so similar. So how did French mess it up?
@@hannahemiliasings He is probably referring to the predictability of gender in Latin, which has 5 declensions and 5 or 6 cases depending on how you count them. There are a few exceptions for example in every Romance language I am aware of the word for hand is feminine, la main, la mano, etc. and the Latin word is itself but manus but based on the 4th declension category it should be masculine. Because of French final syllable weakening many transparent morphological markers for gender have been lost despite certain rules of thumb such as -e TENDS to be feminine but not always. Other Romance languages did not experience the same phonological history as French, which is unique in terms of Romance languages so take a word like arbor in Latin, which is transparently masculine and modern French arbre which gives you no indication really but contrast that with Italian albero or Spanish arbol, both of which indicate transparent masculine gender and there are plenty of other examples. French has some of the worst orthrography of any modern European language, with only English and Danish possibly being worse and that just adds to the unpredictability. So it is not about gender distinctions being taken for granted but the relative irregularity of the predictability of the genders compared to Latin above all but also other Romance languages with less intense final syllable loss.
@@spellandshield I see! This is a fantastic explanation. And it also explains why I struggle so much to predict gender in new vocabulary even now, having spoken it fluently for nearly 10 years. Thank you!
That was pretty accurate to point out that "grammatical gender MOST OF THE TIME doesn't have anything to do with biological sex", as a speaker of English, Polish, Ukrainian and Russian I can say that we do attach slight feminine, masculine or neutral characteristics to words if we want to emphasize something's femininity or masculinity or neutralism (the last one we often use towards people in order to undermine their position or to show strong condemnation, because neutral gender is percieved like something that is definitely lower in status). Btw, I reckon that the grammar influences the perceiving of our world so badly that for instance almost all the cartoons that show let's say [a pen] as a character in it, will almost always be a faminine character because its grammatical gender is feminine but [a pencil], as a character in the same cartoon will be a masculine character, but at the end of the day I bet no one could ever explain to you why on earth a pen is more feminine than a pencil. PS: the example with the words "pen" and "pencil" was based on Ukrainian. In Polish for example the case with those two words would be different. The Polish think that pencils and pens are male XDD. So if you ask people to make up a little trivial story for kids with a pencil and a pen people will give them characteristics according to the word's grammatical gender in the majority of cases, which I find very interesting.
Yep. That’s what I was trying to say under Ranieri’s video as well. My first language is Italian and I can confirm that, for me, and for the majority of native speakers, there’s a slight association between social gender/biological gender and the gendered nouns we use. Honestly, as much as I love his videos, I would like for a person who’s a native speaker of such languages and grew up speaking a language with gendered nouns to talk about this topic. Because I think most of English speakers just “assume” that there’s no correlation between social gender and gendered nouns.
My understanding is that the Russian word for Owl is feminine so when Winnie the Pooh was translated into Russian, they made Owl a girl rather than try to find a noun for him that was masculine. On the other hand when concieving of Garald in the Witcher, the author purposfully created a masculine form for the Polish word for Witch, which I think was interesting.
@@frankharr9466 Yeah, for animals, the grammatical gender definitely does not remain "completely uncorrelated" with the way we perceive their behavior / character in a story.
@@frankharr9466 it's "Geralt", but yeah it's interesting to see how people see it, I myself and my friend noticed it immediately but my mother and my other friend didn't and just thought about "Wiedźmin" (Polish for "Witcher", from "Wiedźma" - "Witch") as a completely made up word
in Spanish, if a word ends in -a you can be /fairly/ confident it's feminine but there are exceptions, notably words that come from Greek like sistema and planeta. really enjoying the video!
I wish French was as consistent as Spanish. I've been trying to learn it for years, and while there is a typical feminine ending -e in French and it's pretty regular with adjectives, there are so many exceptions with nouns that it's not much of a rule. It's almost pure memorization as to what gender a noun is.
Same aplies to portuguese, and most "o" ending words are feminine. there are also some sufixes that are consistently from one gender or the other, like "-l(masc, like o cordel, o anel, o final, o sol) -gem (fem, "a garagem, a imagem, a vertigem, exc. "o/a personagem, o/a virgem, depending on the gender of the person") -ade (a cidade, a saudade, a verdade) there are some sufixes that can be either gender, depending on the gender of the person it refers to, like -ista(o/a artista, motorista, cientista, comunista) -nte (gerente, presidente, ouvinte, governante) and there are some where there is no way to tell at all. -orte can be "a morte, o corte,a corte(pronounced differently from "o corte") a sorte, o porte" -nte when it doesnt refer to a person "o dente, a frente, o pente, a mente"
French also does whacky things with its Greek loanwords. Problème, dialecte, système and others have the wrong gender! In Greek at least it makes sense. Το σύστημα is neuter because it ends in -μα (ma) which is a derivational suffix for the result of an action (a system is the result of the action of an ancient Greek verb συνίστημι which essentially means "I set up things together", a system is a set up). Ο πλανήτης also is then masculine because it has an -s at the end. But in Latin, unlike Greek, the first declension didn't have an -s even for masculine nouns!
@@davigurgel2040 this -ista suffix is from the ancient Greek -ιστής derivational suffix which means "the person who does something". In Greek it takes an -s to mark that it's masculine, but in Latin, where it was loaned, it doesn't
Thank you very much Simon. This is a superb scholarly explanation of an extremely interesting topic. Ranieri’s video is completely inadequate, as it centers on his idea that nouns acquired gender as a function of their sound. Your exposition shows that this is the reverse of what actually happened. Italian nouns that end in ‘a’ end in ‘a’ because they are feminine, and are not feminine because they end in ‘a’. As you clearly set out the core of grammatical gender as being the separation of animate and inanimate objects, you must know about the theory that Animism is the prevalent source of all our current belief systems, and that grammatical gender is a response to the respect (and fear) that early societies had for the spirit of objects that has the power to help or harm them. J G Frazer in The Golden Bough explains that word gender can be seen as a product of either patriarchal or matriarchal societies, and Robert Graves in his extensive forays into Greek myths explains them in terms of Greek culture transforming over time from matriarchal to patriarchal. It has been put forward by others that in the belief system of Animism, the sun was the supreme being, and that the patriarchal society of the Roman world makes the Latin word ‘Sol’ masculine, whereas the onetime matriarchal world of Germanic culture makes the German word ‘Sonne’ feminine. The only example that I know of in English of an inanimate object having a gender is that ships, and by extension other vessels, are feminine. It strikes me that this is the last vestige of superstitious Animism that English speaking seafarers have retained due to the extremely dangerous nature of what they do.
Hi, Simon! Here's something amusing for you. In Hungarian the word for queen consort is királyné, where the -né means "wife of" and may be used for any married woman by attaching né to the husband's surname (women increasingly refuse this); when the queen, like Elizabeth (Erzsébet in Hungarian) is a female king, then the word for queen is királynő, literally "king female". You guessed it, király means king. Something important that you failed to mentioned is that gendered languages often assign the neuter gender to persons. For instance in German "das Fräulein" (the miss or maid), "das Liebchen" (the little loved one"), etc, are neuter because of the diminutive -lein or -chen or other, and their entourage of article, adjectives, and pronouns obediently agree in being neuter. Apparently (you may correct me if I'm wrong) in Old English wi:fman was masculine because of the -man, while the wi:f whence it came was neuter. I am myself a linguist and I believe this is the most fun occupation in the world after sex.
In spoken German, the personal pronouns mostly agree with the natural not the grammatical gender (for nouns referring to humans). In written German it‘s becoming more and more old-fashioned to use grammatically agreeing personal pronouns, too. Example: Da ist das schöne Mädchen! (Neuter agreement)Ich würde gerne mit ihr (not ihm) ausgehen (feminine agreement). There‘s the beautiful girl. I would like to go out with her.
I've already seen Luke's video and was pleasantly surprised to find you made one on this subject! I absolutely adore your presentation style and diction. My native language is Spanish (Caribbean, Puerto Rico dialect), and loved this explanation on grammatical gender. Thank you for the effort and research you put in your content!
in russian we don't have the grammatical category for noun animacy, yet there's this little grammatical rule left from the times when we did have it: masculine nouns in accusative case have different forms for animate and inanimate objects. since it's only an atavism, it doesn't always work well, for instance 'robot' is considered an animate noun. there's even this 'tricky question' regarding the matter: which one is more dead - a corpse, a deceased, or a dead man (труп, мертвец, покойник)? of these, only corpse is declined in an 'inanimate' way
Czech does distinguish noun animacy, but only for masculine nouns. It affects plural nominative endings (including the adjectives): německý tank, německý voják. Dva německé tanky, dva němečtí vojáci. Note the palatalization of both the adjective (ck → čt) and the noun (ky → ci)
hold on, I'm 100% sure that teachers taught us this noun animacy category (in Russia). it actually exists, but it's often impossible to distinguish "dead" things from "animate" ones.
Thank you, Simon. As someone who regularly beat my head against a table trying to make sense of cases while trying to learn German in college (I barely passed that class!) it's at least comforting to know there WAS some kind of rationale behind it all.
He didn't explain the case system - only gender- but I'll make an attempt anyway because I have no life. What the case system mostly serves as is to disambiguate (often to the point of redundancy) what word order may leave unclear. The best example I can come up with in English is how indirect objects are handled: I gave him the papers I gave the papers to him Both of these communicate the same idea, but second would be easier to interpret if one was not fully paying attention (as is often the case with casual speech). Also, languages like to place information that is more important to the topic towards the front of the sentence, so having a case system frees up word order to allow for that. With the example above, one might want to emphasize either of the two objects by putting them earlier in the sentence, so "I gave _the papers_ to him" might emphasize the idea that it was the papers that were given, not who they were given to.
As a native german i had as a child at school no problem, to learn Standard German. Before comming to school i only spoke my local dialect. Here in dialects ( unstandardized german) words and even grammar are often different.
@@charlesmartin1121 : When you speak a dialect of a language , it is no problem, to learn the ,Standardized' version, yes. What i wanted to describe, was that i as a child didn' t understood, why there are two versions of language.
I think it's interesting to read about Bantu's noun classes. I do get the idea that noun classes and grammatical gender might be considered as entirely different things by some experts but even if that's the case, to make the comparison can be thoughtful
Well it's not super different. They often work in very similar ways, even though it doesn't always follow the Indo-European way of doing it. I'd say the main difference between noun classes and grammatical genders is how many there are. If there are two or three, we generally call them grammatical genders, while if there are more than that, we call them noun classes.
One of the weird and wonderful things about the indo-european language family is how often the feminine grammatical gender is associated with "a" suffixes. This also stretches to people's given names. I know there are exceptions, like how Andrea is a male name in Italian. But it any case, it would be interesting to hear if there is research on how this characteristic has become so widespread. Maybe it's a trait that has persisted since starting out in the PIE "eh2" suffix mentioned at 15:54
Polish has an interesting system. Alot, not all, but alot of people have names taken from Christian saints. But most Polish names, in masc. and fem., have diminutive forms. Eg: Monika can become Mona or Monia, Karolina becomes Lola (or Karolinka for something like "little Karolina") and Katarzyna can become Kasia. But some names just receive a modifier, like Mateusz becomes Mateuszek ("little Matthew", if English allowed for it) and Mariusz can similarly become Mariuszek. Polish is also pretty consistent about name endings. Boys' names (apart from a popular name like Kuba) end in consonants. And I think every woman's name ends in "a" as far as I can think and tell.
@@Nikelaos_Khristianos That's very cool. To everyone: In my original comment I was just as much reflecting on how this pattern holds true for common nouns, such as in my own language of Norwegian where feminine singular nouns end in "a" in the definitive form (unless one uses just common and neuter genders, which is an option). I also notice how this impacts tradenames, where companies will often choose to brand themselves or their products with fake (or real) Latin-sounding words ending in "a", probably because they want the warm motherly vibes this gives off. Here are just some real examples from my area that come to mind: Retura, Advania, Yara, Akasia, Sabima, Inspecta. You don't find many examples that ape the base form of Latin neuter or male nouns. Off the top of my head, Invictus Games it the only thing I can think of, and doesn't that sound a bit scary?
I have only a rudimentary (hobbyist) knowledge of Old English but I believe it was in some case opposite in O.E., namely, -a suffix denoted masculine nouns. There is the interesting given-name in Old English, that a king (of Northumbria or Mercia?) had: King Ana. Which is a little funny seeing as how it is one of the the most widespread feminine give-names in the world, especially in Latin languages.
Yes, it's a pure remnant of that suffix. But in the successor languages, it became a nominative feminine ending. The endings of other cases are different. By the way, this "a" reduced to "e" in French (silent) and German.
This is an interesting topic to me. I've been teaching myself Ukrainian and I try and guess or figure out why words are either masculine or feminine and what endings to use with them. It's interesting how English lost that but all the other languages didn't. I'm going to check out that paper and Luke's video too. Thank you for the links. 😊
The endings in nominative case determine the gander in Slavic languages most of the time. It has very little to do with biological sex of the animate categories nouns describe. You can even change gender of a given noun without hinting at ambiguity of assumed social gender / biological sex of whatever/whomever you're referring to. Consider a dog in Polish. The standard word for a dog is pies, but you can also say (affectionatelly) psina (feminine) or psisko (neuter). In neither of the latter two cases does the speaker imply that the dog is a bitch or a castrate).
On Grammaticalization, you only mentioned the later stages of this process. First, a content word (e.g., the English verb "to will"-'to want, wish, or desire') or phrase (e.g., the English "going to") has to adopt a grammatical function (become an auxilliary verb, in the case of "will").
I'm Polish so the concept isn't perplexing to me, but I realized that i haven't given it a thought before. And i thought that your format will be really interesting. Beautiful country. I wish I could retreat into one too. Thank you for making it accessible.
Nice one. Interestingly, Navajo has a complex hierarchy of animate to inanimate across a range of degrees: humans/lightning → infants/big animals → midsize animals → small animals → insects → natural forces → inanimate objects/plants → abstractions. This affects the order in which nouns appear in sentences. An example of grammaticalisation can be seen in French verbs. What were originally personal pronouns can now be analyzed as personal prefixes. Take laver - to wash. Phonetically, it is conjugated as /ʒlav tylav ilav ellave ɔ̃lav vulave ilave ellav/ The verb endings, preserved in writing, have been lost in speech (except for the formal third person plural and second person). Other Romance languages are pro-drop but these prefixes are obligatory. They cannot be stressed. If emphasis is required, actual pronouns are used: moi je lave, toi tu laves, lui il lave, elle elle lave, nous on lave, ..., eux its lavent, elles elles lavent.
yeah, and in spoken french oftentimes you can’t use the verb on its own even when there is an overt subject, like instead of saying « mon frère est gentil » (my brother is kind) you’d say « mon frère il est gentil » or « il est gentil mon frère »
Well, a big example of grammaticallisation, that happened in Romance language in general, is how the future tense descends from the infinitive of the main verb + the verb "to have" conjugated in the present. In French for exemple, with the verb "to wash" (laver): Je laverai (laver+ai) Tu laveras (laver+as) Il lavera (laver+a) Nous laverons (laver+[av]ons) Vous laverez (laver+[av]ez) Ils laveront (laver+ont) It Portuguese, object pronouns are even placed in between what used to be the infinitive and the verb "to have". For example: "I will wash" [Eng]: lavarei (lavar+hei) [PT] "I will wash you" [Eng]: "lavar-te-ei" [PT]
Interestingly some Indo-European languages like Shetlandic Scots or Asturian have a hybrid grammatical gender system where countable nouns are either masculine or feminine and uncountable nouns form a separate group without grammatical gender within it. Some Shetlandic examples: Uncountable, no gender : Da watter's caald --> it's caald (the water's cold--> it's cold) Countable, masculine gender : A canna fin da pen drive --> A canna fin him (I can't find the pen drive --> I can't find it) Countable, feminine gender : da phone's ringin --> shø's ringin (the phone's ringing --> it's ringing)
It's surprising that you know about asturian's neuter. I'll put some examples in asturian if you'll excuse me. In asturian (central dialect) we mark masculine with -u, femenine with -a, and neuter, for non-countable words, with -o; so we say: El coríu ta moyáu (The duck is wet) L'aigla ta moyada (The eagle is wet) But El suelu ta moyao (The floor is wet; note that it is uncountable, so the adj. is in neuter) La ropa ta moyao (The clothing is wet; again, the word is feminine, but it is uncountable, so the adj. goes in neuter).
@@Andres-vg1wy is it true that there are "masculine" neuter nouns - ie neuter nouns declined as masculine nouns, and "feminine" neuter nouns - ie neuter nouns declined as feminine nouns, but there are also pure neuters which are not declined as either but use "lo" (¿or its asturian equivalent - is it spelled differently?) and a distinctive neuter ending? (¿or lack thereof?)
I'm not sure what's more interesting here - the fact that a language that is arguably a dialect of English still has grammatical gender (albiet without differing articles or suffixes), or that your first thought for a countable masculine noun was a _USB stick._ The more you know.
I don't think that the neuter category in Asturian lacks gramatical gender. You would say "La madera vieyo" (The old wood) and "El carbón vieyo" (The old coal) in which both have the "vieyo" adjective instead of "vieya" or "vieyu" but they are still separated by their articles wich are gendered. What Asturian does have is a 2 way distinction betwen gender and contability in which a noun can have any combination of the two, unlike the neuter of German in which if you are neuter you aren't masculine or feminine. I also dislike the term neuter gender for the asturian phenomenom, I much prefer the term "neutro de materia" or neutral of matter, I guess, because it doesnt mix this phenomenom up with gender and it specifies that what triggers it is the uncountable status, being a so called "matter noun".
Loved how you pronounced Late PIE like it is just a matter of course. I couldn't do the same without pausing for at least two seconds and repeating the phrases thrice to get all the phonemes right... Respect!
Polish preserves the animate-inanimate distinction for masculine nouns, adding a third one - personal. This is why some people classify Polish as having five genders (which makes sense to me), while some people don't, because for most cases the endings are the same. It does however affect the words for 'these': 'these man' would be 'ci panowie' or 'ci mężczyźni', while 'these dogs' would be 'te psy' (both of these nouns are masculine). It affects plural as well and the distinction can be seen most clearly in words that can refer to either an animate object or an inanimate one: 'pilot' can either refer to an airplane pilot - or to a pilot episode of a TV show. 'piloci' means 'airplane pilots, but if you were talking about multiple pilot episodes, it would be 'piloty' (again, both are masculine nouns). It does affect adjectives as well, but only in plural - 'black men' is 'czarni mężczyźni', but 'black dogs' is 'czarne psy'. For numerals as well, 'two men' are 'dwaj mężczyźni', but 'two dogs' are 'dwa psy'.
Actually it does not preserve it, but rather developed it again. In Proto-Slavic there was no animacy distinction in nouns as far as we are able to reconstruct it
@@zelimys6331 perhaps 'preserves' was not the right word, but I simply meant that the animate-inanimate-personal distinction is not instead of, but alongside the feminine-masculine-neuter one.
Also note that while plural adjectives have a two-way split - czarni (masc. personal) / czarne (masc. nonpersonal, feminine, neuter), numerals occur in three forms - dwaj (masc. personal) / dwa (masc. nonpersonal, neuter) / dwie (feminine). There are also collective forms of numerals which are used with mixed gender groups and pluralia tantum (in this case the nouns are in the genitive case): 'dwoje ludzi' - 'two people,' presumably a man and a woman 'dwoje drzwi' - 'two doors,' in Polish 'drzwi' ('door') is pluralia tantum This even applies to the word meaning 'both' - 'obaj / oba / obie / oboje,' though I very often hear people use the collective 'oboje' when referring to two men (the correct form would be 'obaj').
Actually this is not a distinction of animate vs inanimate but masculine-personal vs non masculine personal. "Ten Pies" (this dog) is animate masculine in singular while "Ten Kamien" (this stone, btw cognate with English "hammer") is inanimate masculine in singular. However in plural they both are non masculine-personal: "te psy" (these dogs), "te kamienie" (these stones). Animacy is of no relevance here- what matters is whether the noun describes a human male or not.
Well, I had watched Luke's video, which I enjoyed as a Portuguese speaker (two cases pretty much like Spanish). I have to say I preferred your video. :) Thanks for doing this. I was aware of gramaticalization, but I didn't know it had a name. Thanks for that!
Not only your very interesting video has answered a lot of questions, it answered questions that i wouldn't even ask. Thanks a lot again, Simon and have a great start of 2023!
In several Slavic languages there is a distinction between masculine-animate and masculine-inanimate nouns. It mainly determines how the accusative is formed.
There is also a distintion between masculine-personal (human) and masculine-non personal (not human) in plural forms. So you have ci mężczyźni / tych mężczyn (these men) and vs te niedźwiedzie / tych niedźwiedzi (these bears) in Polish. Ci is these in nominative plural for human males only, te is for everybody and anything else.
Luke sent me here in a reply on his video. Thanks for sharing some ideas on how this gender came to be! It's still a surprise how and why that animate gender split, and why things within that category were grouped the way they were. This is the first video of yours I've watched and I love the chill vibe you present with and how clearly you present your ideas.
I've started to learn German on Duolingo about a year and a half ago, and the adjective case thing almost always causes me to throw my phone in frustration.
@@swyjix That would make Wasser grammatically transgender! Wasser was born neutral (das Wasser) 😂 BTW, no article used, e.g. "Nein, Mineralwasser, bitte."
Bengali, an Eastern Indian language does not have grammatical gender but Hindi and many other Indian languages do. Could you add that do your cool chart? Thanks for an informative video. Love your voice and the outside views you showed.
As someone learning japanese I've always wondered what's up with 御 ("o" or "go", the honorific prefix) and it's relation to grammatical gender. Some words take o as a prefix and others take go. The rule is that native japanese words take "o" and chinese loan words take "go," but there are exceptions in both cases (ごゆっくり is native but takes go, お客様 is chinese but takes o). I've tried googling this but could never find good results. Realistically the answer is just that o is the japanese reading of the kanji 御 and go is the chinese reading (a dichotomy pretty much every kanji has), but the inconsistency and grammatical significance make me question it.
@@Ma1nspr1ng yes iru 居る is for living things and aru ある is for non-living things (they are also used in some grammatical forms/functions but that's besides the point). That said the words essentially just mean "there is/are living things" or "there is/are (non-living) things" and since japanese is very context based this mainly serves to specify context (that you are talking about a living thing or an object). imo this is not as interesting as it sounds though because it's like saying english has a solid/liquid distinction between the words eat and drink. It's not grammatical it's just the definitions of two words
I left this comment on Luke's video, so I'll leave it here too. 😅 I remember being so confused by the grammatical gender in my mandatory French classes (and German is even more confusing because of the three genders); I could never remember which words were what. Spanish, my favourite Romance language, is a lot easier in that regard since there's at least a loose rule for which words are which. One nice thing about Finnish is there are no articles to worry about, not even definite or indefinite, although in spoken Finnish they often use "Se" ("It") the way we use "The" in English. They also only have one word, "Hän", that means both "He" and "She" (although that can lead to some ambiguity sometimes, especially since in puhekieli, they also use "Se" to refer to people, which makes me feel like I'm being rude even though it's normal for Finns). The rest of Finnish grammar is a gong show to learn, although at least it's a lot more consistent than English grammar is.
@@kessera5645as a native French speaker, feminine nouns do not on average have a more negative connotation, however, many words that describe occupation have a neutral connotation in the masculine but a negative, often sexual connotation in the feminine, which might be where this idea stems from. « Maître » means master, as in « maître charpentier » (master carpenter), but its feminine « maîtresse » means a woman that is involved in extramarital affairs. « Un courtisan » either means a nobleman or a man who is looking to pursue a relationship (a father could refer to a man wanting to marry his daughter as a « courtisan »), and it has a connotation of love and respectability in the masculine, but its feminine « courtisane » means an expensive prostitute. « Un parépatéticien » is a synonym for a philosopher in the masculine, but its feminine « parépatéticienne » means a prostitute. « Coquin » generally means someone who is playful, but its feminine « coquine » means a woman who is overly lustful. There is also the fact that according to the 18th century language reforms, most prestigious occupations do not have a feminine form in France French (but they do in Canadian / Belgian / Swiss and other dialects of French). So in France French, a doctor « docteur » would always be masculine, even if the doctor was a woman, so a person would have to specify « une femme docteur » (a woman doctor). Other dialects simply say « une docteure » (a doctor, in the feminine). And this old rule technically applies to many professions such as author, president, mayor, etc. So to make the distinction clear, there is no particular positive or negative connotation given to the gender of a noun when it refers to an object or concept, but there is a lot of sexism baked into the French language when it comes to occupation / profession.
Great video as always. 14:21 You could argue this has already happened (in terms of "will" not meaning anything and becoming verbally reduced by most speakers), it's just become the contraction 'll attached to the pronoun, rather than than the contraction "wi" attached to the verb.
you look good here, simon 👀 great video, too. i must say as a native speaker of a language with grammatical gender, learning languages that don't have it is also very confusing for us.
In Polish there are no articles but the determinatives are different depending on the gender and there are 3 in singular - English 'this' is in Polish either "ten" (m.), "ta" (f.) or "to" (n.) - and 2 in plural so "these" is either "ci" (masculine personal - for human males only) or "te" (non-masculine personal - every other noun). This even stretches to the equivalent of "that" and "those" - "tamten", "tamta", "tamto", "tamci", "tamte" (and since "tam" means 'there" it's literally "therethis" so it's also an example of gramaticalisation). This gender split is used for all the adjectives but the declinations also differ for male in singular depending if noun is animate or non-animate. And since Polish really loves to push that gender thing to extremes in plural the numerals differ depending on the original singular gender until 4 (it all gets a little simpler starting from 5). This is to say Polish grammar is hard and you should be grateful for how easy English is (or it'd be if you fixed your spelling).
This might surprise and intrigue you, it did to me when I learned about it last semester at university. I do Ancient Greek at university, and it has EXACTLY the same rules regarding pluralisation and declension of numbers as Polish. It's practically identical. When I asked why this might be so common, my lecturer (who is super knowledgeable about PIE) reckoned it might be because numbers 1-5 are the most commonly used numbers in any language, so they're more likely to have similar rules. I also ran this by my Polish teacher, and he suggested it might be related to the fact that "5" can also be treated as a "handful", which is why 5 is the point of divergence. He also pointed out a possible etymology with the word ,,pięć" possibly being linked to ,,pięść" the word for fist, like a "fistful" in English. As an aside, even as a native speaker, phonetical inconsistency is a massive pain in the ass in English! I have been made to look foolish numerous times for trying to use a word in spoken conversation that I had only ever read in a book and never said aloud before, only to completely wreck the pronunciation and look twice as stupid as a result. English! 😤😤😤
@@Nikelaos_Khristianos Yes, it seems that because Slavic peoples were the last ones to leave the ancestral plains our languages kept a lot of features of (late)PIE. I was recently watching a lecture about PIE and vowel changes in different forms of words -- o-e-empty -- and was like this is exactly how it works in Polish. So I suppose the closer the languages in the other families are to the PIE (e.g. Ancient Greek, Sanskrit) the more features like these they share. As counting goes this probably goes all the way to brain structure as many animals - like dogs or even as distant can count up to five. Then it becomes many even though they cans still do less - more differentiation. Add to that that "pięść" - 5 digits on human hand - and it's no wonder that's the cut-off. But us keeping it in the language makes Polish numerals crazy complicated (they divide people to only two kinds - Polish language experts and everyone else). Yes, if it wasn't for the disconnect between spelling and pronunciation (especially of vowels) English would be one of the simplest languages. Simplified rules and small amount of exceptions make its grammar so much easier. But you can teach a person to read Polish even if they don't understand what they are saying so we win there.
i know the maxim "older is better," but it's a curious thing to consider whether proto-hittite (unattested) _did_ have three genders (noun classes), but that it was reduced to two for some reason (e.g. speakers of a two-classed semitic language became the most common speakers of late proto-hittite)? in other words, could something like language mixture (and sprachbund more broadly) influenced hittite's grammar system? regardless of any conjectured catalyst, however, it's the same amount of logical change: reduction to two genders vs. addition to three genders. and all that said, most research does indeed support an animate-inanimate system evolving into three noun classes, i just find the question interesting.
Great Vid! Thanks! Amazingly informative!! 💕 Most importantly for others: don’t be afraid of inflectional languages or different grammar! People who aren’t d*cks aren’t going to crucify you for getting things wrong. Sadly alot of people getting riled up on both sides (of the argument for language reformation) concerning grammatical gender being linked to perceived gender concepts although it might not have been originally. 😅 at least in Germany it’s caused quite a bit of discussion and I‘ll be honest as someone whose languages are primarily German and English, I would prefer even to simplify German, but arguments of „tradition“ and „cultural identity“ are difficult to discuss. 😅
With the "will" situation, I wonder if the contraction "-'ll" as in "she'll walk" will see the future tense indicator being added to the verb ("She lwalk") or the subject at some point in the future?
I am Spanish . When I used ti study English in highschool , they showed us the full forms of verbs first and later the contractions : first we learned " I will go" , and later l' ll go. My childrek are being taught the contractions first. It seems to me that the reason for native speakers not being able to tell appart " they ' re " , Their and there, might be because the " are " in they're and the " have " in "should' ve ", are not considered as gramatically distinct for those who make mistakes writting those words .
I'm Czech and the Czech words for many common animals such as a cat, a mouse and a squirrel are feminine (kočka, myš, veverka), and it always takes me by surprise (again and again, even though I should have got used to it by now) when English speaking people refer to those animals as a "he" because I naturally think about them as female, simply because of the grammatical gender of my language 😄
I wrote this in a reply to another comment, but - the dialect of English I grew up with _did_ have a sort of grammatical gender; certain things in the environment (things like beetles and boulders and vehicles and snakes and such) could be referred to as 'he' or 'she' in a predictable manner that had no bearing on their actual sex (especially since some of them were inanimate) It was only used in very informal contexts, and it was a form of slightly marked speech - you could also refer to any of these things as 'it' or 'that' and that was more neutral - but there was a system to it, because using something other than the expected gendered pronoun would have sounded incorrect. And it wasn't personification; you weren't using it to make something seem lke anything other than it actually was, just to draw attention to it. Funny thing is, I still found grammatical gender a confusing concept the first time I was introduced to it in the language classroom - because I was learning it in a formal context, using standard English, which only uses natural gender (even in cases like personification - where the object assumes the natural gender of the person it is being rendered as). It wasn't until years later that I realised I'd been using a system of grammatical gender in my day-to-day speech, for basically my entire life, without even thinking about it.
@@Tefans97 Australian English, from one of the regional subdivisions that aren't academically recognised as sub-dialects because - well, honestly, because linguists haven't got around to studying that yet, given the very large number of other languages to study in the region. Which is fair.
The only thing we do with an article in English is pronounce the article, “the,” differently before a vowel or a consonant. Not all native English speakers do this, but most do here in the US. This is not a hard and fast rule, there are probably exceptions, but before a word with a vowel, the word “the” is pronounced with a long E, (i.e., pronounced “thee,” as in, “the animal”) and before a word with a consonant, we pronounce it with a short E, (i.e., pronounced “thuh,” as in, “the dog”).
It's interesting that Swedish, having first arisen from Norse with a three gender system, evolved back into a dual gender system resembling that of Hittite. 😄
It is interesting. Dutch did the same. But neither of these have gone back to match Hittite all the way, as Hittite had no concept of masculine / feminine even in pronouns.
Yeah, the system in Swedish doesn’t really have anything to do with animacy. I guess there could be some conception that common words (en-words in Swedish) are more animate but it holds basically zero water when you realize for example that the word for child is neuter, while the word for chair is common. I believe the Swedish and Dutch systems resemble each other quite well though as they both result from merging of Proto Germanic masculine and feminine into one gender (common)
Polish has 3 genders, animate-inanimate distinction, verbs encoding gender of the subject in past tense, and different declension of nouns in plural depending on whether it's animate and plurals changing depending on the gender mix of the members of the group :) Lots of fun.
Some more features of the mind-wrecking Polish gender system I haven't seen mentioned in the comments so far: * Verbal forms have a gender in some tenses (past, conditional/subjuntive). Furthermore, the addition of gender morphemes often causes alternations in surrounding phonemes: zaczął (he began), but zaczął + a = zaczĘła (she began); znalaz + ły = znalazły (they-non-virile found); but [edit] znalaz + li = znalEŻli (they-virile found) * Numerals have an incredibly challenging relation with gender. (In)Famously, the English numeral two has 17 equivalents in Polish. In many cases, there are separate forms for groups of virile nouns (kilku mężczyźni, a few men), non-virile (kilka kobiet, a few women) and groups of children/mixed men and women/animal offspring (kilkoro dzieci, a few children). To add salt to injury, these numerals sometimes govern a different gender and number as far as verb agreement is concerned: Wielu męźczyźni przyszło na imprezę (Many men it-came to the party)
You have one mixed metaphor in your comment: "To rub salt in the wound" and "to add insult to injury". Bafflingly, they mean the same thing. Even English can be as weird as Polish at times. 😅
@@Nikelaos_Khristianos You're absolutely right, silly me x) I think it's how close salt and -sult sound that tripped me up. Thanks a lot :) I will own it and leave it as is for everyone to mock!
@@patriciaadams3010 I feel you, I'm in the middle of it all now. Despair not though, after a few mental breakdowns all that remains is the constant need to complain to some poor soul about how hard Polish is :') Pro tip: RU-vid is great for that! Jokes aside, it's a very hard but genuinely fascinating language.
The line between animate and inanimate sounds so much more desirable than masculine and feminine. Like the difference between fall and drop is quite expressive. Don't know whether this comes across but utterly love your videos, which often have me intriguued for weeks.
Thank you, Simon. In Czech, masculine nouns are divided into animate and inanimate classes, and their grammatical endings differ accordingly for some cases. In Dutch there is common gender and neuter. So, it appears that some modern languages have remnants of animacy; while others are still in the process of simplifying gender, perhaps en route to eradicating it completely.
@@marmac83 The difference is fading, but not quite gone yet. It's only still visible when referring: 'de stoel en zijn leuning' or 'de vereniging en haar leden'.
I recall hearing about a study that appeared to determine that many modern romance speakers did, in fact, describe masculine nouns using more “male” descriptors and feminine nouns using more “female” descriptors. For instance, if a “bridge” were feminine, it might be described as “graceful”. Now, I do not recall many more details about this study, but am wondering if you have heard of this and what your thoughts would be on it.
Your Spanish pronunciation is actually really good. I can tell you speak with a Germanic accent but definitely not like a modern English speaker, you sound as if you spoke Norwegian or Icelandic. I guess it's the Old English influence
American English speaker here. I learned German as a high school student and enjoyed it. My accent was very good, although grammar was more problematic. When we visited friends in the Netherlands I tried speaking Dutch. They were very amused at my German accent. I’ve noticed the same thing trying to speak French and Spanish-I sound like a German speaking a foreign language
Fascinating! Unless you covered it in a previous video I missed, I’d be extremely interested in a video on when and why English almost completely lost grammatical gender. It’s quite anomalous and must have happened rather quickly.
10:45 Interesting that the inanimate gender that turned to Neuter had the rule that Nominative and Accusative have the same ending, this is the same rule in Latin.
Fascnitating how the late Proto-Indo_European words for wheel, house and tree slightly resemble its polish equivilants... According to my research this also incudes most other Slavic languages
This was an interesting look at gender systems in indo-european langauges! I would have loved to hear about systems in different places with all sorts of class systems (like Zulu, famously), though I understand that this is more your area of expertise :)
Zulu for all it’s complexity, the gender system never “saw the need” to distinguish masculine and feminine in people, so in that respect resembles Hittite more than it would something more elaborate than Indo-European. Most humans are in one gender, one specifically for people. In some Bantu languages, teenagers are classified differently, with trees. I suppose all cultures agree they are weird. (I live in South Africa and know some Zulu and Sotho).
Half-Europe speaks Slavic languages and Slavic languages have animate/inanimate distinction. It's a late invention and it arose to resolve ambiguity in masculine nouns: originally nominative and accusative cases were identical in masculine nouns (after the phonetical changes where the original endings -os and -om like in Greek/Latin disappeared entirely), and due to the free word order, when you'd say "father sees son", it wouldn't be clear who was seeing who. So Slavs invented to replace accusative with genitive, so instead you would say "father sees of son". It made sense to use genitive because in function its forms coincided with partitive/ablative which is an "accusative-like" case. The trick to replace accusative with genitive forms didn't appear for inanimate nouns because in phrases like "father sees stone" it's perfectly clear that stone, being an inanimate object, can't see father, it's the other way around. Hence in Slavic languages you use one form for animate objects, and a different form for inanimate objects. Maybe it was something similar in Proto-Indoeuropean.
Slavic languages still have the concept of animate/inanimate nouns, although it is practically used only with the masculine nouns (effectively making inanimate masculine nouns a "neutral gender frondists" among animate masculine ones - accusative case of such nouns equals nominative). Not sure if baltic langs have the same thing.
3:44 "In Spanish you can be confident that if a noun ends in a it's feminine" - el problema, el sistema, el paradigma ... words deriving from ancient Greek words that are neuter, become masculine in Spanish regardless of the ending.
I was reading about the Ubang language recently where the men and women have separate lexicons (for the most part). I wonder whether in the deep dark past, this was more common, and over the millennia they melded. Languages with two grammatical genders call them "masculine" and "feminine", so perhaps this is an unconscious or subconscious harkening back to that.
_Some_ languages with two grammatical genders call them "masculine" and "feminine". Others, such as Danish and some variants of Norwegian, call them "common" and "neuter".
The treatment of animate and inanimate things in grammatical uses, would relate to subject/object in a sentence. Something that became indicated by cases at some point. Still you will find the two cases most related to this dichtomomy nominative and accusative retained a glimpse of that. Take Latin as an example. Masculine is -us nom. and -um acc.; while neuter is in both cases -um. In Greek it's similar. So the neuter is in it's ending indifferent between nominative and accusative, indicating those words were normally used in accusative. They are inanimate and don't possess agency. In the end neuter words can become subjects and cases denote the function. The genus still stucks. Even if it's original function is obsolete, it gets new ones. One of which is indicating gender, another being information fail-safes (redundancy sounds so negative for something quite important).
I think that you can't look at animate/inanimate nouns without also looking at active/passive verbs. Animate nouns were subjects of active verbs, while inanimate nouns were subjects of passive/deponent verbs. That might explain why some nouns could originally take both animate and inanimate forms.
@@Nikelaos_Khristianos In modern Slavic languages like Russian, the accusative takes the same endings as the genitive for animate nouns and as the nominative for inanimate nouns, but having two nouns with nominative endings in the same sentence isn't confusing because it implies an active verb with the animate noun as the subject and the inanimate noun as the object. Some reconstruction of early PIE give a -s case marker for nominative singular of animate nouns but no marker for the nominative or accusative of inanimate nouns, which suggests that early PIE was ergative (verbs could be both transitive or intransitive), like "close" in English with "I closed the door." vs "The door closed." The -s case marker indicated agency, and usually only animate nouns could be agents. Inanimate nouns that did not take the -s case marker also couldn't be used in dative or allative cases. PIE had three declension paradigms, an accent-shifting paradigm for inanimate nouns with no marker in nominative or accusative singular and with no dative or allative, an accent-shifting paradigm for animate nouns with a -s marker in nominative singular, a -m marker in accusative singular, etc., and a static non-shifting accent paradigm with both inanimate and animate nouns with markers similar to the accent-shifting paradigm for animate nouns. Early PIE had different demonstratives for animate "*so" and inanimate "*to". The -s animate case marker might have come from the "*so" demonstrative. Early PIE had a massive vowel reduction, and the accent-shifting strong paradigms might reflect nouns that predate the vowel reduction, while the static weak paradigm might reflect nouns created after the vowel reduction. I found the references below: allegatifac.unipv.it/silvialuraghi/Gender%20FoL.pdf (The origin of the Proto-Indo-European gender system: Typological considerations) www.kloekhorst.nl/KloekhorstOriginNominalAccentAblautParadigmsMS.pdf (The origin of the Proto-Indo-European nominal accent-ablaut paradigms) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_nominals (Proto-Indo-European nominals)
Gender is a huge misnomer, that have led to this "one's pronouns" semi-controversy in modern English. It's a concept invented by Greek grammarians, who noticed that nouns decline like female or male names, or, in other cases, "neither," cognate with the Latin "neuter." In fact, the number of _classes_ varies across languages from none, like in English or Bulgarian, where they have disappeared save from pronouns, all the way up, AFAIK, to 14 in Swahili. Does it make sense that Swahili has 14 _genders?_ The same is exactly true for e.g Polish with its three-class system... What's remarkable is that feminist speakers of "gendered" IE languages insist on exactly the opposite to what English feminists want: to construct gendered forms of inherently non-sexed words, like "engineer," "doctor," "bookkeeper" etc., regardless of what their natural class (gender) is, even it that goes against the grain of the natural language life, just like "he" is (or used to be) a pronoun for a person of an unknown or don't-care sex. The world of speaker and language relation reflected in a mirror, if you wish!
It is not a misnomer at all. First, because words can and almost always have more than one meaning, sometimes even opposite meanings. Next, the word "gender" in the grammatical sense actually predates the usage of gender to mean "sex" in English, and the distinction between sex and gender certainly is much more recent. The word also makes complete etymological sense as designating a class or type ("genus").
Polish I find has a really elegant solution for non-gendered occupations. Or rather, occupations that don't have a seperate masc. and fem. declension. Like for ,,doktor", one simply adds ,,pan" (mr) or ,,pani" (madam) in front of the noun, so it's like saying "Mr doctor" or "Mrs doctor" if English were to have a similar system. Also, Polish actually has five genders in essence: The masc. gender has three seperate genders (personal, animate, non-animate) plus neauter and feminine. This also extends to pluralisation of verbs, as it accounts for virility vs non-virility (how's that for some Latin-style grammar! 😂) Edit: Swahili has 14 genders because it has no cases. These genders account for case-like concepts such as, "to give to someone" or "to go somewhere with someone". It makes sense in context, it just sounds bizzare without it.
Was hoping that it would be discussed in the vid but happy to bring it up; Spanish is evolving in some places and communities to have a neutral gender form for people who are nonbinary. For example, here are some established neutral forms of various words (el/la: le, él/ella: elle, un/una: une). Heres an example sentence: Elle es bonite por dentro y por fuera (they are beautiful inside and out) I think its wonderfully interesting to see a language evolve in real time this way and interestingly go back to a 3 gender system that it historically had before in its proto indo european form.
These are neologisms, which are not the same as natural language evolution. It is possible for neologisms to be incorporated into the language, but that doesn't make it the same thing as natural evolution.
(1) Animacy: Not only are people and animals, plants and fungi, likely to be two degrees of animacy, but other creatures or things or concepts can be somewhat animate. Gods and goddesses, other spirits, ghosts, or the wind or flowing water could be regarded as animate or semi-animate. How would you categorize them in our modern world, or in a pre-technological or pre-writing culture? Other qualities may be important enough to acquire a grammatical gender function. One I've seen mentioned is "useful or safe/edible plants" versus "unsafe/indeible/poisonous plants." Those could be very handy to mark in an early society. (2) Besides verb pats sticking together to gain inflections (prefix, suffix, or infix), prepositions or perhaps other words may become "sticky" to a root word. Or how words are strung together in a phrase may become more fixed and then sticky. English has instances whee words "move around" in a phrase or sentence, and affect meaning, but could otherwise become "sticky" to fuse with a word to form inflections at some future language sage. However, English also has some kinds of situations where a noun or pronoun and a preposition have begun to stick in informal or not-so-standard or paper mode, while others are a verb plus a preposition. So we have things like gotta, shoulda, haft, where either two verb parts have fused and eroded, or a verb plus a preposition, or a noun plus a preposition. (and so of course an example escapes me right now, but those happen similarly in colloquial or informal / vulgar (not bad, just non-standard or common) speech levels. -- So words like have or had or shall/will, should/would and so on, or of, from, to, at, others, may tend to merge. Also, for. English gets some old, prior stage verbs by fusing the preposition and verb, where nowadays, we tend to reverse it to verb plus preposition. Examples from Old and Middle English: upkeep, outstanding,. Compare modern setup, pickup, login or logon or logout. Oh, and "used to" (do something), a fixed form auxiliary verb, is another example. Likely other modal verbs and auxiliary verbs, except word order enters into that too. Think of how we usually show everyday speech, dialects, slang, things like gotta, wouldja. Oops, and there's another category: a verb form and a pronoun fusing and eroding, with a common sound change in between connecting them. Would you becomes would ya becomes wouldja. Forms of you/you/your/yours tend to do this but the y may fuse with the preceding consonant to give -ya, -tcha, or -dja. (You can think of this without me spelling out examples.) The 'em for them and 'im for him and 'er for.her also might do that. The point is, we may be seeing the as an early stage before full merger to create some new grammatical endings, but as yet, it's still unclear. The American y'all (you all) as opposed to you'll or ya'll for you will, is its own thing, gaining ground maybe in the US and possibly elsewhere due to media exposure. But whether we get singular we, you, they, versus plural we-all, you-all / y'all, they-all, remains to be seen, and I/me/my/mine and he, she, it and their forms are likely to stay around. So...change happens.
Hello. Great video. Can you also do a video on why English has generally lost gender while most other European languages have retained it in some form?
I think it is most interesting that English pronouns have retained grammatical inflections, i.e. gender and case, that have been lost in the other parts of speech. Pronouns in English seem to be very conservative parts of speech, although they are also losing such distinctions (we've lost "thou" "thee" and "ye" and are in the process of losing "whom"). I wonder what it is about pronouns that makes them so conservative and if this happens in other languages.
As the other comment said. Words that are used all the time tend to stay. Less used words and constructs are more prone to be reduced, removed, or changed, particularly when languages go through a bottleneck with few speakers or when several groups of people have to communicate across some differences - as in Old Norse meeting Old English/Anglo-Saxon. Similar, but different, something had to give to make it simpler for the other party. As what became English ran into more barriers like that, it lost its case system and its gender system. Old Norse went through something similar, but not to that extent. West and East Norse got more different, and there may have been additional bottlenecks, but the net result was in any case that the case system was drastically reduced in modern Scandinavian. As someone said - children basically have to re-invent the language when they learn them, and if they don't learn "all" of it, which they never do, something will inevitably change as generations go by. But pronouns are used so much that they mostly stay (but then you have words like "whom" which is less used and thus in danger).
"Can't pronounce this author's name" my dude you pronounce English from a half dozen centuries I think I you can be trusted to have a stab at it 😂 love your stuff dude ❤
The preterite in the Germanic languages consisted of two parts of the verb, the stem + the verb for ”to do“ right after it. And at some point it merged together.
Thanks very much. I have a problem that you can possibly enlighten me about, and that is the two definite articles that are in Danish and the other Scandinavian languages, i.e. 'en' and 'et'. It seems to me that 'et' generally refers to intangibles such as 'written' - 'at skrive', but then there is the word 'huset' - 'the house', which is most definitely tangible. What I am asking is is there a system to the definite article usage, or is it just convention and relatively unsystematic.
I think you're mixing things a little.. "at skrive" - "at" is just the infinitive article. In English "to write". "written" simply translates to "skrevet", as you would expect - '-et' indicating the past tense. Nothing to do with definite. Real examples of masculine and neuter articles are "bilen" - the car, and, as you mentioned, "huset" - the house. Mass nouns, or uncountables, are a bit random.. and potentially more difficult to learn. Nouns in general are easy, just learn the article and the noun as one single unit. "What's that? - Det er _et hus_" Then remember "et hus". "What's that? - Det er en hund" - Remember "en hund" (the natural reply to that question). Mass nouns though.. there's no indefinite article. But there is a definite ending when it's in the definite form. But as there's no indefinite article the question "What's that?, pointing at milk, water, juice.. the reply will be a noun with no article, so how do you learn it? Because you need to.. in the definite it'll be either neuter or masculine (or even feminine, in Norway), and that's not systematic. Water and milk, for example: water is neuter in the definite, milk is not.
It's good to have two takes on this from two talented linguists. How grammatical systems (affixes, infixes, phrasal stuff that may become adhered to the root words) and how things change (morph) or even swap, or erode, then redistribute, or develop new systems, has got to be an interesting phenomenon. I wish we'd switch to a new term other than "gender" for grammatical gender, which really doesn't cover it in non-into-European languages. The term mood or mode also doesn't quite work, but it's what we're stuck with from past customary usage. I wonder if French will lose its gender system or what will replace it, since there's still contrast for some words, but in the spoken forms, often it has disappeared. Imagine how French would confound linguists if we didn't have the written and historical records, both within French and from neighboring contacts. Even the written changes can seem unlikely. Like aqua to eau [o], Augustus to août [u]. Or how ei could change to oi to [wa].
You could always call morphosyntactic noun and pronoun classes (that require concord/agreement in determiners/adjectives/verbs) but that's really a mouthful, so I prefer grammatical gender. Or maybe English could the Latin term used in German, namely: genus
"noun class" is the term I've seen, and the one I use. It describes those categories such as inanimate/animate and masc/fem/neut while avoiding the problem of "grammatical gender," which as you said doesn't work as well outside of IE languages, and additionally even if you try to tell people that grammatical gender doesn't necessarily refer to social gender or sex, it's hard to break the association.
@@pawel198812 "Class" is the term used outside of languages that have an I-E style system of grammatical gender-the Bantu languages, for instance-so it's probably the best choice for something neutral.
Hi Simon, slightly off topic but if you get the opportunity I would be really interested in how you prononce or would have prononce old English names. In particular names that used æ etc like Ælfwynn? Indeed just what old English names would have originally sounded like. Thanks for your posts. All very interesting.
Personally i find words like water or pollen much more alive than a word like piano. In olden days some things that we now know as inanimate were considered alive or having a spirit. I can see how words can be coupled into one and in some cases becoming a grammatical function beyond recognition for us today, this also happens in pidgin languages i think.
I've heard the Bushmen of South Africa have three categories for animate nouns: 1) animals that can eat them or pose a threat, 2) animals that they can eat, 3) fellow humans. Only themselves and Asians fall in category 3 ... Caucasians and Blacks are in 1 😓
English does have a degree of animacy, which works as a grammatical category. The difference between "he, she" and "it". Animals are frequently ascribed animacy, and given he or she, even when gender is not clear, meaning this is clearly a question of animacy rather than an exception made to clarify the animal's sex when such information might be necessary. Vehicles are often ascribed animacy, depending on how the person speaking feels about them. Also the sea is frequently given "she" by people who have intimate contact with it. Then we have the tendency of some people to use animate personal pronouns to refer to intimate parts of their anatomy, which is a deal-breaker for me, but is fairly common! So we very much have animacy/inanimacy in English, but we mostly do not express it through determiners, but through pronouns.
Spanish marks animacy on grammatical objects by the preposition "a". This is often referred to as "personal 'a'" in grammars but it is also used for animals so it is clearly an animacy marker and not just a personhood marker.
