Talk:Grammatical gender/Archive 1

message: Isn't there a vast and lush field of such?  English and French would go under the more-than-two-or-three category: he/she/it/one/such/so and roughly il/elle/ça/on/ce/ci for guyly/gally/thingly/ally/thoughtly/wayly.  (Oh, I'm goading English-speakers to dump Latin.) lysdexia 18:43, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes I think we should. One thing which has interested me lately is how English and Spanish both have gender in 3rd person possessive pronouns (his, hers; su, sua) but that the gender relates to different things. In English to the gender of the possessor, in Spanish to the gender of the thing possesed. Same goes for number though that's more blurred. Are there some grammatical terms to disambiguate these phenomena? — Hippietrail 02:59, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Should we talk about pronoun classes?

message: Aren't countries also feminine in English?  Spain allied herself, Russia mobilized her, etc.?
:You can refer to both ships and countries with either feminine or neuter third person singular pronouns, practically.  Stylistically, I'd say that using feminine in this case would be a bit old-fashioned for today, but you still definitely use such.  146.151.47.17, 16:14, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: The distinction of a and an is of course only phonological.  Compare a happy girl and an unhappy girl. - TAKASUGI Shinji 08:17, 2005 Apr 18 (UTC)
I was shocked to see that English is included in the list of languages with a two-fold gender distinction between masculine and feminine. I should think that a) either English shouldn't be included in neither the 2-gender languages nor in the 3-gender languages because it has already included in the list of languages with no grammatical gender inflection; b) or English should be included in the list of languages with a three-gender distinction (masc, fem and neuter), as English pronoms can take three forms (he for natural masculine, she for natural feminine and it for inanimate).Xinelo 19:56, 23 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  English Gender 

message: Now, German is listed as a language "without gender on the nouns, but only visible in the adjectives, determiners". This statement is not in accordance with e.g. Hockett's definition, i.e. not in accordance with the standard view within the field. What is "visible on the nouns", be it on the stem or in the declension, is an eventual declension class membership. Gender is, per definition, a classification of nouns as seen in the behaviour of determiners and adjectives. Since this is a situation where we do not (yet) have consensus, I bring it up here on the discussion page, before (or: rather than just) changing the paragraph in the article. Trondtr 20:56, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  German Gender 

message: I see that the article claims that Swahili has 15 noun classes. I'd always thought that it only had 8...how do we get 15? By counting plurals separately? That hardly seems reasonable. For the record, the classes I'm aware of are
* WA (mtu/watu)
* VI (kitabu/vitabu)
* MA (jiwe/mawe)
* MI (mti/miti)
* N (ndizi)
* U (umoja)
* PA (mahali)
* MU (locatives such as pembeni)
Am I missing something? --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 22:34, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, maybe I'm missing one more class: KU (verbal nouns such as kuimba). But that's still only 9 classes, not 15. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 15:31, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Since no one has been able to answer this question in over four months, I am editing the article to reflect the revised count. If anyone has more info, please share it. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 00:03, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

text: I gave a belated answer at Talk:Swahili language; didn't check out the present state of the article yet. — mark ✎ 14:07, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Swahili

message: Hi. Does anyone know of any more examples of words where the real gender is different from grammatical gender?  Mädchen and Fräulein from German (which describe females but have neuter grammatical gender) are good examples, but I need to find more... Please post here or e-mail frankie [at] frankieroberto.com if you have any possible examples! --Frankie Roberto 00:20, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Well you could consider the large bulk of nouns in the male and female genders in languages which also have a neuter gender - these would all be examples. — Hippietrail 08:56, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Those examples aren't quite so useful. The best example would be a word which has male or female natural gender and the opposite grammatical gender. However, I expect these examples are rare if not non-existant. Examples where male/female objects have neutral gender would also be welcome. --Frankie Roberto 20:58, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  The ancient Greek word παις young boy is neuter gender. thefamouseccles 01:00, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

text: Irish cailín "girl" is masculine, while stail "stallion" is feminine. Go figure. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 04:52, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Mädchen and Fräulein are neuter because they are diminutives: German classes all diminutives formed with -chen and -lein (cognates of English -kin and -ling) as neuter. Similarly, Irish classifies all diminutives in -ín – e.g. cailín – as masculine (m. and n. having coalesced in the history of that language). --Picapica 08:28, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Real vs Grammatical Gender

message: Is it really worth it to note some made-up languages by J.R.R. Tolkein in these lists? I'm sorry but it strikes me as really ridiculous.
:If you feel a change is needed, feel free to make it yourself!  Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone (yourself included) can edit any article by following the  link. You don't even need to log in, although there are several reasons why you might want to.  Wikipedia convention is to be bold and not be afraid of making mistakes.  If you're not sure how editing works, have a look at How to edit a page, or try out the Sandbox to test your editing skills.  New contributors are always welcome. — mark ✎ 21:26, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It probably isn't as ridiculous as one might think. Tolkien's languages have attracted a great deal of interest and study among those who like languages and linguistics. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 14:46, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Tolkien

message: I've tried to cleanup and reorganise the article, by abbreviating the introduction and grouping related material scattered over the article together.  I've also tried to be more consistent in the use of "noun class" and "grammatical gender", preferring the former - this, I think, makes the explanation of the distinction between natural and grammatical gender clearer, and also is a better description of the concept (particularly since the classes are not directly linked to gender in many non-IE and non-Semitic languages).  For the same reason, I would favour moving the article to "Noun classes", but I don't feel too strongly about this so I'm happy to let it lie as it is.  
I would very much like to move the extremely long lists of languages at the end to a new article Languages sorted by type of noun classes, or some such thing, if there are no objections.  -- Arvind 14:04, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: As for the last point, I am very much in favour of a split. We might even think of having one article for the gender system of each language. As for the first point, I am more sceptical. A grammatical gender is a noun class, but one may think of noun classes which are not gender classes. Also, the gender assignment literature uses the term "gender" also for e.g. Australian and Dravidian languages. In some languages nouns can be divided in classes defined by their classifiers, this is in the literature thought of as being different from gender. Most (all?) gender systems have a basis in biological sex. Trondtr 23:52, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cleanup 

message: I've read texts in Latin and in Greek, two ancient Indo-European languages with relatively free word order.  With grammatical gender, it is easier to tell which pronouns go with which antecendents.  Without grammatical gender, the languages probably would have had to develop more ordered syntax.  It seems that those languages with loose word order need grammatical gender for clarity and understanding.  Only speakers of those modern Indo-European languages with fixed word order, like English and French, have the luxury of even thinking about not using certain pronouns. BrianGCrawfordMA 18:11, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm sorry, but I disagree on your "I'm glad...". The price for the ease of telling the antecedent is too high to pay, in my opinion. Rememering which gender is spiritus/manus, dies/res, puella/poeta, rex/lex, ανθροπος/παρθηνος etc is a pain, and memory is much better spent on more worthwhile things. Also, whatever clarity you gain from the gender endings is by chance, just as the German "die bräutliche Schwester befreite der Bruder" (from one of Wagner's operas) happens to work only because Bruder is masculine singular (the only instance where German distinguishes between nom. and acc.). The Latin "astra regunt homines" (as opposed to "astra regit Deus") is just as ambiguous. I'm much better served by case endings than by the occasional difference of genders. --Shlomital 16:16, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Why I'm glad grammatical gender exists in ancient Indo-European languages

message: Russian is native to me, yet, I've never noticed that there would be animate/inanimate cases for the masculine. Could someone please give me an example? I even asked my language-savvy mom; she doesn't know about such. --84.249.252.211 20:38, 24 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think it refers to the fact that in Russian (and most other Slavic languages) the accusative of animate masculine singular nouns is identical to the genitive (e.g. вижу человека) while the accusative in inanimate masculine singular nouns is identical to the nominative (e.g. вижу дом). Angr/talk 17:28, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

text: Nope, because there are reams of declensions as well, usually depending on the sound of the final consonant or vowel (soft, hard, historically soft, etc.). The Polish plural, however, disregards word endings as the gender determinant, and has one gender for male humans (the masculine personal) and one for everything else (the common). That always cracks me up.  ProhibitOnions  (T) 21:21, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

text: Um, I was just drawing your attention to an interesting peculiarity. In the singular it's much the same as most of he other Slavic languages...  ProhibitOnions  (T) 23:44, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Russian, four genders (or 3 with one special case)... 

message: People, if you carefully count the classes on Sesotho language you'll see that, counting singular and plural separately, Sesotho has 9 classes (or 11 if you include 1a and 2a), but the highest number is 18 (note how some classes are missing). Wait - I've confused myself, now. I'll quickly have a look...
Okay, so I lied. It has 15 classes, 17 if you count 1a and 2a, 18 only if you incorrectly count the plurals of 14 (these are actually class 6), and 7 according to Doke's counting scheme (sing and plural in same classe, 15 and 17 together...). So that's 7 or 15. I wonder what sources the content comes from? There's a very good reason why the sings are separated from the plurals and it's dumb to compare Bantu langs to Greek as this article does. In case I'm logged out again, this is User:Zyxoas. 216.239.58.136 10:05, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sesotho classes 

message: What's conspicuously missing from this article is any mention of the origins of grammatical gender, and why people in the distant past may have decided that certain objects were intrinsically "masculine," "feminine," or neither (as the categories usually are). What have linguists discovered, or speculated, on this matter? ProhibitOnions 09:50, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've heard Hittite language had two noun classes, animate and inanimate, and they somehow changed to masculine and feminine.  I hope someone will kindly explain it. - TAKASUGI Shinji 16:23, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Origins of grammatical gender?

message: The issue of counting genders in a language may be tricky. Let's take Polish as an example: some grammarians say that Polish has three genders in singular (masculine, feminine and neuter), and two in plural (masculine-personal and non-masculine-personal). Others say it has four genders: masculine-personal, masculine non-personal, feminine and neuter, and that the first and second merge in singular, and the third abd fifth merge in plural. Additionally, distinction may be made between animate and inanimate nouns, so it could yield even five genders: masculine-personal, masculine non-personal animate, masculine inanimate, feminine and neuter. Perhaps you could even make a distinction between gender and noun class, and say that there are three genders but five noun classes (based on such attributes as gender, personality and animity). So it depends on the way you're looking at it. Kpalion 11:24, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lists of languages by number of genders/noun classes 

message: Apparently malayalam does have a sort of grammatical gender -- although all inanimate objects only have neuter forms and sometimes the feminine and masculine are completely separate nouns and not derived from the same root, eg. പശു (cow) and കാള (ox).
--Grammatical error 11:10, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gender in malayalam? 

message: I removed the sentence saying that Portuguese "todo" vs. "tudo" was an example of masculine vs. neuter.  Those words simply mean different things ("each" vs. "the whole thing"), and they are both grammatically masculine. Qaramazov
Hi. I only noticed now that you had made a comment here. You are indeed right that "todo" has the masculine grammatical gender. But exactly the same can be said of the article "lo" in Spanish. And the personal pronouns of English, "he", "she", "it", have no gender at all, in this sense.
The point is that lexically, there is still an association with gender. And it is the same kind of correspondence for Port. "todo/toda/tudo" as it is for Sp. "el/la/lo", and for English "he/she/it". FilipeS 21:49, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tudo and todo in Portuguese 

message: I am proposing the merger of the entry on 'natural gender' with this one. My reasons are the following:
*As far as I can tell, the 'natural gender' entry exists only to contrast natural with grammatical gender, and point out that they don't always coincide. But that could be done in the 'grammatical gender' entry itself;
*The 'natural gender' entry is very small;
*There already is a lengthy entry for 'gender' in the general sense, including biological and sociological aspects. That covers the concept of 'natural gender', to the extent that it intersects with sexuality.
FilipeS 18:23, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merger with 'natural gender'? 

message: The article stated that "In German, all nouns ending in -ung (corresponding to -ing in English) are grammatically feminine".  However, just off the top of my head, I can easily give some counterexamples, for example the male nouns Dung, Schwung and Sprung.  The feminine gender is always used, however (as far as I'm aware of), for nouns formed from verbs by taking the infinitive stem (sometimes slightly modifying it) and appending "-ung".  Unfortunately, I do not know how this form is called in linguistics.  This is very similar to the English gerund except that the substantivierter Infinitiv is actually used in many places where the gerund would be used in English.  I think the -ung form is used when a passive meaning of the verb is intended, or when a particular action is described, whereas the "substantivierter Infinitiv" is used when an active or general meaning is expressed.  It's a bit complicated, so bear with me. :-)  Here are some examples: Verb, "substantivierter Infinitiv" und that strange -ung form (the latter two with the corresponding definitive article).
* handeln, das Handeln, die Handlung ("to act", "the acting" and "the action";  alternatively "to trade", "the trading", "the store" in compound nouns, e.g. Buchhandlung = book store)
* erklären, das Erklären, die Erklärung ("to explain", "the explaining", "the explanation")
* mutmaßen, das Mutmaßen, die Mutmaßung ("to conjecture", "the conjecturing", "the conjecture"; alternatively "to suppose", "the supposing", "the supposition")
There are probably thousands of verbs which have a corresponding -ung noun, though there are probably equally many which don't, or at least where the -ung form has fallen out of favor in contemporary German.  For instance, neither the "substantivierter Infinitiv" nor the -ung form are typically used for the verb "schaden" (to harm, to damage), though the same is not true for the verb "schädigen" with very similar meaning.  Where the -ung form exists, it is always a feminine noun (whereas the "substantivierter Infinitiv" is always a neutral noun). Aragorn2 14:25, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Good point. What you're getting at, and what the article should be saying, is that all nouns that are formed by appending the suffix -ung are feminine. From this automatically follows another characteristic of these nouns: they are by definition morphologically complex, whereas the counterexamples you name are morphologically simplex. — mark ✎ 14:42, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

text: I don't think it's a diminutive. The German diminutive suffixes would be -chen as in 'Mädchen' and -lein as in 'Männlein' 'little man'. I think it would be better to call it the nominalizing suffix -ung. — mark ✎ 15:48, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

text: As user Mark Dingemanse has pointed out, this has nothing to do with the diminutive.  I removed this suggestion from the article. Aragorn2 15:55, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: As a sidenote, the suffix "-ling" is used in German in multiple ways: to make countable nouns from uncountable ones, e.g. "Teig" (dough) -> "Teigling" (piece of dough), and to form personal nouns from abstract nouns, or from adjectives, e.g. "Lehre" (teaching) -> "Lehrling" (apprentice), "Strafe" (punishment) -> "Sträfling" (convict) and "feige" (cowardly) -> "Feigling" (coward).  Maybe there are more uses.  The resulting nouns are masculine.  Note that this is not a diminutive form either, as is currently falsely claimed on the English WP article on the diminutive. Aragorn2 16:11, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "-ung" nouns in German 

message: Swedish is listed under "common and neuter" and under "more than three". What's the true?--Nixer 15:24, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: As I was taught it in Swedish class (in Swedish schools), Swedish has four genders (genus): maskulinum, femininum, reale and neutrum. It can also be classified as having two, with masculine and feminine being subclasses of reale, thus being common + neuter. Cases where masculine/feminine distinctions exist, other than the pronouns, are few and getting fewer. -Ahruman 23:46, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

text: If English is listed under "Languages with three grammatical genders", then the Scandinavian languages (at least Danish and Swedish) should be listed as "Languages with four grammatical genders", since the pronouns "he/him/his" and "she/her" also exist in these languages, when speaking of persons (and pets/allegorical beings etc.). But all nouns are classified as either common or neuter, not masculine or feminine. As Lena Synnerholm's comment above shows, Swedish has even more rudiments of the feminine gender than English does. So please move English to the category with one gender, or otherwise move the Scandinavian languages. 130.225.127.135 15:21, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Swedish  

message: As a native Spanish speaker, I suggest this example included in Lexical Gender should be changed. Fruta being defined as a group of fruits is not correct: it is not a collective noun used to refer to a group of fruits. It is used to refer mostly to edible fruits (La manzana es una fruta. => The apple is a fruit., see the Royal Spanish Academy Dictionary). Fruto, on the other hand, can be used indisctinctly, but tends to be more commonly used when denoting the origin (La manzana es el fruto del manzano. => The apple is the fruit of the apple tree.) -- Zavreio 17:57, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: By the way, I think I missed my point. What I meant to say is that both Fruta and Fruto are singular nouns that refer to singular items, not groups. --Zavreio 18:15, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Fruta" is not an example 

message: The above is not how article are moved on Wikipedia. First, you get some consensus that "grammatical gender" really belongs as a subset of "noun class" and does not deserve its own article. Secondly, once consensus exists, request the article be moved to the new title, if you cannot do it yourself. Cutting and pasting is a no-no, regardless of the merits of the move, because it loses the edit history.
As there was evidently little discussion of the move, and no users expressed agreement with Grzegorj's suggestions, I have reverted both pages. Please also be aware of Wikipedia:No original research.  ProhibitOnions  (T) 16:16, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Your work isn't destroyed, you can always retrieve it by looking at the older versions of the pages. And I'm making no judgement as to whether what you wrote is original research; however, radical changes should usually be discussed first. Others had already taken issue with some of your premises.  ProhibitOnions  (T) 20:58, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Revert move

message: Add  * Support  or  * Oppose  on a new line followed by a brief explanation, then sign your opinion using ~~~~.
*Oppose Use the most common name of a person or thing that does not conflict with the names of other people or things. This is gender, here. Do we need a more general article on noun-inflexion? that's another question. Septentrionalis 21:35, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Survey

message: I have submitted a NPOV violation in this article ( here). Nobody has said "no" to this so far. I have been asked of contribution. I have spent many hours of hard work and removed the violation, leaving all the rest of the article. I have removed the doubling of the information about the gender in Spanish. I have presented the arguments and sources. I have also add some facts to the article. And the user CharlotteWebb removed all my corrections without having said a word to all my arguments and the submission of NPOV violation. This violates the following  reverting don'ts:
*Do not simply revert changes that are made as part of a dispute.
*Do not revert good faith edits. (My aim was to remove NPOV violations so my faith was good).
*There are misconceptions that problematic sections of an article or recent changes are the reasons for reverting or deletion. If they contain valid information, these texts should simply be edited and improved accordingly. (Nobody has even expressed the opinion that my corrections were problematic, and nobody has proved that it is not valid).
*Improve the edit, rather than reverting it.
I am about informing administrators about this incident -Grzegorj 07:18, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Call the cops if you must, but I reverted your edits because you were attempting to use them to gain an advantage in the requested move discussion above. Also I only made one revert. If you stick around, you'll probably grow more accustomed to being reverted, and realize (if nothing else) that it's part of the editing process. Just remember nobody actually hates you. — CharlotteWebb 10:56, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Complaint 

message: In light of the above discussions, I think it might be wise to split Grammatical gender into Grammatical gender and Noun class. Most of the material currently in the article would stay there, as it applies to the notion of grammatical gender. The parts about noun classes, such as the examples from Bantu languages, would be moved to the new article. Any comments, or does this have to be done more formally? FilipeS 23:11, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: There's no need for any formal process.  I'd just indicate in the first edit summary at Noun class that there's material that came from here, so its GFDL history can be traced if necessary.  A note to that effect at Talk:Noun class wouldn't be a bad idea either.  That noted, I'd say go for it! -GTBacchus(talk) 23:38, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Split article?

message: I've been thinking about this article, and I think it's time for a rewrite. I don't know if Grzegorj is still around, but some of his changes went in the right direction. Even though I made a considerable contribution to the present version of the article, I now see some flaws in it:
# It gives too much emphasis to the distinction between "marking of gender" in nouns and "gender agreement" in other parts of speech. This is an artificial distinction; the two things typically go hand in hand in natural languages. Compare it with Grammatical number, a very similar phenomenon: there, too, there can be marking on the nouns or in other parts of speech, but both are analysed together.
# For that reason, the article is too dogmatic about the status of grammatical gender in English. I now think it's fairer to say that the English language is a borderline case: it has very little gender marking, but there are still a few traces of it, and gender in English is not fundamentally distinct from gender marking in other languages. 
Other opinons and suggestions are welcome. FilipeS 20:54, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Rewrite