Grammatical Gender

[DeadPoolX]

This has bugged me for years: why do most languages have grammatical gender?

It makes sense to apply gender to living creatures, but why do it for a non-living object, like a chair or a book?

Even languages that have more than two grammatical genders (such as German or Russian) seem to arbitrarily apply gender to both living and non-living objects.

As a native English speaker, the idea of applying gender to a couch seems ludicrous. It's a non-living, inanimate object which has no reason to have any gender applied to it.

I'll admit that sometimes, in English, we do apply feminine pronouns to non-living objects, but usually that's reserved for some sort of vehicle. You'll hear people refer to ships and cars as "she" sometimes, but often it's meant to be affectionate in some way.

For most non-living objects, we'll say "it" or some variant thereof. I'd call my computer an "it." It's not a living creature, so there's absolutely no need for any gender assignment. Yet in many other languages, a computer would have some sort of gender applied to it.

I've also looked this topic up online, and the best I can find after viewing Wikipedia, various language-related websites, and some message boards, is that no one really knows. Often the answer comes down to a simple "that's just how it is."

Considering this board is fairly international, I'm hoping someone whose native language has grammatical gender, or knowledge of linguistics, might be able to shed a little light on the subject.

BTW, I've learned German (know it pretty well, but not fluently) and French (barely remember any of it), so I'm not speaking as someone who's never bothered to learn more than English. I may not be very good at learning foreign languages, but I've at least tried.

[OmerMor]

I am a native Hebrew speaker, and in Hebrew everything has a gender applied to it.
I don't know the official reason, but I'll take a guess: Hebrew has no concept of gender-neutral "it". I guess the neutral gender is a more recent linguistic development. And when you had only 2 options, they just arbitrarily picked one for every noun class.
Not the best explanation, I know

[adeyke]

As with many issues with languages, it just comes down to history. If we sat down now and designed an entirely new language, I doubt the suggestion of "Let's give each noun an arbitrary gender, such that using the wrong gender will result in a sentence that's perfectly comprehensible but wrong" would go very far. However, since language is instead just transmitted from one generation to the next, any historical accidents of the language are perpetuated. That is, modern languages are gendered because their ancient ancestors were gendered.

From what I gather, the Proto-Indo-European language already had gender thousands of years ago. Back then, maybe they thought that everything really did have a gender, either due to form of animism, or because some things were associated with people of one gender more than another.

As an Indo-European language, English was also once gendered, but it isn't any longer. Maybe other languages will also eventually drift away from being gendered.

(Well, for the most part. It still has plenty of issues relating to gender, but that's when it comes to people rather than objects. For example, there isn't a universally accepted gender-neutral personal pronoun. I use "they", but that still doesn't have as much acceptance as it needs. And there are nouns for profession members and such that are gendered when they don't need to be.)

[DeadPoolX]

I am a native Hebrew speaker, and in Hebrew everything has a gender applied to it.
I don't know the official reason, but I'll take a guess: Hebrew has no concept of gender-neutral "it". I guess the neutral gender is a more recent linguistic development. And when you had only 2 options, they just arbitrarily picked one for every noun class.
Not the best explanation, I know

Yeah, I've heard this one before, and I guess it makes sense to some degree. It still doesn't explain why some objects (not living beings) are made "male" or "female." How is decided if a book or a window is "male" or "female?"

As with many issues with languages, it just comes down to history. [...] That is, modern languages are gendered because their ancient ancestors were gendered.

From what I gather, the Proto-Indo-European language already had gender thousands of years ago. Back then, maybe they thought that everything really did have a gender, either due to form of animism, or because some things were associated with people of one gender more than another.

I recall reading that on Wikipedia, but that still leaves some questions unanswered:

1. Like I asked above, why are some objects made "male" and others "female"? If this has a historical basis, why are new words still given grammatical gender?

2. What about living creatures? Sure, maybe an animal is physically male or female, but the word for that creature may have a different grammatical gender than the physical gender of the animal itself.

3. To add to #2, what about body parts? In some languages, a body part may be of the opposite gender than the gender of the person it belongs to in the first place!

And there are nouns for profession members and such that are gendered when they don't need to be.)

You mean like Policeman, Fireman, Congressman, Chairman, etc? They've tried fixing it so those words either have a female form or a gender-neutral form, such as Police Officer or Chair (meaning both chairman and chairwoman).

But those are positions, and the "man" part of them is because those positions, and nearly all professions, were once male-only. Even if those fields included women, it'd be rare to see one in a higher position.

I think that's different from deciding a couch or a table has grammatical gender. Objects like those didn't have exclusions based on gender.

[BBP]

Yippee! A language discussion! (it's a bit too late for me now to start a lengthy dissertation though)
(forum breathes a sigh of relief)
Language is something that has been present for a long time and that has continuously evolved. English is an odd language since it largely developed on an island. Considering Old English used to have gender, the proper question is "why doesn't English have gender?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_gender
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_English

[adeyke]

I don't have an answer for why every word has the gender it does. It's not consistent across languages (and, indeed, the gender an object has in a language will influence how speakers of that language view that object). However, if you're using a gendered language and you get a new noun, it has to be assigned some gender in order for the noun to be useable in the language.

As for which gender it gets, sometimes it's just determined by the structure of the word, e.g. some word endings being correlated with gender. As for others, I suppose it's something people just made up as they started using the word. I've faced that task myself often enough, if I'm speaking German and want to introduce a loan word from a non-gendered language like English. I don't really know how I determine what gender to use. Sometimes, it'll be based on the word structure, while other times I'll match the gender of the German equivalent. I get the bad feeling that I'm often just defaulting to using the masculine. And I'll sometimes find that a loan word I'd been using has actually made it to general acceptance, but with a different gender than the one I'd assigned.

I'll note that sometimes there are actually regional differences within a language. For example, some German speakers say butter is masculine, others that it's feminine.

As for the gender in English, it's not just the ones ending in -man. There's also also a category of words that have gotten a feminine version via the addition of -ess (e.g. actor/actress, waiter/waitress). Then there are cases like "nurse", which don't carry any gender denotation but which carry such a gender connotation that the term "male nurse" is used. I'm not saying that this is identical to the situation to languages where everything is gendered. It's just that the language still isn't as gender-neutral as it should be.

[BBP]

I wish I knew about regional differences in gender when I did German at school...

[Rath Darkblade]

I am a native Hebrew speaker, and in Hebrew everything has a gender applied to it.
I don't know the official reason, but I'll take a guess: Hebrew has no concept of gender-neutral "it". I guess the neutral gender is a more recent linguistic development. And when you had only 2 options, they just arbitrarily picked one for every noun class.
Not the best explanation, I know

I too am a native Hebrew speaker, and I know what you mean about grammatical gender in Hebrew. You're right that Hebrew has no concept of the gender-neutral "it", and I don't know the official reason either, but I can make a guess at the reason why:

Hebrew as a language is a bit of a paradox. It's true that Hebrew was spoken in ancient times - by which I mean earlier than roughly 200 AD - but it ceased being spoken around about that time (probably as a result of the Bar Kochba Revolt and the resulting diaspora). It survived into the medieval period only as the language of Jewish liturgy and rabbinic literature. Then, in the 19th century, it was revived as a spoken and literary language. There are various forms of Hebrew which I won't go into.

Suffice it to say, Modern Hebrew was "revived" as a modern spoken language in the early- and mid-19th century by east European intellectuals (the greatest of which was Eliezer ben Yehuda). Eventually, as a result of the local movement he created, but more significantly as a result of the new groups of immigrants known under the name of the Second Aliyah, it replaced a score of languages spoken by Jews at that time.

The major result of the literary work of the Hebrew intellectuals along the 19th century was a lexical modernization of Hebrew. New words and expressions were adapted as neologisms from the large corpus of Hebrew writings since the Hebrew Bible, or borrowed from Arabic (mainly by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda) and older Aramaic and Latin. Many new words were either borrowed from or coined after European languages, especially English, Russian, German, French - and, of course, Yiddish (which is in itself a mixture of Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, German and other east European languages). Since then, Modern Hebrew has undergone further revivals, with words being borrowed from or coined after Russian, Arabic, Persian and so on.

To sum up: Modern Hebrew is a vibrant, busy, and ever-changing language. It reflects the character of the people who created it: tough, busy, proud, touchy - but devoted, strong, and good-hearted. It may be that there is no "it" in Hebrew because the 19th-century intellectuals who gave it life didn't think of creating an "it"; or (and this is the Zionist in me speaking) perhaps the immigrants who created the modern nation of Israel were simply too busy to pay that much attention to their own language. The intellectuals could say what they liked, but often ordinary people simply created words "on the fly", and later generations liked the sound of those words and adopted them themselves - and eventually they made it into the 'official' dictionary. It's difficult enough to know how these things happened, never mind why.

Sorry I can't give a more precise answer. Hope this helps.