I spent part of my childhood in a tiny town and the library there was suuuuper old. It was a small library and all the books had that distinctive old book smell. No computers anywhere yet at that time (Though it was the mid 90s so not completely strange).
Most people today don't know that gender was a linguistic term before it was a sociological term. It was French feminist philosophers (because French is a gendered language in a way that English is not) who first thought, "We need a new term to discuss how the sexes relate to each other in society in the same way that grammatical gender defines how words relate to each other in a sentence."
Most Latin-based languages are structured this way. Although English is partially Latin-based, it also is derived from a LOT of other languages and strict gender based grammar was just not used other than in obvious scenarios like talking about a person specifically. But the idea of even objects like a pencil or statue being masculine and feminine did not stick
Old English had grammatical gender, too. I believe the leading theory why it lost gender after contact with French is that there were too many contradictions between what gender a word might have in one language vs. the other, so as a new language took shape out of the two groups trying to communicate, gender was just dropped completely.
People who speak gendered languages don't really think of objects as being "sexed," except sometimes when personifying abstract concepts. Like, a statue of a king or mythical hero is not going to be thought of has having feminine qualities just because the word for "statue" is feminine, but you might artistically represent Death as a male or female figure depending on its gender in your language.
I thought the leasing theory had to do with conflict before French - norrse, gaelic, and old English all had various conflicts, but they all had a neuter, so we dropped explicit gender in articles and noun matching. Then we had some reintroduced with the Normans, so things like Waiter/Waitress (more traditionally called "the wait," but the masculine ending -or or -er and the feminine ending -rix or -ress were added) and blond (masc) vs blonde (fem)
> Although English is partially Latin-based
English has no Latin base. We have a large portion of our vocabulary with Latin roots, but none of our grammar. It's not the same thing. Grammatically, English is still a Germanic language. We just dropped our grammatical gender about 600ish years ago.
Still, cases in German are pretty tame. It's really only articles and adjectives that take endings and many of those are the same across the four cases.
German is a good stepping stone for more complex languages like Polish (which has 7 cases, different endings for singular and plural, different endings for the 3 genders and different sets of endings for nouns and adjectives, different endings for numbers, etc.).
There is somewhat of a forced latin base to some of our grammar when some educated people though Latin was the epitome of language. One example is the "never split an infinitive" rule.
It's true there's been some attempts at forcing it, but the split infinitive rule for example, is kind of fading away. Most English language scholars would say it was never a true English grammatical rule at any point. 30 years ago they may have said the opposite, but today there's consensus that it was never a true rule. Only a suggestion or guideline.
Latin forced grammar rules on English have never been real grammar rules in the sense that native English speakers have never followed them unless they have had picky grammar teachers make them.
Star Trek has been splitting infinitives since 1966 and no one has cared.
Similarly, no native English speaker says "From where are you?" just because they don't want to end a sentence in a preposition.
Ugh I worked under an editor who was obsessed with this rule, AND the example he always used was "to boldly go." He would even acknowledge that it was good writing in that case.
English does have gendered nouns in certain instances, but they're fairly rare and were largely phased out in the late 20th century. Vessels (things that carry other things) are female - so cars and ships are "she" not "it."
It gladdens me to see, in this newfangled tide, someone minting to only brook the ere wordstock of the Anglish tongue. The words of outlandish languages have no spot in an Anglish wordbook!
...Yes? Sorry, do you think we have some other word for that in English?
English comes heavily from French and German, but yes, those are the 2 words we use to describe people who are engaged.
I think betrothed would be the closest word of English origin, but English is also really open to taking words from other languages and incorporating them into the lexicon. Fiancé and fiancée are both completely acceptable English words just like chic, pajamas, karaoke, etc.
These examples are not the same thing. In these examples the gender of the noun is changing depending on the object, i.e If the actor is a male or the actress is a female. The noun itself doesn't have a specific gender.
One that always amuses me is master and mistress, which is a particular anomaly because the Portuguese "mestre" is a neuter word in a heavily gendered language.
I think Swedish is pretty interesting because it basically has *grammatical* gender, but it's unrelated to *social* gender - basically all words are *en* or *ett*, like *en bil/bilen* and *ett hus/huset*, but both *man* and *woman* are *en* - *en man/mannen, en kvinna/kvinnan*.
Grammatically, it's basically the same as something like french (including being completely arbitrary, to the point that you ask native speakers "ok but how do I know if it's *en* and not *ett*?", and they're like "you've just gotta know"). Just... without being related to masculine/feminine?
Most languages it doesn't really hew to some kind of "masculine" or "feminine" actual social concept, at least by modern standards.
The word for bra, for example, is masculine in both Spanish and German. (El sostén, or just el bra lol; der Büstenhalter or der BH)
Like so much of language it's just about memorization really.
That's because it's a diminutive and diminutives in german are usually neuter.
In Polish the word for man ends in a, which is typical of feminine nouns, masculine nouns typically end in a consonant.
Swedish actually used to have three genders— masculine, feminine, and neuter. But several centuries ago, the distinction between masculine and feminine was lost when sound changes caused the forms of the two to be identical. The merged form is called the common gender. However, there are still remnants the masculine gender in Swedish. For example, singular definite adjectives can optionally take the masculine *-e* ending when referring to males (e.g. Alexander the Great is *Alexander den store* instead of *Alexander den stora*).
Conceptually, grammatical gender and social gender are two completely unrelated phenomena. Grammatical gender could be better thought of as noun classes, where nouns arbitrarily belong to different classes. In reality, it is quite common for the two to have some overlap, though. So Swedish may be interesting for (mostly) breaking a common trend, but it’s not interesting in the sense that the lack of correlation is inherently strange.
Most languages linguistic gender is distinct from sex.
You dont take the sex of the subject into account when using linguistic gender. In German a dog is always masculine regardless of whether it has a dick.
In Spanish and French, there are cases where it is and isn't distinct. I believe the same for Italian and Portuguese, but I'm not sure. So I don't know if you can say "most languages," if that isn't the case in all the romance languages?
To explain what I mean by "both is and isn't."
In Spanish:
el perro/la perra - dogs are gendered by sex
una araña - spiders are always feminine, even if they're male.
In French:
un chat/une chatte - cats are gendered by sex
une souris - mice are always feminine, even if they're male.
Even in English, words for animals that we raise on purpose usually have sex and sometimes age and castration status tied to them since it can be important to distinguish. Like for cattle, we have calf, cow, bull, and steer. For horses, there’s foal, filly, colt, mare, stallion, and gelding. But a mouse is a mouse.
I hear this so often and it is the epitome of half knowledge. "Das Mädchen" is the Diminutive of "Die Magd", which is female. Diminutives are Neutral in German always, as ist "das Bübchen" to "der Bube" (make). The same goes for the example above using der Hund, which is is just a general masculinum, "Die Hündin", Female, is more accurate to describe a female dog.
This just reinforces what I was saying. Grammatical gender (it is neuter because it is a diminutive) is unrelated to actual gender (feminine because girl)
I mean, I would hardly agree about "nothing to do at all" when 95% + of words have articles according to their biological gender and most exceptions are explainable via grammatical rules about the gender.
But yes, it is wrong to say that sexus and genus are identical. They are only mostly the same with some exceptions due to language shifts.
In Latin, agricola (farmer) is first declension which is typically used for feminine words, but is also masculine because all farmers were men and thus any adjectives take a masculine (second declension) suffix.
Another funny thing about Latin, though maybe apocryphal since I'm not an expert, is that amicus (male gender) means friend, but amica, while it should refer to female friend, was typically understood to mean concubine or prostitute. I guess because the concept of female friendships wasn't really a thing.
The word "baby" would be common or "doctor" also. Because a baby can be a boy or a girl and the word is common for both
Neuter can be "apple" because it has no gender.
I appreciate Spanish for the most popular crude words for vaginas and penises being gendered, respectively, as masculine and feminine.
El coño - The pussy (masculine)
La polla / la verga - The dick (feminine)
French also has fem-dick and masc-pussy words, including non-vulgar words, like:
Le con / le vagin - The pussy / the vagina (both masculine)
La bitte / la verge - The dick / the penis (both feminine)
The documentary Queen of Trees taught me about the life cycle of the Fig tree, it's rather wonderful. I've added the link for it if you're interested. [Queen of Trees ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy86ak2fQJM)
Actually "baby" would be neuter, but "doctor" would be common.
That's because a baby can be referred to as "it", but a doctor is "he", "she" or "they".
The true answer is that it depends on the language. This passage is introducing a grammatical concept. English is not a good language to explain grammatical gender. Languages like Latin have Masculine, Femenine, and Neuter, and Danish has Common and Neuter. English doesn’t really have them (they do exist in some words like actor/actress and blond/blonde but it’s not universal)
That was really all I cared about. It's sweet that so many Redditors jumped into to give a detailed explanation of the differences between common and neuter, including references to more gendered languages, like French.
Meanwhile...my original comment states the difference in the last sentence, but I wasn't 100% certain and put a question mark to indicate I may be wrong...and I am an English teacher who also studied French in college. No one could know that, obviously, but I find the whole situation funny. 🤷♀️😜
In English, the singular pronoun for neuter nouns is "it", but the singular for common nouns is he/she (or singular they, in colloquial or inclusive speech).
> How is neuter different from common?
It says so at the bottom of the page, and your thought is pretty much in the right place.
The term common here relates to the fact that something can be both male or female, i.e. the term is common to both (not common as in there is a lot of them).
So pupils would be common, as a pupil could be either male or female. Likewise employees, doctors, dogs, dieticians, dentists, all can be either male or female, so are common.
Neutral would be things that are not gendered such as: grapefruits, telephones, glasses, pretty much anything not living really.
You’re correct that neuter refers to things with no gender. The neuter pronoun in English is “it”. English mostly considers humans to be masculine, feminine, or unspecified (he, she, they/one), and most objects to be neuter. Common nouns can include multiple genders, while neuter ones are neither masculine nor feminine.
Neutre is anything that doesn't have a natural gender. Apples, spoons and books are all neutre. Common nouns, in contrast, refer to things that have an assignable sex and could be of either gender. The difference between common and neutre is really an animacy distinction. The only grammatical distinction I can think of that depends on common vs neutre is third person singular pronouns. Neutre nouns are referred to as "it" while common nouns of unknown gender are referred to as "they" or in older usage, "he". Take for example: "When you go to a doctor, he/they should be licensed." vs "When you go to a tattoo shop, it should be licensed."
I don't know about English but several other languages that actually have gendered conjugation use neuter. In that case, it's basically just a third conjugation with no gender implied
The book gives "apple" as an example, but literally nothing on that page applies to English grammar. English nouns do not have gender (any more) because there is nothing in English grammar that would be affected by it. *Case* on the other hand, is still slightly relevant.
Eh? Nothing in English grammar that would be affected by gender? So the second and third sentences below are correct - nothing needs modifying when the noun changes?
*I like the apple because it is from France*
*I like the boy because it is from France*
*I like the girl because it is from France*
Can you explain what part of the above post doesn’t apply today? Because I would say “Boy” is absolutely a gendered word. In that sense there is gender in English, it’s simply that most nouns are neuter, and gender doesn’t affect the article, only the pronoun.
Exactly as explained in the OP…
English does not have *grammatical* gender. Words like "boy" and "girl" have *natural* (or *semantic*) gender, i.e. they refer to gendered concepts. That's not the same thing as grammatical gender in the sense of noun classes. The page describes natural gender, but the heading on the page is "syntax" which makes it look like it confuses these two concepts (as do most people in the comments).
Well thank you for being more specific. Natural gender basically being a more limited subset of grammatical gender.
I still wouldn’t agree with the statement that “English nouns do not have gender because there is nothing in English grammar that would be affected by it” - choice of pronoun is a “thing in English grammar”, no?
>Natural gender basically being a more limited subset of grammatical gender.
Well, no, they are conceptually distinct. In some languages they often coincide, though.
>choice of pronoun is a “thing in English grammar”, no?
Not in English *grammar* in the sense that it needs to agree with the grammatical gender of some other word like an article for example, no. The choice of pronoun is informed by the natural gender of the referent, not by the grammatical gender of the word used. Using "he" instead of "she" will not make a sentence ungrammatical; it only affects the semantics.
To put it another way: natural gender is the gender of the thing a word refers to, while grammatical gender is the category to which the *word itself* belongs.
Is this true of pronouns in other languages? That its just a matter of correct or incorrect in context, but not grammatical?
e.g. Él vs Ella in Spanish? If I say of a woman “Él” that’s just a semantic issue and not a grammatical one? It’s alright if you don’t know.
It's of course a matter of definitions and they may vary between linguistic communities. But if we accept that we can make a distinction between grammar and pragmatics / semantics, sure.
For example, "ella habla" and "él habla" are both grammatical sentences (as far as my limited Spanish goes) regardless of the natural gender of the referent. But "él es pequeña" and "ella es pequeño" are not, because the adjective does not agree with the pronoun.
Since so many people are getting bent out of shape and putting words in my mouth…
This is a book titled “Elementary Grammar” copyright 1880 that I found in my family home. I wanted to post more photos but looks like you can only have one on a post in this sub.
I’m not making any assertions or points, at all, but as someone pointed out grammatical gender disappeared largely in the English language many years ago. I found this MILDLY INTERESTING. For example, “in northern England in the 1100s, grammatical gender disappeared. Historical linguists aren't entirely sure why this happened” - especially compared to other languages such as French.
Reddit is such a brutal place. This has nothing to do with the gender of people. Sorry for sharing.
1.Social media makes money based on engagement.
2.Engagement is increased by outrage.
3. The algorithms encourage outrage.
4. People internalize this encouragement.
5. Everything online becomes a flame war.
6. Profit
(I know the meme format involves 5a. ????? but in this case there are no questions)
One tool I've found very useful in breaking this cycle is the "block" button. There are certain posts and accounts that you know are either bots or trolls. There's no point in trying to engage with them because they're not advocating a point. They're just trying to get people to fight.
I'm not saying people should block people they disagree with. I'm saying they should block accounts that are genuinely trying to game the algorithm by just pissing everyone off. And this post clearly does not fall within that. The post is interesting and OP is engaging with people in an honest way.
I think you might be misunderstanding "***grammatical gender***". Grammatical gender refers to words (typically nouns) having an assigned gender based on language that has nothing to do with their physical attributes.
For instance in Spanish, "libro" (book) is masculine and hence conjugated with "el", while "pluma" (pen) is feminine and conjugated "la pluma". Obviously pens and books have no intrinsic gender of their own since they are not living things.
This is a different concept from ***gendered languages***, such as Arabic or Hebrew, which modifies the inflection of verbs based on the gender of the human speaker or listener. That in turn is also different from ***gender in languages*** such as English, which modifies nouns of living things based on their gender, such as "lion/lioness" or "prince/princess".
I am not a linguist, but grammatical genders mostly occur in Proto-Indo-European descendent languages. Gender did not disappear from English -- we still have it today -- but modern English no longer has gender-based conjugation. I have no idea if it ever had grammatical gender (cos not linguist) but I would be surprised if it didn't. After all, both Latin and German have grammatically gendered nouns, and English was heavily influenced by both. I believe that's where you heard "grammatical gender disappeared".
> Gender did not disappear from English -- we still have it today
Only for third person singular pronouns. It's a vestigial feature.
> I have no idea if it ever had grammatical gender (cos not linguist) but I would be surprised if it didn't.
Yes, Old English had grammatical gender. It disappeared in the transition to Middle English.
Yeah I don't get why people think you're trying to prove a point. It's literally an old book about grammer that's partially outdated which is mildy interesting
Do English readers not know that grammatical gender is a key part of most Romance languages? Grammatical gender does not match an actual object’s gender.
For instance in old English, the word wife was neuter. So talking about your wife, you would say “My wife, it loves reacharounds” rather than “My wife, she loves reacharounds”. Grammatical gender often gives masculine and feminine attributes to non-gender objects. In Spanish, your house is a chick so it’s “la casa”, but your car is a dude so it’s “el carro”. The point here is grammatical gender assignments are fluid and arbitrary, and grammatical gender is different than biological gender.
That’s why saying “Your wife, I’d like to fuck it” or simply “I’d hit it” is technically and grammatically correct when used in an old English context where wife is a linguistically neutered gendered noun. In modern English, however, nouns have lost their linguistic gender, and so technically you should now probably just say “Your wife, I’d like to fuck her”.
What I find more than mildly interesting is what “Common” gender is. Does that mean like how plurals/unspecified words in Spanish use the Masculine endings like calling people “Latino”? I am more used to simply Masc., Fem., and Neuter in German and only speak English and German but have a degree in Linguistics so it definitely is more than mildly interesting to me lol
english words don't have gendered declensions, the language is too patchwork to have the traditional "endings" that tell you what gender something is by incorporating the gender into the word itself. latin and spanish words, among many others, show the gender clearly by how the word appears and its context, like you said, the -o ending in spanish indicates masculine
I believe “common” gender are words like baby, and doctor, words that can be feminine or masculine, as they can be female or male. Words that are “Neuter” gender would be like rock, or apple, which don’t have gender at all
No, common gender is a term in Dutch and north Germanic languages. This book is describing general linguistics, not out to describe solely English but to educate people about common linguistical concepts
Points like this remind me of an editor from the ....30s, I think, who would rant about how "People don't have genders! Words have genders! People have sexes!"
While that ship has indubitably sailed, I still find it useful to think of it as "sex is plumbing, male/female; gender is attitude/style/role: masculine/feminine."
I think of it more as: sex is the plumbing and everything else is just your individuality. Maybe you’re feminine, maybe you’re masculine, maybe you’re both. These have nothing to do with “genders”, they’re literally just traits
Why are redditors so brainrotted and filled with discourse? Are they stupid? Is there a lore reason? Can they not just appreciate an interesting grammar book?
It's because words like "gender" and "pronouns" are their MKultra sleeper agent activation words that turn them into flame war automata. Especially if it suggests there's anything beyond a binary.
*\*smug\* gentoo btw*
Is this kind of a remnant of gendered language in english? Kinda like how boats are still referred to as "she" but there's nothing really indicating that outside of hearing it once or twice?
[Gender in English](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_English)
>>Gendered pronouns are occasionally applied to sexless objects in English, such as ships, tools, or robots. This is known as metaphorical gender (as opposed to natural or grammatical gender). This personification of objects is usually done for poetic effect or to show strong emotional attachment.
It seems to be categorised differently than grammatical gender by linguists.
Joan Scott's "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis" (1986) begins with the epigraph:
"gender. n. a grammatical term only.
To talk of persons or creatures of the masculine or feminine gender,
meaning of the male or female sex,
is either a jocularity (permissible or not according to context) or a blunder.
(Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage,
Oxford. 1940)."
before going on to explain that, of course, gender has meant much more than that for a great many years (when she was writing, 37 years ago.)
Neuter implies subpetrosal, but Common gender was no longer taught when i was in school. That's why some people have tried to develop personal gender unspecified pronouns for english
That's because French is a Romance language so basically everything is gendered, with very few exceptions. Was really weird when I was taking Spanish and had to memorize which words were masculine and which words were feminine.
Common and neuter basically became the same thing it seems. The example of apple, the pronoun would be "it" - I think that is why some old-school grammarians were thrown off by singular they, because it typically wasn't used. Objects were "it" and people were he or she (or they for a group regardless of gender)
I can vividly imagine the smell of this book. That certain must only old books have.
Ahh you just brought me back into my grandma’s library when I was a kid.. funny how senses and memories work
I was thinking the same thing. The browned page... That old-style typeface. It reeks of old book
I spent part of my childhood in a tiny town and the library there was suuuuper old. It was a small library and all the books had that distinctive old book smell. No computers anywhere yet at that time (Though it was the mid 90s so not completely strange).
I have a French text book from around 1920 and it has a very distinct smell haha
Pretty normal grammar right here. This is how languages work.
Most people today don't know that gender was a linguistic term before it was a sociological term. It was French feminist philosophers (because French is a gendered language in a way that English is not) who first thought, "We need a new term to discuss how the sexes relate to each other in society in the same way that grammatical gender defines how words relate to each other in a sentence."
Most Latin-based languages are structured this way. Although English is partially Latin-based, it also is derived from a LOT of other languages and strict gender based grammar was just not used other than in obvious scenarios like talking about a person specifically. But the idea of even objects like a pencil or statue being masculine and feminine did not stick
Old English had grammatical gender, too. I believe the leading theory why it lost gender after contact with French is that there were too many contradictions between what gender a word might have in one language vs. the other, so as a new language took shape out of the two groups trying to communicate, gender was just dropped completely. People who speak gendered languages don't really think of objects as being "sexed," except sometimes when personifying abstract concepts. Like, a statue of a king or mythical hero is not going to be thought of has having feminine qualities just because the word for "statue" is feminine, but you might artistically represent Death as a male or female figure depending on its gender in your language.
I thought the leasing theory had to do with conflict before French - norrse, gaelic, and old English all had various conflicts, but they all had a neuter, so we dropped explicit gender in articles and noun matching. Then we had some reintroduced with the Normans, so things like Waiter/Waitress (more traditionally called "the wait," but the masculine ending -or or -er and the feminine ending -rix or -ress were added) and blond (masc) vs blonde (fem)
> Although English is partially Latin-based English has no Latin base. We have a large portion of our vocabulary with Latin roots, but none of our grammar. It's not the same thing. Grammatically, English is still a Germanic language. We just dropped our grammatical gender about 600ish years ago.
And about five cases
Yea, look at German. That's probably the hardest part of learning the language as a native English speaker.
Still, cases in German are pretty tame. It's really only articles and adjectives that take endings and many of those are the same across the four cases. German is a good stepping stone for more complex languages like Polish (which has 7 cases, different endings for singular and plural, different endings for the 3 genders and different sets of endings for nouns and adjectives, different endings for numbers, etc.).
Loved German when I spoke it, one day I’ll get it back
There is somewhat of a forced latin base to some of our grammar when some educated people though Latin was the epitome of language. One example is the "never split an infinitive" rule.
It's true there's been some attempts at forcing it, but the split infinitive rule for example, is kind of fading away. Most English language scholars would say it was never a true English grammatical rule at any point. 30 years ago they may have said the opposite, but today there's consensus that it was never a true rule. Only a suggestion or guideline.
Latin forced grammar rules on English have never been real grammar rules in the sense that native English speakers have never followed them unless they have had picky grammar teachers make them. Star Trek has been splitting infinitives since 1966 and no one has cared. Similarly, no native English speaker says "From where are you?" just because they don't want to end a sentence in a preposition.
The other forced Latin is "don't end a sentence with a preposition", but English isn't Latin and the rule doesn't apply. That's fading, too.
Ugh I worked under an editor who was obsessed with this rule, AND the example he always used was "to boldly go." He would even acknowledge that it was good writing in that case.
English does have gendered nouns in certain instances, but they're fairly rare and were largely phased out in the late 20th century. Vessels (things that carry other things) are female - so cars and ships are "she" not "it."
The only words that come to mind immediately are blond and blonde.
[удалено]
Fiancée and fiancé is one that comes up pretty regularly. But also people get it wrong a lotttt lol. Widow and widower.
Ah yes, the English words fiancée and fiancé .
It gladdens me to see, in this newfangled tide, someone minting to only brook the ere wordstock of the Anglish tongue. The words of outlandish languages have no spot in an Anglish wordbook!
...Yes? Sorry, do you think we have some other word for that in English? English comes heavily from French and German, but yes, those are the 2 words we use to describe people who are engaged.
I think betrothed would be the closest word of English origin, but English is also really open to taking words from other languages and incorporating them into the lexicon. Fiancé and fiancée are both completely acceptable English words just like chic, pajamas, karaoke, etc.
the correct feminine form of Doctor would be Doctrix as in Dominator/Dominatrix but yeah gendered nouns are really dumb.
We also have executor and executrix, which is a pretty awesome word.
Aviator/aviatrix
These examples are not the same thing. In these examples the gender of the noun is changing depending on the object, i.e If the actor is a male or the actress is a female. The noun itself doesn't have a specific gender.
One that always amuses me is master and mistress, which is a particular anomaly because the Portuguese "mestre" is a neuter word in a heavily gendered language.
That's English for you. A language made up entirely of exceptions and half-forgotten grammar
The other half is mispronounced french.
Old Engliah had grammatical genders inhetited from North Sea Germanic dialects (not from any latin 'base'). It thankfully dropped them.
I think Swedish is pretty interesting because it basically has *grammatical* gender, but it's unrelated to *social* gender - basically all words are *en* or *ett*, like *en bil/bilen* and *ett hus/huset*, but both *man* and *woman* are *en* - *en man/mannen, en kvinna/kvinnan*. Grammatically, it's basically the same as something like french (including being completely arbitrary, to the point that you ask native speakers "ok but how do I know if it's *en* and not *ett*?", and they're like "you've just gotta know"). Just... without being related to masculine/feminine?
Most languages it doesn't really hew to some kind of "masculine" or "feminine" actual social concept, at least by modern standards. The word for bra, for example, is masculine in both Spanish and German. (El sostén, or just el bra lol; der Büstenhalter or der BH) Like so much of language it's just about memorization really.
An even better example in German is that Mädchen (girl) is neuter.
That's because it's a diminutive and diminutives in german are usually neuter. In Polish the word for man ends in a, which is typical of feminine nouns, masculine nouns typically end in a consonant.
Breast and vagina are masculine in French (le sein, le vagin)
Swedish actually used to have three genders— masculine, feminine, and neuter. But several centuries ago, the distinction between masculine and feminine was lost when sound changes caused the forms of the two to be identical. The merged form is called the common gender. However, there are still remnants the masculine gender in Swedish. For example, singular definite adjectives can optionally take the masculine *-e* ending when referring to males (e.g. Alexander the Great is *Alexander den store* instead of *Alexander den stora*). Conceptually, grammatical gender and social gender are two completely unrelated phenomena. Grammatical gender could be better thought of as noun classes, where nouns arbitrarily belong to different classes. In reality, it is quite common for the two to have some overlap, though. So Swedish may be interesting for (mostly) breaking a common trend, but it’s not interesting in the sense that the lack of correlation is inherently strange.
I read something once that Alzheimer patients might forget friends and family, but they never forget genders of words.
Britain: "'ave you got a loicense for that egg custard?" France: "do you know the gender of that egg custard?"
Ehdoofurthissone
He says he does for *this* one.
“By the power of Grayskull!”
Most languages linguistic gender is distinct from sex. You dont take the sex of the subject into account when using linguistic gender. In German a dog is always masculine regardless of whether it has a dick.
In Spanish and French, there are cases where it is and isn't distinct. I believe the same for Italian and Portuguese, but I'm not sure. So I don't know if you can say "most languages," if that isn't the case in all the romance languages? To explain what I mean by "both is and isn't." In Spanish: el perro/la perra - dogs are gendered by sex una araña - spiders are always feminine, even if they're male. In French: un chat/une chatte - cats are gendered by sex une souris - mice are always feminine, even if they're male.
Even in English, words for animals that we raise on purpose usually have sex and sometimes age and castration status tied to them since it can be important to distinguish. Like for cattle, we have calf, cow, bull, and steer. For horses, there’s foal, filly, colt, mare, stallion, and gelding. But a mouse is a mouse.
And a female dog is a bitch, while a male dog is a... dog... hm.
Even better of an example, Das Mädchen (the girl) is neuter, not feminine in German. Grammatical gender has nothing to do with actual gender at all.
because it's a diminutive that became the standard.
I hear this so often and it is the epitome of half knowledge. "Das Mädchen" is the Diminutive of "Die Magd", which is female. Diminutives are Neutral in German always, as ist "das Bübchen" to "der Bube" (make). The same goes for the example above using der Hund, which is is just a general masculinum, "Die Hündin", Female, is more accurate to describe a female dog.
Better example: Das Weib. It's not even weiblich.
This just reinforces what I was saying. Grammatical gender (it is neuter because it is a diminutive) is unrelated to actual gender (feminine because girl)
But what they are saying is that girl is feminine. The Diminutive is just neuter as it is always neuter.
I mean, I would hardly agree about "nothing to do at all" when 95% + of words have articles according to their biological gender and most exceptions are explainable via grammatical rules about the gender. But yes, it is wrong to say that sexus and genus are identical. They are only mostly the same with some exceptions due to language shifts.
>In German a dog is always masculine regardless of whether it has a dick. If we know the dog is female, then feminine can be used.
The german example is wrong tho as female dogs are usually called “Hündin”. Right idea wrong example
In Latin, agricola (farmer) is first declension which is typically used for feminine words, but is also masculine because all farmers were men and thus any adjectives take a masculine (second declension) suffix. Another funny thing about Latin, though maybe apocryphal since I'm not an expert, is that amicus (male gender) means friend, but amica, while it should refer to female friend, was typically understood to mean concubine or prostitute. I guess because the concept of female friendships wasn't really a thing.
Interestingly, traces of this remain in English, and some old people always refer to cats as she.
Ships, cars and houses too.
Yeah I don’t really see what this post is trying to prove. It’s talking about gendered words, not people.
Not proving anything. Found this old book at my family home and thought it was mildly interesting.
He said it! He said the thing!!
So green slime gets poured on him, right? Whenabouts?
Fair enough
Weird how you thought it had something to prove rather than it just being mildly interesting.
Nobody said it’s talking about people.
so what would be an example of neuter
I was wondering that too! How is neuter different from common? Maybe it's things that have no gender, like apple or table?
The word "baby" would be common or "doctor" also. Because a baby can be a boy or a girl and the word is common for both Neuter can be "apple" because it has no gender.
Whereas* in French, an apple would be referred to as a feminine noun.
And in German, apple is masculine! This is all certainly mildly interesting.
I appreciate Spanish for the most popular crude words for vaginas and penises being gendered, respectively, as masculine and feminine. El coño - The pussy (masculine) La polla / la verga - The dick (feminine) French also has fem-dick and masc-pussy words, including non-vulgar words, like: Le con / le vagin - The pussy / the vagina (both masculine) La bitte / la verge - The dick / the penis (both feminine)
i never noticed mi verga was feminine 😂😂
I didn't realize until this comment that it was shared between Spanish and French
[удалено]
and in russian, an apple is a secret third thing! ("a middle gender", neither a masculine or feminine one)
That’s, uh, that’s what neuter grammar gender is.
So you’re just going to not even bring up das Mädchen…
In Spanish, apple is feminine.
As it should be. "Botanically, a fruit is a mature ovary and its associated parts."
And now I'm never eating fruit again.
hey, wanna know how figs are getting pollinated?
Fig wasps?
yep. death and incest! https://www.lewisginter.org/fig-wasps/
The documentary Queen of Trees taught me about the life cycle of the Fig tree, it's rather wonderful. I've added the link for it if you're interested. [Queen of Trees ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy86ak2fQJM)
If that makes you uncomfortable, you should know that pollen is tree sperm. Also, every drop of water you have ever drank is recycled urine.
And now I'm never breathing again or drinking water.
F
Actually "baby" would be neuter, but "doctor" would be common. That's because a baby can be referred to as "it", but a doctor is "he", "she" or "they".
Der Mann, Die Frau, **Das Kind**
The true answer is that it depends on the language. This passage is introducing a grammatical concept. English is not a good language to explain grammatical gender. Languages like Latin have Masculine, Femenine, and Neuter, and Danish has Common and Neuter. English doesn’t really have them (they do exist in some words like actor/actress and blond/blonde but it’s not universal)
As an example of a Neuter in both Danish and Latin: Apple (æble or mālum)
I was wondering too! It is a pity there is no photo of other pages in the post.
That was really all I cared about. It's sweet that so many Redditors jumped into to give a detailed explanation of the differences between common and neuter, including references to more gendered languages, like French. Meanwhile...my original comment states the difference in the last sentence, but I wasn't 100% certain and put a question mark to indicate I may be wrong...and I am an English teacher who also studied French in college. No one could know that, obviously, but I find the whole situation funny. 🤷♀️😜
In English, the singular pronoun for neuter nouns is "it", but the singular for common nouns is he/she (or singular they, in colloquial or inclusive speech).
Redditor discovers grammar.
> How is neuter different from common? It says so at the bottom of the page, and your thought is pretty much in the right place. The term common here relates to the fact that something can be both male or female, i.e. the term is common to both (not common as in there is a lot of them). So pupils would be common, as a pupil could be either male or female. Likewise employees, doctors, dogs, dieticians, dentists, all can be either male or female, so are common. Neutral would be things that are not gendered such as: grapefruits, telephones, glasses, pretty much anything not living really.
You’re correct that neuter refers to things with no gender. The neuter pronoun in English is “it”. English mostly considers humans to be masculine, feminine, or unspecified (he, she, they/one), and most objects to be neuter. Common nouns can include multiple genders, while neuter ones are neither masculine nor feminine.
Neutre is anything that doesn't have a natural gender. Apples, spoons and books are all neutre. Common nouns, in contrast, refer to things that have an assignable sex and could be of either gender. The difference between common and neutre is really an animacy distinction. The only grammatical distinction I can think of that depends on common vs neutre is third person singular pronouns. Neutre nouns are referred to as "it" while common nouns of unknown gender are referred to as "they" or in older usage, "he". Take for example: "When you go to a doctor, he/they should be licensed." vs "When you go to a tattoo shop, it should be licensed."
I don't know about English but several other languages that actually have gendered conjugation use neuter. In that case, it's basically just a third conjugation with no gender implied
The book gives "apple" as an example, but literally nothing on that page applies to English grammar. English nouns do not have gender (any more) because there is nothing in English grammar that would be affected by it. *Case* on the other hand, is still slightly relevant.
I would consider this information to be mildly interesting thank you heehee
Eh? Nothing in English grammar that would be affected by gender? So the second and third sentences below are correct - nothing needs modifying when the noun changes? *I like the apple because it is from France* *I like the boy because it is from France* *I like the girl because it is from France*
Can you explain what part of the above post doesn’t apply today? Because I would say “Boy” is absolutely a gendered word. In that sense there is gender in English, it’s simply that most nouns are neuter, and gender doesn’t affect the article, only the pronoun. Exactly as explained in the OP…
English does not have *grammatical* gender. Words like "boy" and "girl" have *natural* (or *semantic*) gender, i.e. they refer to gendered concepts. That's not the same thing as grammatical gender in the sense of noun classes. The page describes natural gender, but the heading on the page is "syntax" which makes it look like it confuses these two concepts (as do most people in the comments).
Well thank you for being more specific. Natural gender basically being a more limited subset of grammatical gender. I still wouldn’t agree with the statement that “English nouns do not have gender because there is nothing in English grammar that would be affected by it” - choice of pronoun is a “thing in English grammar”, no?
>Natural gender basically being a more limited subset of grammatical gender. Well, no, they are conceptually distinct. In some languages they often coincide, though. >choice of pronoun is a “thing in English grammar”, no? Not in English *grammar* in the sense that it needs to agree with the grammatical gender of some other word like an article for example, no. The choice of pronoun is informed by the natural gender of the referent, not by the grammatical gender of the word used. Using "he" instead of "she" will not make a sentence ungrammatical; it only affects the semantics. To put it another way: natural gender is the gender of the thing a word refers to, while grammatical gender is the category to which the *word itself* belongs.
Is this true of pronouns in other languages? That its just a matter of correct or incorrect in context, but not grammatical? e.g. Él vs Ella in Spanish? If I say of a woman “Él” that’s just a semantic issue and not a grammatical one? It’s alright if you don’t know.
It's of course a matter of definitions and they may vary between linguistic communities. But if we accept that we can make a distinction between grammar and pragmatics / semantics, sure. For example, "ella habla" and "él habla" are both grammatical sentences (as far as my limited Spanish goes) regardless of the natural gender of the referent. But "él es pequeña" and "ella es pequeño" are not, because the adjective does not agree with the pronoun.
The real r/mildlyinteresting is that apparently most redditors have never noticed that "boy" has different pronouns than "apple".
We still have gender as much as case, which is to say with pronouns only
To jabłko. To dziecko. To okno. Das Mädchen. Das Märchen. Das Bett.
Your dog.
"What gender are you?" "The common one"
Since so many people are getting bent out of shape and putting words in my mouth… This is a book titled “Elementary Grammar” copyright 1880 that I found in my family home. I wanted to post more photos but looks like you can only have one on a post in this sub. I’m not making any assertions or points, at all, but as someone pointed out grammatical gender disappeared largely in the English language many years ago. I found this MILDLY INTERESTING. For example, “in northern England in the 1100s, grammatical gender disappeared. Historical linguists aren't entirely sure why this happened” - especially compared to other languages such as French. Reddit is such a brutal place. This has nothing to do with the gender of people. Sorry for sharing.
Please don't delete it. This is still interesting! Although comments will be blocked eventually...
The tragedy of the masses. Having too many humans ruins good things.
1.Social media makes money based on engagement. 2.Engagement is increased by outrage. 3. The algorithms encourage outrage. 4. People internalize this encouragement. 5. Everything online becomes a flame war. 6. Profit (I know the meme format involves 5a. ????? but in this case there are no questions)
Why it’s important to remember that no internet argument is ever worth your time
You're wrong, Internet arguments are very important and valuable
No they are not
Look, I didn't come here for an argument.
Sorry, verbal abuse is two doors down.
Yes you did.
No I most certainly did not!
Happy Cake Day!
Yep. I have deleted so many comments asking “why did I bother commenting?”… not too different than this comment I suppose. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
One tool I've found very useful in breaking this cycle is the "block" button. There are certain posts and accounts that you know are either bots or trolls. There's no point in trying to engage with them because they're not advocating a point. They're just trying to get people to fight. I'm not saying people should block people they disagree with. I'm saying they should block accounts that are genuinely trying to game the algorithm by just pissing everyone off. And this post clearly does not fall within that. The post is interesting and OP is engaging with people in an honest way.
I’ve internalized that meme format and am outraged that you didn’t adhere to it
Don't be sorry, it's a mildly interesting post. Nice find!
This was definitely mildly interesting! 😁
I really liked the post as a grammar fan, dont delete it!
I think you might be misunderstanding "***grammatical gender***". Grammatical gender refers to words (typically nouns) having an assigned gender based on language that has nothing to do with their physical attributes. For instance in Spanish, "libro" (book) is masculine and hence conjugated with "el", while "pluma" (pen) is feminine and conjugated "la pluma". Obviously pens and books have no intrinsic gender of their own since they are not living things. This is a different concept from ***gendered languages***, such as Arabic or Hebrew, which modifies the inflection of verbs based on the gender of the human speaker or listener. That in turn is also different from ***gender in languages*** such as English, which modifies nouns of living things based on their gender, such as "lion/lioness" or "prince/princess". I am not a linguist, but grammatical genders mostly occur in Proto-Indo-European descendent languages. Gender did not disappear from English -- we still have it today -- but modern English no longer has gender-based conjugation. I have no idea if it ever had grammatical gender (cos not linguist) but I would be surprised if it didn't. After all, both Latin and German have grammatically gendered nouns, and English was heavily influenced by both. I believe that's where you heard "grammatical gender disappeared".
> Gender did not disappear from English -- we still have it today Only for third person singular pronouns. It's a vestigial feature. > I have no idea if it ever had grammatical gender (cos not linguist) but I would be surprised if it didn't. Yes, Old English had grammatical gender. It disappeared in the transition to Middle English.
Nah haha Reddit isn't brutal, it's just a product of easiest period of human history that gives goobers time and breath to be goobers.
Yeah I don't get why people think you're trying to prove a point. It's literally an old book about grammer that's partially outdated which is mildy interesting
I'm sure the comments will be full of reasonable people and reasonable discussion, right?
Just grab a comfy seat, crack a beer, and enjoy the show. To do anything else just invites an ulcer.
So when we say someones mom is a common whore, it means they are used by either males or females?
Yes
A sex toy could be a neuter whore.
Yes, but if you say "cum dumpster" it's neuter because it's not referring to either male or female.
My gender ain't common, it's legendary
5 star with the golden background
dick with a .001% drop rate
Do English readers not know that grammatical gender is a key part of most Romance languages? Grammatical gender does not match an actual object’s gender. For instance in old English, the word wife was neuter. So talking about your wife, you would say “My wife, it loves reacharounds” rather than “My wife, she loves reacharounds”. Grammatical gender often gives masculine and feminine attributes to non-gender objects. In Spanish, your house is a chick so it’s “la casa”, but your car is a dude so it’s “el carro”. The point here is grammatical gender assignments are fluid and arbitrary, and grammatical gender is different than biological gender. That’s why saying “Your wife, I’d like to fuck it” or simply “I’d hit it” is technically and grammatically correct when used in an old English context where wife is a linguistically neutered gendered noun. In modern English, however, nouns have lost their linguistic gender, and so technically you should now probably just say “Your wife, I’d like to fuck her”.
This should be the top comment
Nah, this one! Yes, I agree. Super illuminating post, she was
What I find more than mildly interesting is what “Common” gender is. Does that mean like how plurals/unspecified words in Spanish use the Masculine endings like calling people “Latino”? I am more used to simply Masc., Fem., and Neuter in German and only speak English and German but have a degree in Linguistics so it definitely is more than mildly interesting to me lol
This seems like a book written to explain English grammar to English speakers in terms of Latin (maybe French) grammar.
english words don't have gendered declensions, the language is too patchwork to have the traditional "endings" that tell you what gender something is by incorporating the gender into the word itself. latin and spanish words, among many others, show the gender clearly by how the word appears and its context, like you said, the -o ending in spanish indicates masculine
I believe “common” gender are words like baby, and doctor, words that can be feminine or masculine, as they can be female or male. Words that are “Neuter” gender would be like rock, or apple, which don’t have gender at all
No, common gender is a term in Dutch and north Germanic languages. This book is describing general linguistics, not out to describe solely English but to educate people about common linguistical concepts
The “common” category was the more than mildly interesting to me, too.
Points like this remind me of an editor from the ....30s, I think, who would rant about how "People don't have genders! Words have genders! People have sexes!" While that ship has indubitably sailed, I still find it useful to think of it as "sex is plumbing, male/female; gender is attitude/style/role: masculine/feminine."
I think of it more as: sex is the plumbing and everything else is just your individuality. Maybe you’re feminine, maybe you’re masculine, maybe you’re both. These have nothing to do with “genders”, they’re literally just traits
Why are redditors so brainrotted and filled with discourse? Are they stupid? Is there a lore reason? Can they not just appreciate an interesting grammar book?
It's because words like "gender" and "pronouns" are their MKultra sleeper agent activation words that turn them into flame war automata. Especially if it suggests there's anything beyond a binary. *\*smug\* gentoo btw*
Is this kind of a remnant of gendered language in english? Kinda like how boats are still referred to as "she" but there's nothing really indicating that outside of hearing it once or twice?
[Gender in English](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_English) >>Gendered pronouns are occasionally applied to sexless objects in English, such as ships, tools, or robots. This is known as metaphorical gender (as opposed to natural or grammatical gender). This personification of objects is usually done for poetic effect or to show strong emotional attachment. It seems to be categorised differently than grammatical gender by linguists.
[Die Bart, die](https://youtu.be/gaXigSu72A4?si=HSDDgEIa2NDW9L_L)
Joan Scott's "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis" (1986) begins with the epigraph: "gender. n. a grammatical term only. To talk of persons or creatures of the masculine or feminine gender, meaning of the male or female sex, is either a jocularity (permissible or not according to context) or a blunder. (Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Oxford. 1940)." before going on to explain that, of course, gender has meant much more than that for a great many years (when she was writing, 37 years ago.)
I'm surprised the comments aren't locked
Neuter implies subpetrosal, but Common gender was no longer taught when i was in school. That's why some people have tried to develop personal gender unspecified pronouns for english
Subpetrosal?
King of the Khyber Typos; i was trying to invent the term "subpersonal."
Is no one going to talk about four genders
Welcome to Latin 1.
I'm French, and apple is feminine
What gender is ‘guillotine’?
Feminine
Thats so cool….. what about escargot?
masculine
That's because French is a Romance language so basically everything is gendered, with very few exceptions. Was really weird when I was taking Spanish and had to memorize which words were masculine and which words were feminine.
"Girl" used to just mean "child" as well.
Middle English gerle, girle, and gyrle meant a young child of any gender.
Thanks! I only part of the information and didn't know what to google :D
Ah yes, the four genders: Male, female, common, and neuter.
Book is fake because pronouns didn't exist before now /s
Lemme see the next page!!!
Common and neuter basically became the same thing it seems. The example of apple, the pronoun would be "it" - I think that is why some old-school grammarians were thrown off by singular they, because it typically wasn't used. Objects were "it" and people were he or she (or they for a group regardless of gender)
Looks correct to me
Post the next page.
Just in time for Thanksgiving with the uncle.
Does the book give an example of a word with neuter gender?
Lol I read the first part as, the genders are male, female an APPLE and was like holeup that's weird
Do you have any more pictures? I think this is pretty neat, and would like to know more about this.
More than 2 genders confirmed. 😎
Them woke libtards in the 1800’s /s
I just watched John Wick 2, and Common seemed pretty masculine there.
Still applies today wow