Grammatical gender

[Bluenoir]

I have been trying to learn to speak french, at least to the point of being able to hold down a basic conversation with my grandparents. They can speak english, but I have always wanted to be able to speak my ancestral tounge on my mothers side.

(It's one of my life long goals.)

As I speak english natively, one of the biggest grievances for me is grammatical gender.

WHY!!!!!!!!!!

If there was an actual system to assign noun gender, it would still be a headache, but a manageable one. However in french at least, it's completely arbitrary. Why is a ball point pen masculine? WHAT IS SO MALE ABOUT IT

It has to be the most ridiculous, arbitary, convoluted, stupid and did I mention stupid grammatical rule conceived.

I think I'll have to go and study french in an actual course, instead of tying piece it together myself. This thread really has no purpose but for me to vent.

French speakers, arbitary noun genders are stupid! /end rant

[Cat King Cole]

Why is a ball point pen masculine? WHAT IS SO MALE ABOUT IT

[ashlesha]

lol. i've wondered how that works in those languages that do it, how people know which one to use. rote memorization? or is there some kind of culturally embedded understanding of what makes something masculine or feminine? (phallic - masculine lol.) i don't get it. it would frustrate the shit out of me, too.

[Cat King Cole]

laghlagh, think of it this way.

In English, why is "to oversee" to watch over, but "an oversight" is a mistake?

I imagine gender is one of those things you pick up that just doesn't make any logical sense.

[Bluenoir]

I imagine gender is one of those things you pick up that just doesn't make any logical sense.

This, there is no logical way of knowing which is which. It's just something you have to learn noun by noun. English, cept for some very few circumstances, is neutral. While it's second nature for my grandparents, it's totally alien thus confusing for me.

There is the remnants of a system, like, "stylo" is masculine as it finishes with an -o, where as "styloe" (which doesn't exist) or, say, "voiture" is feminine as they finish with an -e. And then you've got the rules of if it finishes with -age it's masculine, if it finishes with -tion it's feminine, etc. The problem is that it's an organic language, it wasn't designed, it was just sorta developed.

Alright, there is no reliable way of determining gender.

[FDG]

From my romance-native perspective, it seems quite stupid to think about objects as not having a gender. For example a bed is clearly male in my mind, even though it'll always be expressed as "it" in english. This can be an obstacle when learning German, though, since an object's gender isn't language-invariant.

AFAIK the reason is simply how a given word ends in the "nearest" latin case where it ends with a vowel (i.e. casa - "house" in italian - will be feminine because its nominative ends in a, yet caso - "case" - will be masculine because its latin nominative ends in -us yet its latin accusative ends in -o). It's technically simple yet it's quite cumbersome to create a rule which doesn't even work all the time, thus rote memorization is the way to go.

rote memorization? or is there some kind of culturally embedded understanding of what makes something masculine or feminine?

Rote memorization, I believe.

Why is a ball point pen masculine?

In Italian she's female, if that makes you feel better...

[Nowisthetime]

Think of it this way:
There is no logical connection for example between the word "bed" (the spelling/pronounciation) and the actual object. Still people learn the word, and yes, they have to memorize all words and connections between words+objects separately as they learn the language. Same with gender. So it really isn't that strange.

[golden]

From my romance-native perspective, it seems quite stupid to think about objects as not having a gender. For example a bed is clearly male in my mind, even though it'll always be expressed as "it" in english. This can be an obstacle when learning German, though, since an object's gender isn't language-invariant.

This confuses me. In French, for example, we have

penis--> le pénis--> masculine, so far, so good, BUT
vagina--> le vagin--> also masculine

Even if these are not the most colorful terms for the sex organs, they are the most basic. Is a penis male, but a vagina male, as well? Is there any reason whatsoever I would conceive of these objects as having gender, rather than only the terms that refer to them, when I am thinking and speaking in French? Or were you kidding?

[Creepy-male]

laghlagh, think of it this way.

In English, why is "to oversee" to watch over, but "an oversight" is a mistake?

I imagine gender is one of those things you pick up that just doesn't make any logical sense.

Well in the first instance you're implying looking from above, down below, like a photo of the earth from space.

In the second instance you're implying looking past something or beyond something and missing something.

I've heard oversight used in the first instance as well... like "government oversight" imply the government is monitoring something. Likewise you can say overlooked to imply something similar to oversight.

Really imho context is what drives things home.

Gender to me is odd, specifically why its called gender... maybe its drawing upon a deeper concept like an analogy of words to people. People exist in different variants, called genders. People exist in different ethnicities as well. Similiarly their are different languages for different ethnicities and different genders for different words.

That seems more sensible than people selecting gender based on sexual connotations... such as "this word is a manly word" or "this word is phallic" or "this word is soft and nuturing and feminine" or "this word is girly like a female".

My guess is probably certain languages adjusted the sound of articles and so forth for fluidity and these stuck, when scholars studied this and noticed it, they likely gave it the arbitrary name of gender, noticing it as different variations on a noun.

[Bluenoir]

Wow, this thread is still going.

In truth, I am actually having a lot of fun learning french, my vocabulary is almost starting to become somewhat workable. It should be obvious that my frustration in my original post was exaggerated, as this thread was made on a whim. I say this just in case some of you are tempted to read into the thread a little more than it was meant to be taken.

[Aiss]

laghlagh, think of it this way.

In English, why is "to oversee" to watch over, but "an oversight" is a mistake?

I imagine gender is one of those things you pick up that just doesn't make any logical sense.

Well in the first instance you're implying looking from above, down below, like a photo of the earth from space.

In the second instance you're implying looking past something or beyond something and missing something.

I've heard oversight used in the first instance as well... like "government oversight" imply the government is monitoring something. Likewise you can say overlooked to imply something similar to oversight.

How about cold-booded having a pejorative meaning, as per dictionaries, vs positive sang-froid, then? You aren't going to get far by insisting on there being an ultimate logic to it, I'm afraid.

Really imho context is what drives things home.

Obviously.

Gender to me is odd, specifically why its called gender... maybe its drawing upon a deeper concept like an analogy of words to people. People exist in different variants, called genders. People exist in different ethnicities as well. Similiarly their are different languages for different ethnicities and different genders for different words.

That seems more sensible than people selecting gender based on sexual connotations... such as "this word is a manly word" or "this word is phallic" or "this word is soft and nuturing and feminine" or "this word is girly like a female".

My guess is probably certain languages adjusted the sound of articles and so forth for fluidity and these stuck, when scholars studied this and noticed it, they likely gave it the arbitrary name of gender, noticing it as different variations on a noun.

I really don't know what to make of it. Do you imagine that somehow people speaking those languages didn't know what "gender" is until some scholars (presumably speaking English or other no-gender-nonsense language) appeared out of the blue and named it "gender"?

Grammatical gender *is* gender. Get over it. It was gender in Latin, in Old French, in Old English, in Old Norse, in Celtic languages... in most if not all languages that contributed to what is modern day English. It kicked it out along with most of declination and a significant part of conjugation, and it works, but keep in mind grammatical gender is no outlandish construct in "certain languages" that "scholars" suddenly came across, in fact it's pretty much standard for Indo-European languages. /sigh

I see Wikipedia also says it's "merely a convenient label" and linguistic classification and whatnot, but it sure doesn't feel that way. It's more of an inconvenient reality in those languages, I'd say.

[Bluenoir]

Humans like dichotomies. Perhaps grammatical gender is an object of a time when it was inconceivable that things (even words) could exist without fitting into some sort of dichotomous order. Hence (male, female) Human beings do have a tendency to see patterns where none actually exist.

I'm of course speculating, that's just what I think could be a possiblity.

[ClownsandEntropy]

There is the remnants of a system, like, "stylo" is masculine as it finishes with an -o, where as "styloe" (which doesn't exist) or, say, "voiture" is feminine as they finish with an -e. And then you've got the rules of if it finishes with -age it's masculine, if it finishes with -tion it's feminine, etc. The problem is that it's an organic language, it wasn't designed, it was just sorta developed.

I guess if you want a system, there's always Lojban.

[Skeptic]

There is the remnants of a system, like, "stylo" is masculine as it finishes with an -o, where as "styloe" (which doesn't exist) or, say, "voiture" is feminine as they finish with an -e. And then you've got the rules of if it finishes with -age it's masculine, if it finishes with -tion it's feminine, etc. The problem is that it's an organic language, it wasn't designed, it was just sorta developed.

I guess if you want a system, there's always Lojban.

Oh shit, you know about lojban? I've been trying to learn it - to think in it!

But yes, most languages, including English, are stupid to the extreme and end up limiting thought and whatnot; this silly rule about word gender is only the surface, if you continue in French you will grow proportionally more frustrated...

[The Ineffable]

But in English it's often the same thing. Country or car are for instance feminine.

[ClownsandEntropy]

You can always follow David Sedaris' example, who always buys things in plural, because he doesn't need to remember the genders, and so he ends up buying two chickens and two kilos of potatoes and two toasters by the end of his anecdote.

[ragnar]

However in french at least, it's completely arbitrary.

In the languages I know - which do not include French - there's a significant correlation btw gender and phonetics - there's a tendency for nouns to have articles that make the sound flow easier.

Something similar is true of English, btw - one uses the "a" or "an" indefinite article (and slightly varying pronounciation of the formal variant) depending on whether the noun is pronounced as starting with a vowel or not, avoiding vowel collision.

[Aiss]

There is the remnants of a system, like, "stylo" is masculine as it finishes with an -o, where as "styloe" (which doesn't exist) or, say, "voiture" is feminine as they finish with an -e. And then you've got the rules of if it finishes with -age it's masculine, if it finishes with -tion it's feminine, etc. The problem is that it's an organic language, it wasn't designed, it was just sorta developed.

I guess if you want a system, there's always Lojban.

^ this

From my romance-native perspective, it seems quite stupid to think about objects as not having a gender. For example a bed is clearly male in my mind, even though it'll always be expressed as "it" in english. This can be an obstacle when learning German, though, since an object's gender isn't language-invariant.

It isn't just romance-native perspective.

In Italian she's female, if that makes you feel better...

What are you talking about, he's obviously male.

[golden]

Although there are no absolutes in French concerning grammatical gender, there are some useful patterns.

Words are usually masculine if they end with:

-age
-ment
-il, -ail, -eil, -ueil
-é (but not -té)
-eau and -ou
-ème, -ège
-i, -at, -et and -ot
-er
-oir
-isme
-ing
-ard

Words are usually feminine if they end with:

-tion, -sion and -son
-ure
-ude, -ade
-ée
-té
-ière
Consonant followed by -ie
-euse
-ance, -ence

I pasted those in from this site (which has further information, including notable exceptions to the patterns) and have seen the same info in various books. Helps me a lot. It's a good exercise to find as many words as you can for each of those endings and practice writing and saying them, as a drill.

One helpful thing about the irregularities in French, and I expect in other languages (?), is that the MOST irregular stuff often is also the most commonly encountered, so you get lots of chances to assimilate those oddities the more you're exposed to the language.

[silke]

The word bed is only a symbol for the actual object. To then take it further and assign it a sex, seems rather strange and unnecessary to me. Why not have a blanket le? or make le and la interchangeable? Why the genders?

well where do you think new beds and blankets come from?

i'm quite used to grammatical gender that it actually never occurred to me to question why it exists, so good question ... tbh english sounds a bit sterile without it ... it is all in the endings really - due to endings some words sound feminine while others masculine, so you'd anthropomorphize and bestow gender upon not the object but onto the word itself