Why Doesn't English Have Genders?
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- čas přidán 4. 09. 2024
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SOURCES & FURTHER READING
Langauges By Genders: en.wikipedia.o...
What Are Gendered Nouns?: blog.duolingo....
Do English Nouns Have Genders? www.thesaurus....
History Of Old English: toppandigital....
When English Lost Its Gender: thelanguageclo...
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Actually, speaking a gendered language natively doesn't help much in learning other gendered languages, except if they are from the same family. For example, although it was easy to learn the French gender, as a portuguese, I really struggle to learn the German gender, that is totally diferent from the romance languages
selling your soul to make a video that isn't correct
@@pedroribeiro3262 yup i agree i've been learning german for 8 years and i still can't get some genders right
❤😊❤😊❤
❤😊❤😊❤
Not having to learn the gender of English's words is fully compensated by having to learn their spelling
Which is compensated for by the fact that you then know the spelling rules for Latin, French, Dutch and Old Norse.
@@troglokev Unless you are an American who modernised English spelling.
@@troglokev Believe me, Dutch is written totally different than English
@@Olafje the bits of English that borrowed from languages other than Dutch, yes. The point is that English borrows words from most European languages.
The words that English has borrowed from other languages are often pronounced very differently as in their original language though.
as a german: the fuck is "dis"?
He probably meant "die" but mistyped.
22nd Century German, after the merger of the Feminine and the Neuter
I noticed that too.
LMAO language jokes are uniquely funny
It’s 22nd Century German, after the merging of the Feminine and Neuter
Coming from a gendered language, Portuguese, I gotta say that trying to re-learn the gender of every object in another gendered language is quite hard, because many times the genders do no match across languages 😅
That's so true! But not a major hurdle to be understood thankfully.
another portuguese speaker here?1?1!1?1?1! lets go?1?1!1?1?1 what the 🤑🤑🤑
Yo os tugas aq!
As a Greek, this has been one of the hardest obstacles in learning German
Because of the language clash English is the most simplified Germanic language. Other languages have genders and declaration with different suffixes. French adjectives are gendered as well not only nouns. Something that makes English difficult is the mess of words. The flood of synonyms is horrible. If you read a non simplified novel you find tons of unknown words on every page. German standard vocabulary is around 500k, English should be a million.
I remember watching Family Guy episode with Death where he's portrayed as a dude. Which created a problem for the Russian dub as death is feminine in Russian so it was weird when someone's referring to himself in feminine acts and sounds like a man. Death is traditionally portrayed as an old woman in Russian.
That funny. In the English speaking world death is personified as a character we either call "death" (straight forward) or "the grim reaper" (as in a somber taker of souls). If I was the dubbers for that I would have wanted to try to localize it by rewriting the lines and getting a voice actress
@@coolandhip_7596 yeah but in the episode the death dates a girl. The Russian dub would have trouble turning him into a lesbian. Besides, I don't remember the whole episode but apart from that he acts like a very typical guy throughout the episode.
@@mihanichRussian homophobia :(
@@mihanichw russian homophobia.
@@rizzwan-42069 yes it's indeed widespread here
You could have gotten away with the Old Norse gaffe because I was still flustered at your insistence that Vikings wore horns on their helmets
^This
Maybe not militarily but ceremonial helmets presumably used in ceremonies
It's just a quick way to say "here's a viking".
@@user-rn2zb6be1u But not by the vikings.🤣
I want one of those helmets!
I find it odd that Sun was seen as feminine, and Moon was seen as masculine. I see it the other way around.
In Slavic languages Sun (sъlnce) is neutral, while there are two words for moon - Měsęcъ (masculine) and Luna (feminine). Ъ stands for ultrashort "u" in proto Slavic.
Romance languages have them as sun being masculine, moon being feminine
To me they both give fem vibes lol
@@mihanich Don't forget kъnęžićь
Well I mean it's the words that are gendered not the objects themselves
You missed the main reason. Sound changes made the gender endings sound the same. From Proto-Germanic to Old English, the "n" of the neuter endings was dropped, the "z" on the end of many masculine and feminine endings was dropped, and the final vowels of many of the inflexions were also dropped, such as the "a" of many masculine nouns and the "i" and "u" of many feminine nouns. This made the only difference between most of the inflexions a difference in vowel quality, and some final consonants such as "m" and "n". In late Middle English, all final vowels were reduced to "e" and eventually dropped, as well, final "m" and "n" were also dropped (this is why the "e" on the end of many English words is silent). This made all the gendered inflexions in all cases sound the same, and so the gender system stopped working.
but did that happen before or rather as a consequence to fit the sounds to the single article
@@maythesciencebewithyou The articles themselves merged in sound before the loss of final vowels in Middle English. The "eo" difthong in "seo" merged with the regular e sound in "se".
@@maitanudaAnd séo got replaced by þá as result. In fact, following that, and applying regular sound change, we would have the following system:
the the thet the
then the thet the
thes ther thes ther.
Notice, this is a complete match to archaic Dutch, which isn’t surprising given that English and Dutch are both Low German languages. Further, it’s very likely English’s case system would degrade further as it did in our time, yielding:
the thet the
A common/neuter/plural distinction, as is found in Modern Netherland’s Dutch and in West Frisian.
Although the gender system would be severely degraded, we’d still have it.
All that said, another point against your argument is this: final vowel simplification occurred in *all* west Germanic languages, including modern High German, which still has a very robust gender system in spite of the fact the once distinguishing vowels are all “e” (/ə/).
@@tfan2222Seo was not replaced by þá, Instead, the s of seo was the replaced by analogy of the þ of the other forms, and the resulting þeo became "the" due to regular sound change. Final vowel reduction did happen in German, but the final vowels themselves remained, allowing the distinction to still be maintained. In English, all final short vowels were lost enitrely. (Also, neither English or Dutch are"Low German" languages. Being West Germanic and not affected by the High German consonant shift does not make a language Low German)
Many Native American languages categorize nouns into animate and inanimate instead.
can you please give a couple examples? I wanna learn
It's thought that proto-Indoeuropean may have done this at one point. There was an Indoeuropean language from the Bronze Age that did it that way. Then, maybe the animate class broke up into masculine and feminine.
It is not 'instead' really. Like in slavic languages animate-inanimate categorization is there while having genders too
Same with the Chechen language. Source = a native Chechen speaker.
@@LemmingwayArkgive me example.
GER: 'der/die/das' did not fit into the thumbnail?
instead a "der/dis"? Dis is not even a German word.
Nuff critic. Imma watch the video now xD
Dis and Dat are colloquial/dialect English words though
@@graemesutton2919in german, Dis is a different form of dies, which comes from dieser, which is a demonstrative pronoun. Dat is a colloquial version of Das, the neutral article. it’s also a different form of dass, which is a conjunction.
@@nonnadiona2659 "Dit og dat" exist in Danish as a translation of "dies und jenes" but they aren't really standard words.
Fun fact, in English the word genre comes from the French word for gender, which essentially shows that grammatical gender is about noun grouping and less about genatalia 😂
Atleast in the modern context of European languages, though I'm curious why the proto-indo-europeans came up with grammatical gender
@@V0liathon honestly, probably because in a society of early farmers, it made more sense when you are surrounded by plants and animals, and which ones to hunt, breed, and their phase of life are much more important: extending such concepts arbitrarily to the inanimate makes sense. But in a modern society where most of our interactions are with things that are manufactured, it has become a bit silly. But old habits die hard as they say.
@@V0liathon When PIE was a "modern" language, it had (an) ancient language(s) it came from. Who knows when "gender/genre" came about.
Fun fact, both "gender" and "genre" come from French "genre." They are doublets.✌️
@hugobourgon198 yup
My French mother told me that after learning English, it puzzled her why the French language had to have gender-labels for inanimate objects, such as for tables and chairs.
She appreciated the English language having gender-neutral aspects to it, along with how forgiving the language usage could be when a person's spoken grammar could be atrociously bad, yet, still be understood.
3:34 No, a male chicken is called a cock. 'Rooster' was invented by Americans in the early 20th century due to them getting embarrassed about using the proper word, which is still in normal usage in other English speaking countries.
Come on now, there's no need to be a rooster about it.
Nay, a male chicken is called a Rooster. this is because everybody else calls male chickens roosters, or think of a male chicken when rooster is used.
@@duckman554 Only in USA/Canada. Other anglophone countries don't have a problem with the word cock.
Yet they are not embarrassed about using the word "fanny" the way they do.
Neither do they mind calling people "Dick".
Lol.
Actually no, both cock and rooster are normal usage in all English-speaking countries. Rooster is a dialectal term in England from around 500 years ago and has been recorded in use in the USA from as far back as the 1760s. The advantage of rooster is that ALL male birds can be called cocks (which is a French word) so a word only for a male chicken is more useful.
Supposedly, over time, languages tend to simplify. English is a good example. Not only are nouns not gendered, neither are adjectives. There are no plural or singular versions of adjectives either. One of the greatest simplifications in English, there are no case endings.
This is... not wrong, but also not correct. What will happen is that, over time, languages will become easier to speak/write, losing complexity... but there comes a point where that process starts negatively impacting the ability to clearly articulate what is meant and not have the other party misunderstand, which tends to trigger the addition of more complexity again, to provide distinctions between elements that have become sufficiently mushed together as to become a problem. And then, of course, there comes a point where all the additonal complexity becomes more trouble than it's worth, and it all starts simplifying again.
Of course, there are other factors that push in both directions, and one part of a langauge can be going one way while another part is going the other at the same time.
English is not actually as simple as it looks. Prepositions very easily become case markers, for example, and that's only held off by a few odd parts of the usage (such as adverbs being able to be shoved in between in some contexts), certainly most of them are already arbritrary enough... And then there's the part where English verbs don't have all that much conjucational complexity in terms of the verb itself... but the verb Phrase is a complicated stack of arbritrary words that only mean anything in a combined stack (including certain slots being 'null' marked, where there's no actual word, but the distinction isn't betweeen "thing(marked)" and "not-thing(unmarked)" but "thing(marked)" and "other-thing(unmarked)" so it's still actively contributing to the meaning of the stack), where to change the meaning of the phrase you have to do anything from toggle the word in one slot to completly throw out the entire phrase, insert a different one, and possibly even swap out the verb itself for a different one with a similar but not identical meaning.... when other languages would just swap out a suffix.
Which is to say, the Words are simple, the Grammar sure isn't!
0:50 The polish verbs itself don't have gender, but they are conjugated by it. So for example "I ate" is "(Ja) jadłem" if I am a male, or "(Ja) jadłam" if I am a female.
Bro failed so hard with the thumbnail on German it’s Der/Die
*Der/die/das
Actually, there are three - Courtney is correct.
@@ClockMaster-mq2hm yes I know they are 3 I am German myself I just wanted to clarify that „dis“ is not an article
@@thesquidi144 It's a pronoun. "New phone, who dis?"
ich fin dis iwie süß xD
And when English does have genders, people think of sailors.
I'm sorry, what?
@@insising in traditional english sailor slang ships and occasionally other vehicles are referred to as female, rather than the usual neuter
And countries are sometimes called "she."
Only because ships have names and names are either masculine or feminine....
"Oh, I know, I'll learn Japanese. It's got no grammatical gender, so that should make it easier." *instant regret*
it really should be easy as soon as you are able to read the hiragana and katakana and at least a few basic kanji. Japanese has more consistent rules that make it easy to learn as soon as you have expanded vocabulary.
Reading/writing Japanese is fairly comparable to English: Both very high up the difficulty/complexity scale.
Speaking Japanese? Ehh, it's mostly a matter of langauges being easier or more difficult to learn based on how similar they are or are not to languages you already know, and how many differernt languages you already know.
Amusingly, if you are familiar with early 1800s English, theres a lot more things that map conceptually 1:1 with Japanese than is the case with modern English.... though English will still in many cases prefer to completely rephrase things where Japanese will just swap out an honourific, and adjust the latin-derived to germanic word ratio where Japanese would swap out verb conjugations.
And, of course, both have plenty of dialects and the standard/casual speech distinction to trip you up.
In Welsh, nouns are still gendered but there's no indefinite article and the three forms of the definite article have nothing to do with a noun's gender!
At least with Dutch/French/German/Italian/Portuguese/Spanish if you learn each noun alongside its corresponding definite article then you won't go far wrong.
Oh, and Patrick's attempt to say "une bière et des cacahuètes" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement of Babbel, sorry! 😅
same in slavic languages
Two things about gender I like to point out for people who are learning languages:
1 people, including educational youtubers and teacher often say thing "it's la table in French so tables are feminine" that's just not how this works. Things aren't gendered, words are. Synonyms of the same things can have different genders.
2 if you learn a language don't overly stress about gender. You will make mistakes but it'll be alright if you say le table people will understand it. You'll just sound like someone who isn't great at French but they would have figured that out from your speed and pronunciation too. Just use the language and don't overly stress about which articles you use.
Yes, but the French can be a little proud with their language. They may understand you, but you can bet your bottom franc they will take every opportunity to correct your French.
@@DarkHelixia which unironically probably the best way to learn. By trying and getting corrected.
@@DarkHelixiaespecially if you have an English accent.
@@Frahamen There's usually rules that govern most of it, although there can be a great deal of exceptions.
English should be happy and they should be sad
As an Italian, our language is too much specified with genders certain times too male ones, I find this thing of the english awesome.
Is your language an Italian?
Wake up new german article just dropped "dis"
die + das = dis? 🙂
@@schnelma605 maybe des since /i/ and /a/ are at opposite ends of the height spectrum
i still remember the shift in portuguese from sex to gender. Even to this day i prefer to say “person’s sex” instead of gender so the word gender is exclusive to words, grammar, etc
Polish doesn't even have different words for "sex" and "gender". It's the same word.
You shouldn't have to do that...
@@DogDogGodFog thats so wild, they have such hugely important roles in english
@@DogDogGodFog It should probably also be mentioned that while the same word is used for the two, there's a different one for grammatical gender.
Malay language has no concept of grammatical gender at all, not even in our pronouns. So, gender to us is sex. Our native word for gender is 'jantina', which is literally two words moshed together 'JANtan' (male) and 'beTINA' (female).
just saying: the three words for the are not "se, seo, þay" /se sio tɛɪ/ but "sē sēo þæt" /seː seːo θæt/
Why did you type all that out just to correct the last word, it was the only incorrect one and off by one letter. Just say "it's not thay, it's that" (I'm too lazy to type thorn).
@@HuckleberryHim because it wasn't the only one? he said "sio" instead of "sēo" too, & that point i just decided to put all three there.
@@Memezuii I don't know about pronunciation, which he botched for basically every non-English word anyway, but it was spelled "seo"
One of my favorite bits of Spanish is that _la leche_ becomes _el queso._
That is to say, the milk - feminine - becomes the cheese - masculine.
Compare die Maid f (genitive Maid, plural Maiden) to das Mädchen n (genitive Mädchens, plural Mädchen)
@@yozhleszy That's bizarre. I read up on it a bit, as I don't know German, and found that the -chen suffix apparently turns a noun neuter. Neat.
@@HayTatsuko Nop. The -chen suffix is an indicator of diminutive. Compare
де́ва (дѣва [děwa], maiden, maid, virgin) f anim (genitive де́вы, nominative plural де́вы, genitive plural дев)
to
дитя́ (дѣтѧ [dětent], child, baby, kid) n anim (genitive дитя́ти, nominative plural де́ти, genitive plural дете́й, relational adjective де́тский).
@@HayTatsuko It´s a diminutive marker that turns words in neuter. Same for -lein, -le and other regional variations.
Recently in Argentina the last president tried to make all genders neutral, so "La" and "El" had to be written as "Le", but the new president got rid of that idea
I mean, it doesn't sound so bad of an idea, but it would be weird to people accustomed to gendered nouns. XD (i.e. La agua -> Le agua, El sol -> Le sol)
@@zanzeperanation827 It was confusing, and you can't go against tradition, most people were furious actually
You cannot _enact_ a change in language. It needs to just happen.
@@jensphiliphohmann1876 tell that to the Chinese lol or l'Academie Française
@@V0liathon
O.k., if you have totalitarian power, you perhaps can.
as a Pole, it’s not like we have any idea why genders are a thing. we just got used to them
also, I need to say that articles are just as hard to learn for us as genders are for English speakers
or should I say “for THE English speakers”. that’s what I’m talking about 🙃
As a linguist, it's fascinating how you manage to always "botch" all the foreign words. Your accent is so prevalent and interesting
Translation:
"You speak like a retard"
Is IT a linguist?
"As a linguist, I find it interesting..."
There is nothing fascinating about it. Not even trying to look up the proper pronunciation and at elast try to mimick it if you make a video about it is just what monolingual english speakers do on a daily basis.
This simplification of genders is starting to happen to Norwegian. I’m in the middle of learning it and I find that a lot of people just say «en dør» and not «ei dør» anymore. The feminine gender is still used somewhat, but in a lot of cases it’s being phased out.
Edit: Note, I’m not a native Norwegian speaker so I can’t say this for certain. All of the Norwegian speakers in my family have passed away and I don’t live in Norway so I’m relying solely on the internet for this
I get the same impression, but anecdotaly it seems to happen only to eastern dialects. Granted that includes the capital, half the population and most foreigners so it's the most visible, especially to someone learning the language.
As a dane we have we have two gender common and neuter but understanding the concept doesnt help learning languaes as german and french because the genders doesnt franlate.. english is much more easy
Most of the world's languages don't use gender, not even gendered pronouns, which English does have, so a better question to ask is why do most European languages have gender.
Also, Old Saxon may have been thr bigger component in most of the OE literature that remains to us, for the political reason that it came from Wessex. Modern English derives more from the Anglian dialects of the east pf England.
I was going to say this, a lot of European linguists treat gender as the default when actually it's an exotic and rare feature.
@@PlatinumAltaria Indo-europeanist linguists being biased idiots. Why am i not surprised at all?
English does not actualy have gendered pronouns (radical idiots pedling defective ideological purity tests aside). It has Sex Marked (also Animacy marked, and Age marked, incidentally) nouns, of which pronouns are but one subset. These are dependent entirely on the refereant (the real world entity being spoken of), and have no impact on any gramatical agreement whatsoever.
English just straight up does not have a noun class system (gramatical gender is but one subtype of such) at all.
English grammar is also entirley mute on the subject of gender identity.
I always wondered that myself.Thanks for posting.Another about English is there is far less conjugation of verbs than in most other languages.
Some of this feels rather inaccurate to me, and I will explain why.
The suffixes observed on Old English nouns were varied and complex. The gender of a word determined not only which article (the-word) to use, but also the grammatical suffixes of the noun, and the adjective-like words that described them. The word for "dogs" in Old English is "hundas", while the word for "ships" is "scipu". These nouns take different plural forms (-as vs. -u) because they fall into different grammatical categories- different genders, if you will, though you can increase complexity with different declensions and such.
Nearing the time of the Norman conquest of England, Old English writers display confusion as to which endings go on which nouns. More precisely, they seem to be confusing the genders. While speakers of Old Norse may have influenced people's ability to use inflectional forms correctly, I don't feel that this would have lead to the complete erosion of English's gender system.
Instead, English's re-emergence as a written language after the Norman invasion illuminates an extended period of weakening in pronunciation. Precisely, as more foreign words were introduced into the English language, longer words were pronounced with fewer syllables, and endings of words were reduced to simpler sounds. For example, the Old English word 'nama' (name) could take the endings -a, -an, -ena, -um, Middle English 'name' was left with only -e and -es.
This simplification was so far reaching that English nouns no longer fell into these same categories. The 'hundas' and 'scipu' of Old English would be reduced to roughly 'houndes' and 'schipes' in Middle English. When you have no unique patterns, it's easy to forget the grammar surrounding them. However, in writing, the complete lack of gender marking happened earliest in the north, in the mid 12th century. Northern Anglic varieties, like Scots, observed the most influence from Old Norse contact. This change was complete, throughout English, by the 15th century.
As the earliest Middle English (mid to late 12th century) texts demonstrate a lack of gender marking, this gives the Danelaw ~100 years and some 100 more of primary linguistic interaction, and the Norman conquest ~100 years of influence up to the time in which these documents were written. These early texts exhibit small and nonexistent usage of loans from Old French, respectively. This observation alone suggests that Old Norse influence may have deconstructed the grammar of English singlehandedly.
In response, I ask the following question: given the social relationship between the English and French rulership, is it more likely that Old Norse did this in isolation, or that the linguistic effects of the Norman conquest were not limited to the south, and affected northern varieties too, even though they did not choose to write it down? Although Modern Scots exhibits far less influence from Norman French than Standard English, it is important to remember that virtually every variety of English underwent some variation of the Great Vowel Shift. Even if Scots is not English, the Anglophone sphere was tightly knit.
It makes far more sense to me to come to the conclusion that contact between Old English and Old Norse speakers caused the case system of Old English to become unstable, while the Norman conquest of England finished the job. I almost feel like this is validated further when considering the amount of loanwords from Old Norse, versus those from Old French. Sometimes we cannot even be sure whether a word was borrowed from ON, or whether OE had a cognate, and the pronunciation itself was borrowed.
Finally, I would like to address a large oversight from early in the video. Linguistic interaction between Latin and Celtic language speakers would not contribute to English being a gendered language. In large quantities, loaning most often causes the simplification of gender systems, as observed in the influence of the Danelaw and Norman conquest. It is far simpler to give up on learning the grammar of a language than it is to add it, completely and accurately, to your own. The gender system of Old English was inherited from Proto West Germanic, and not at all from the surrounding languages, as Celtic speakers were often absorbed into the English-speaking population, or killed and pushed away.
Also, since Shakespeare isn't obvious to even educated people, it's worth noting, in the video, that Shakespeare's English belongs to what we call 'Early Modern English'.
Thank you for using the English flag instead of the Union Jack 🙏. I get frustrated that all the languages of the UK get forgotten.
Slight correction. Only nouns can have gender. Adjectives and other words, even verbs, can agree with a noun for gender, but they do not have gender
It wasn’t until relatively recently in the late 20th century that gender in English was commonly used to refer to someone’s sex. Before that, it was a grammatical term most of the time and one didn’t have to specify “grammatical gender.”
Isn't it more accurate to say that English does have masc/fem/neut but almost everything is neuter? Some languages really don't have gender. Words like 'man' and 'woman' definitely have grammatical gender because they influence pronouns, possessives etc.
Covert gender! I like the idea, thank you.
Gramatically, English has no gender.
What it Does have are Sexed Nouns. That is, there'll be one noun for an individual who is known to be (or failing that, appears to be) biologically male, and a different one if the individual is known to be (or appears to be) biologically female (some have a word for if the indivudal has been neutered, too). For many living entities (including plants and humans), Age is also indicated. Sometimes it's a binary ('mature enough to count as adult in the context we're discussing, or not) sometimes there are finer distinctions (usually farm animals).
Animacy is also a big deal. 'it' is acceptable for a newborn of unknown sex, but in any other case to refer to a human as an 'it' is to declare them as capable of deciding and acting for themselves, and as worthy of being treated as a person, as a random rock would be.... maybe a worker ant if one is being particularly generous. Needless to say, this is... impolite. (the flip side of this, anything of sufficient metaphysical weight, for want of a better all encompasing term, can be refered to with male or female pronouns, because there is no pronoun for the combination 'singular, animate, sexless', and English rates getting Animacy right higher than anything else.
The distinction here? The Words don't affect Each Other. They are all equally affected by the Referant, the real world thing the word indicates, and that's it. Gramatical gender doesn't actually care about the referant, At All... not once it gets going, anyway. While it may start off sex based (or that might just be a convenient way to lable it), Gramatical gender quickly comes to be asigned not by the sex of any referant, but by the similarity of the word to other words, with sufficiently similar words (be that by sound or by interaction with other gramtical bits) ending up the same gender... and then one can use the Other gender with the word to indicate something related-but-different.
You might notice I didn't mention Gender Identity there?
That's because English Grammar does nothing with it. So far as gender identity goes English Grammar is entirely mute.
I used to think that we Chinese speakers are lucky for no need to learn two genders of words, but after I reviewed my language , I happened to find that Chinese divided into a more complicated way which called”元素”（elements）。
English has a lot of flaws but not having gendered nouns ain't one.
It does not have A LOT of flaws,
Ehh, gendered nouns aren't really a flaw. Well... let me make a slight correction: having a system of noun clasess is not a flaw. 'gender' is but one system of noun classes, specifically one with two or three classes that, one way or another, became Losely associated with the sexes despite that having no actual practical bearing on how they work. There are other systems of noun class without that association, which can have more than three possible classes.
Spoken English has a fair number of flaws, though not really any more or less than any other language.
Writen English is a different matter. Most of it's 'flaws' are actualy a combination of complexity and poor teaching, but even once you get past that, some of those that remain are still pretty dire.
All languages and dialects change over time, but in their own different ways. Indo-European languages tend to have systems of grammatical gender because its ancestral language (Proto-Indo-European) likely had a 3-gender grammatical system. Historically, English has used to have a system of grammatical gender, but it also had a robust case system similar to standard modern German. However, over time, English lost its original system of grammatical gender in nouns because nearly all of its inflectional morphology (which includes nouns, verbs, adjectives) and case system (now only existing in pronouns) have eroded to the point that there are no longer any differences between historically masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns in terms of how they inflect (they almost never do except in pluralization with -(e)s). Simultaneously, word order in English started to become increasingly rigid because the position of nouns within sentences determined their role in the overall meaning conveyed by those sentences rather than the suffixes that would have indicated the nouns' case and gender. So languages with very little noun inflection, i.e. analytic-type languages like modern English, tend to lack grammatical gender or any other kind of noun class system.
I can remember der, die and das from German, but I don't recall dis.
It’s 22nd Century German, after the merging of the Feminine and Neuter
8:44 every example you gave was a non-indo european language. It's not rare for languages to not have gender, it's just rare in indo european languages. (Finnish and Hungarian are Uralic, and Turkish is altaic, so they're NOT indo european)
Exactly. this grammatical gender thing is very much an indo-european specific thing.
In biology you talk about sex, not gender. Gender belongs in linguistics.
It is nice to be different, variety is the spice of life. Standards have there place, but individualism has a place also.
Der/dis? I think you are talking german skat? Dis und dat, hehe.
Knowing the neutral word gender was thay does help explain why we basically just use "the" all the time.
Funny that the European languages categorize based on arbitrary characteristics, but languages like Mandarin and Japanese who use counters when referencing quantity of nouns are way more specifically characterized.
Mandarin does that because they have far fewer uniquely distinguishable syllables, so you really need those measure words to help reduce the risk of confusion. The language itself has roughly 1500 unique syllables if you include the tones. And some things like measure words are needed to help reduce the likelihood of misunderstanding what's being said.
Yeah, Polish has gendered verbs and adjectives - but the gender of the verb/adjective depends on the gender of the noun that this verb/adjective references.
Same in Arabic
Just a side note, the neuter definitely article wasn’t “þay” (which caught me off guard as that kind of word didnt really exist at that time), it was þæt, which is how we get the word “that”
We use female pronouns for the ships, and sometimes when referring to a country or kingdom as a single entity (see cgp grey)
As Aiden said, "English is 4 languages in a trenchcoat" and I can't stop laughing at that.
It really isn't. It's one langauge in a trenchcoat. That trenchcoat just has a LOT of pockets on the inside...
I'm an English speaker and a nationally certified American Sign Language interpreter - ASL not only doesn't have genders as explained in this video - it also does not use he/she/her/him. Some will say "I looked online and found a sign for HE" - but that's not ASL. That is English influenced pigeon sign language (PSE). If I were talking about my professor for example, I might set-up a person marker and index to them - or just use "themself" for a sign and if I were voicing in this situation it would sound like "My professor is cool. "They" are always understanding if my assignment is late. I hope I get them again next semester." Certain things may give it away such as "My professor is pregnant..." And from then on when I see the sign "themself" or index to that person-marker I could voice "she/her" from then on out bc I have been made aware of the sex of that person.
So, English is a woke language, being gender neutral.
Gotta remove English from video games, I don't make the rules!
I have no idea why you think the sound "wa" is at the end of the words "do", and "to".
It took me a second to realize what you meant but lmao
@@dl1083 lmaowa
It was grating my ears the whole video.
@@lunyteve same.
He doesn't " think " that.
It's just usual British accent.
Notice that every final U sound that he pronounces ends with W
Due, two, too, do, new,
It's consistent and natural for a lot of speakers.
The way you said "le jus" made it sound like the plural. Le is pronounced more "luh" not "lay".
Vikings didn't have horns on their helmets.
I'd like to add that the interesting thing about the loss of grammatical gender in English is actually that grammatical gender was not uniformly lost all over Britain at the same time. Places that had more Norse language contact (corresponding to what is now Northern England and Scotland) lost grammatical gender more quickly. As the video said, this is most easily explained by conflicting genders in Old English and Norse, so people got rid of grammatical gender over time. The southern part of the Midlands and south-eastern England (Kent) lost grammatical gender later in history. For example, Kent in south-eastern England didn't lose all traces of grammatical gender until the 14th century. In other words, the southern part of Britain, despite being the place where Normans landed, was actually more conservative.
"please do not add 'dis' as a new german article
THEY ALREADY HAVE ENOUGH"
- someone who's trying to learn German
Gender, aka noun class, applies only to nouns. What you're referring to when you talk about gendered verbs/adjectives is class agreement, which is an essential part of a language having a noun class system. Each verb has several forms for use when referring to nouns of different classes, much like the definite article does.
English does still associate object with masculine or feminine traits (e.g. vehicles and vessels are often described as feminine), but without agreement (with a couple of very rare vestigial exceptions) english doesn't have a noun class system.
I'm pretty sure that there are languages where the noun's gender also has an effect on the adjectives that refers to that noun.
@@tovarishchfeixiao yeah, that's agreement. You have to use the adjective form that agree with the gender of the noun, but the gender isn't a characteristic of the adjective itself. I hope I'm making sense.
@@matthewparker9276 But you said "genders only applies to nouns" which is just incorrect. Because by the agreement it does applies to the adjectives too, even if they don't have a specific assigned gender.
Even then, When English uses 'he' or 'she' for something that doesn't have an actual sex, it's more a side effect of treating it as Animate, and then not having a pronoun for something that is 'animate, does not have a biological sex nor any traits indicating that one or the other would be less non-applicable'. Whether that results in a male or female pronoun being used depends on a bunch of factors.
This is, as usual for the site, a very interesting video. As an ESL teacher, I had to study linguistics and at least one foreign language. I found Korean much easier to learn than the headache that is German, precisely because of the gender issue. When asked by students why we only have vestigial gender, as in using she for ships and occasionally for a beloved automobile, my answer was similar to the one given here. I said that English evolved as a trade language, a pidgin, for use among the various people who had settled the Insula Britonum/Eilean nam Breatannach. This doesn't, however, explain the numerous, sometimes not mutually intelligible, dialects. Geordie is not well understood by most of the other inhabitants of Britain, much less elsewhere, for example. Then there are the odd dialects of America and Australia.
A note for those interested in this matter. Pennsylvania Dutch is actually German [Deutsch], but it is neither Hochdeutsch [standard High German] nor a specific German dialect. Because Immigrants came from different parts of Germany in significant numbers, they did what happened in Britain, the languages/dialects merged into a pidgin that also adopted some elements of English. Germans are astonished when they visit the area around Lancaster, PA, though German can be encountered more widely.
Just like to add something: The Normans where basically vikings too.
They were descendants of Norwegian and Danish Vikings that had settled there less than a 100 years ago or maybe it was 200 years ago, but not too long ago.
The name Normans comes from Norsemen. And Normandy... well also from Norsemen.
How could Latin from Roman times have influenced English, when the Anglo-Saxon came after Rome withdrew? I understand medieval Latin could have influenced English, but the video specifically refers to Roman times.
Parts of Norway have only two genders for nouns.
Only maskuline ande neuter, while feminine words gain the properties of masculine words.
The phenomena is described in different ways, depending on perspective
- no feminine gender (because no words have feminine properties)
- collective gender (masculine and feminine words share the same properties)
- feminine as masculine (because feminine words have the masculine properties)
While other areas have three genders, some words can be either, and you can choose,
Depending on the word and settings; using the feminine form, can be perceived as more vulgar, while using the masculine form can be perceived as more up-tight.
However, your dialect can shift this, depending on what's recognized as common within that dialect.
And the problem with gender in languages is German and French have almost exactly reversed gender assignments - the English just threw their hands up when the two mixed…
Sort of like how English verbs lost (most of) their subject agreement when (old?) Norse and old English interacted... two very similar systems that were just different enough that it made things more difficult rather than easier (except for that one that was still the same in both langauges, which is still around to this day) resulted in those systems being thrown out entirely in favour of something that wasn't going to get confused with either of them.
"an exception in the world"
the world: europe
💀
Laziness is likely also the reason Romance languages lost the neutral, which existed in Latin. It’s also the reason words generally got shorter and simpler (ex. Italian) and many letters were muted (ex. French and Spanish)
The confusing part isn't so much the concept of gendered language, it's more remembering which word is which
I will stick to English as thinking of things as having gender that are objects makes absolutely no sense to me.
English is smart for not having genders, makes things so much easier. As a native Spanish speaker it is a huge ordeal for people to learn the language. Having genders seemed like something invented that had nothing to do.
Nah English needs gender.
Kinda annoying since English has a word for female actor 'actress' but not for female doctor/engineer
That seems to be a problem with someone that is into all that equality BS. Male or female doctor or engineer you are still an engineer. Do you need a world to prove a point? Sounds like you do only to satisfy this new equality agenda that has nothing to do with the language.
@@shwanmirza9306 Technically it could easily have had such a word... but instead you got a partially successful campaign to purge (the words for) such distinctions instead. (which, it should be noted, had the Opposite effect from intended, though that quickly became background noise as less obnoxious factors achieved the supposedly desired result in spite of this nonsense).
Heck, English used to have a word for a female baker: a Baxter.
Nah, the lack of genders doesn't actually help much in terms of 'how much complexity is there', the complexity mostly just gets shuffled around.
Also, gender is quite useful for error correction. English isn't the greatest on that front.
Being non-gendered has nothing to do with the language's success. The only reason English became the international language is because of the influence of england and then the USA. While gender isn't an issue when learning English, figuring out all the irregularities is an impossible task, even for native speakers. A lot of words need to be memorized individually to know how to pronounce or spell them, and a lot of verbs are irregular.
the Spelling is a whole grand mess of its own.
The irregularity isn't actually particularly special. that happens to the most and least common words in any language that undergoes significant shifts in how things are formed for one reason or another. If English is unique in that regard it's entirely in the lack of effort to do anything about it, rather than in it happening to begin with.
6:10 vikings wearing horns on their helmets is a myth lol
No way Sherlock
Persian also doesn't have genders, we don't even have gendered pronouns, which I find so much better and easier. I think we also used to have genders, but because we didn't and still don't have any articles, the endings of nouns and adjectives were the only things distinguishing gender in Persian, a bit like Latin. However, as Persian like most other languages evolved to simplify these endings or to drop them completely most of the time, gender started to fade as there was no way to distinguish grammatical gender.
However, some traces still remain such as the plural, for which we sometimes make a distinction in formal written language, by using the suffix '-hā' for inanimate objects and '-ān' for people or animals. However there are some exceptions to this, such as words like tree and eye, which I think are a remnant of gender in Persian as they get '-ān' and not '-hā' despite being objects. This may be because the ending '-hā' is related to the Latin '-a' that's used to indicate neuter plural in the nominative and accusative case, which wasn't exclusively used for objects and not all inanimate objects were neuter. That means words such as tree and eye weren't neuter and therefore didn't get the neuter ending. (The ending '-ān' may have been for both masculine and feminine nouns, like the Latin '-es' in the second class.) Nonetheless, in most languages the neuter evolved to be associated almost exclusively with inanimate objects with certain exceptions, such as not giving the neuter plural endings to some inanimate objects in Persian and 'child' in English sometimes being referred to as 'it'.
However, a cleaer example would probably be the words 'amu' and 'ama' which mean respectively 'uncle' and 'aunt'. Here the endings distinguish the gender, a bit like how it is in Latin or in some modern Roman languages.
7:25
You argued that the difference between Old English and Norse genders may have caused English dropping gender altogether. But then you bring up the idea that Norman French might have brought it back. Why make that distinction?
Why wouldn't the imposition of yet another language with its own genders make dropping genders even more appealing?
I speak German and English fluently, as well as some French and a bit of Norwegian. In my experience, Norwegian genders are broadly in line with their German equivalents, while French is basically guesswork. Of course these are not the languages of the time, but I wouldn't be surprised if the same would have been true then.
That is to say, I suspect the gender confusion between Old English and Old Norse was very minor, while the confusion between English and French (or Old Norse and French) was much more severe.
Another language that doesn't have nor need gendered nouns, Indonesian. A language spoken by 200mil+ people worldwide.
Mostly in Indonesia
The question is what linguistic purpose assigning arbitrary gender to all nouns. One would think such usage would die off over the centuries if there wasn't a benefit.
In german language there is a phenomeon, you didn' t noted. In some cases, a change of gender means something different. Two examples. Der See- the lake, but die See-- the sea, or der Schild- the shield, but das Schild - the sign.
That's not a "change of gender" - you gave two examples of pairs of different words which happen to have the same spelling.
@@user-gd9vc3wq2h : I am no linguist, and english is not my native language .
Thumbnail is incorrect, German should have “der, die, das,” “dis” isn’t a German word.
In Norwegian, it has become optional to use the feminine gender. You can conjugate all feminine nouns as masculine nouns, effectively forming a common gender, like in Dutch.
The Bergen dialect does this.
Here's a question to consider:
Why didn't the Muricans "FIX" words like TABLE with the great vowel shift?
Centre -> center
Programme -> program
Organise -> organize
etc
but words like TABLE and APPLE kep that French "BL/PL" nonsense
I believe Dutch has "proper spelling, -PEL and BEL
Even Babbel is BabBEL and not babble
I can't work out where you got the idea that Old English neuter form for "the" was "thay". There's no truth in that - in fact it was "that", which is where the Modern English word comes from as demonstrative adjectives were used in a different way in Old English.
In Lithuanian which has grammatical gender, you can tell which gender a word has based on its ending, so it's almost immediately apparent whether you've gotten it right or not after you speak a sentence. For example, all words ending with "-as" are masculine, and masculine adjectives also end with "-as".
Also a funny thing abut grammatical gender in Lithuanian is that inanimate objects are referred to with gendered pronouns, the same way as people.
потому что грамматический род не имеет ничего общего с одушевленностью или с полом. в индоевропейском языке было два рода, действующий (active, actor) и общий или бездействующий (inactive). последний всегда стоял в косвенных падежах как прямое дополнение. в позднем индоевропейском из общего рода выделяется "женский", это имена собирательные, имеющие окончание множественного числа "среднего" рода.
не знаю, как в литовском, но в русском, где существительные не имеют гендерных флексий, это сохранилось
солнцЕ, яйцО -- солнцА, яйцА, собакА, коровА
гендерные флексии сохраняют исходные прилагательные.
бѣлъ, синь
бѣло, синє
бѣла, синꙗ
и большинство определенных прилагательных
белый, синий
белое, синее
белая, синяя
и если, "дѣтѧ" среднего рода, то одушевленные die Maid f (genitive Maid, plural Maiden) и das Mädchen n (genitive Mädchens, plural Mädchen) следуют той же схеме. одушевленность реализуется не флексиями, а склонением. в литовском одушевленные и неодушевленные склоняются одинаково или разно?
Answer: so we don’t worry about exception words, like «el lapíz» or «la mano» in Spanish
0:25 The two were more noticeably separate until the 60s, when gender started being used for people.
in German:
he (er): der Mann, der Tisch, der Mond (the man, the table, the moon)
she (sie): die Frau, die Gabel, die Sonne, die Maid (the woman, the fork, the sun, the maiden)
it (es): das Tier, das Wasser, das Mädchen (the animal, the water, the small maiden)
Grammatical gender has little to do with biological gender.
No, Mädchen means Girl
The thumbnail is wrong. German has three noun genders: der, die and das. "Dis" does not exist.
Just to add: Norwegian puts the gendered article to the end of a word, not like English in front of.
Slavic languages like russian have genders, but don't use articles. Latin also didn't use articles, whereas french and Italian does.
Sooo, it's "hund en" instead of "en hund" in Norwegian?
@@tovarishchfeixiao yes
Hungarian doesn't have /gender/ but it does have some pretty fun grammatical rules about /rhyming/! Conjugating different parts of a phrase to rhyme with the subject is a lot more fun and sensible than memorizing a categorical rule for different classes of nouns @_@
What rhyme are you tralking about? lol
As a Hungarian with linguistic interest i never in my life did hear about "grammar rules about rhyming".
@@tovarishchfeixiao like, possessive markers, for example, the suffix is conjugated to rhyme with the base word. And how the different verb families conjugate with rhyming vowel sounds. At least that's how it was described to me during my study abroad there almost 20 years ago >_< I have to admit, I haven't had much practice since then.
It's usually called "vowel harmony". I am learning other uralic language, finnish, which also does this
@@jasoncox7244 That's not rhyme. lol
It's called "vowel harmony". Then this is why i didn't know what you meant, because the weird name you used for "vowel harmony".
@@uwuzote Almost all Uralic language has vowel harmony (i say almost because i'm not familiar with all the langauges). And Mongolian also has vowel harmoney (though they call them masculine and feminine which could confuse people into thinkign that Mongolian has grammatical gender).
And Korean also kinda does but also kinda doesn't have vowel harmony (it's a bit too complicated for this comment).
among the world's languages, grammatical gender is the exception, not the rule, only present in approximately a quarter of them.
@@eduardoxenofonte4004 Could be, but don't forget that widespread languages became that way by pure luck (read: imperialism), not because they're simple to learn, which Patrick claims.
@@Olafje They are referring to linguistic diversity. the vast majority of languages do not have nouns whose categories are named masc/fem/neut in English
@@insising Grammatical gender is very much an indo-european thing. You very hardly would find any language with such concept outside of that family.
@@Olafje Colonialism would be a much more accurate term instead of imperialism. Because most "widespread" European languages actually did spread to outside of Europe by colonialism. Of course we won't count the lingua franca/world language stuff because that's a different situation, since it's usually just a learned 2nd language while the colonialsm case usually results in it becoming one of the native languages of that region.
@@Olafje Did you even read my comment and comprehend it? What European language would be in China that counted as a native language for the speakers? Seriously.
09:06 Do you REALLY consider that the reason English became a global language was its lack of gender (concieved as a linguistic advantage)? No political reasons alleged?
Having been thrown out of the french class at school for coming 29th out of a class of 28, I have never been able to understand understand the insane, twisted logic of inanimate objects having a gender in any language.
I don’t like how the narrator adds an “aa” sound behind vowels. For instance “too” becomes “too-ahh”
its an ai right? if not then jesus christ its so annoying
8:34 Who knew languages not on this continent (Chinese, Japanese, and Maori) languages that are very very very VERY not related to English, probably split off after Proto-Indo European ( Turkish and Hungarian and Finnish) And a random language isolate that isn't related to any other language (Basque) are not going to be related to European languages! Wow!
Russian also doesn't have any genders. It doesn't even have articles! You just say "cat eat food"
@@Finity2010-ud2rl Russian has gender. Also many language families outside Europe have gender.
Ending each sentence with “uh” is like nails on a chalkboard
It seems that the Anglo-Saxon neuter article word was the word that eventually won acceptance, becoming the word “the,” and the masculine and feminine forms died out.
The question for me is not 'why does english lack arbitrary gender?' but 'why do languages have grammatical gender at all?'
I support your suggestion that lack of gender helped English grow in popularity. Lack of gender is just one reason why English can so easily borrow foreign words. No gender to decide. Along with flexible spelling rules, lack of accents, simple conjugation, adjectives before nouns, etc.
Simple conguation? English has more exceptions than regular words. And the lack of accents not realy a positive thing, since it would help a lot with the chaos of vowels. Also every language do/did borrow words from different languages, even gendered languages too, they just did a better job at integrating the words into the language than english would. And the adjective thing is just what you're used to, it won't mean any change of any kind of level of difficulty if it was different.
@@tovarishchfeixiao Exceptions are, for the most part, generated when there is a signficant shift in how things are done, and Most words change, but those used exceptionally often or exceptionally rarely do not. Having gender doesn't really affect that much one way or the other.
Being Dutch I had 4 years of learning German in school. Half a year to learn the language and three and a half years to learn the der, die, das, dem, den….. Still clueless about it.
As a native Russian speaker I'm greatly thankful that English does not have gendered nouns.
even with genders, i would say Spanish and French are far easier to learn than English. I would take that over all the irregular verbs, idioms, and conditionals, etc... and the spelling and pronunciation is the worse
Written English has some major issues. Still a decent number of languages with worse writing systems though.
But the two most fundamental factors to how hard a langauge is to learn are how similar it is to a langauge you already know, and how many different (the more different the better) languages you already know.
Also, the Idiom issue is universal. That's not an English issue, that's a Human issue. The only way you ever don't have to deal with it is if you're somehow dealing with a langauge And Culture that are both too new to have developed any (and odds are pretty good they'll borrow some form their neighbours in short order if nothing else).
Bord means table in Norwegian, Tafel means board in German. Good to know
then you get the fun of 'sideboard' and 'cupboard' and a few others in English, which Litterally mean 'board + descriptor' and refer to various bits of furniture which have a flat surface for putting things on. .