A German gentleman writes a masculine letter of feminine love to a neuter young lady

March 24, 2007 4:53 AM

What is the function of gendered articles of nouns in (German|Spanish|etc)?

In learning German, I was told that the best way to learn to articles associated with each noun was straight memorization. I questioned my German tutor about the function of the articles and she said that there wasn't really any function at this time.

I looked at some old AskMe questions, and found this part of the sci.lang faq, which says that in proto-Indo-European languages, there was only masculine (animate objects) and neuter (inanimate objects), then neuter split off to neuter and feminine. But it doesn't explain why (and indeed, says that we probably can't ascertain why this happened historically).

But what I want to know is specifically what function the gendered articles serve today and why they haven't been reformed out of the languages thereby reducing unnecessary complexity.

posted by beerbajay to writing & language (21 comments total)

Oh quick additional bit: I'm not interested in the logical bits of language which actually use gendered pronouns to specify actual sex (hermana/hermano, etc)
posted by beerbajay at 4:55 AM on March 24, 2007

It's worth noting that English nouns were once all gendered. The reform involved with the change from that to what we have now may help in this answer also.
posted by wackybrit at 6:08 AM on March 24, 2007

I think the link you posted does a pretty fair job of explaining it in just a few sentences, actually! There were two classes of nouns, but then the neuter (inanimate) split into two forms; one a singular neuter form that stayed neuter, the other a collective form as a de facto neuter plural that had a marker different from that used for plural masculine nouns - this became the feminine. Or something like that!

A basic problem is the idea of "gender," which is sort of a misnomer. Although there's often a connection between a person's sex and a grammatical gender, there are a bijillion exceptions, so it would probably be helpful if we referred to nouns in terms of "classes," rather than "genders."

Look at Swahili. This is from Wikipedia, and provides a little taste:

"In common with all Bantu languages, Swahili grammar arranges nouns into a number of classes. The ancestral system had 22 classes, counting singular and plural as distinct according to the Meinhof system, with all Bantu languages sharing at least ten of these. Swahili employs sixteen: six classes that usually indicate singular nouns, five classes that usually indicate plural nouns, a class for abstract nouns, a class for verbal infinitives used as nouns, and three classes to indicate location.

Although the Swahili noun class system is technically grammatical gender, there is a difference from the grammatical gender of European languages: In Swahili, the class assignments of nouns is still largely semantically motivated, whereas the European systems are mostly arbitrary. However, the classes cannot be understood as simplistic categories such as 'people' or 'trees'. Rather, there are extensions of meaning, words similar to those extensions, and then extensions again from these. The end result is a semantic net that made sense at the time, and often still does make sense, but which can be confusing to a non-speaker."

So it could be a lot worse!

Obviously some languages have "lost" grammatical gender more than others. But I've learned French, German, Italian and several others which use them. And because words do not take the same gender (necessarily) in those languages, it's also a weird thing to have to learn 'em all over again. But once you've had a reasonable amount of study, the "der," "die" or "das" of it all just sinks into your brain as if by osmosis. That's probably why there's no deliberate attempts at reformation - it's simply not that big a deal once you've got the basics down.

And keep in mind, even in English there are big "gender" problems for speakers not used to our language. I know many Hungarians (who don't have gender even in pronouns) who simply cannot differentiate between "he" and "she." There word for either, "Ö," describes both. So it is very bewildering to sit chatting in English with a guy who sees a pretty girl pass by and says, "I could really fall for him!"

I'm sure many Hungarians might wonder why we haven't reformed our language to reduce this unnecessary complexity, but it would never occur to us to do so!
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 6:22 AM on March 24, 2007 [2 favorites has favorites]

The answer is "just because". Why is it "I play" but "she plays"? Wouldn't it be easier to just drop the "s" so verbs never changed in present tense? Why break / broke / broken? Wouldn't it be easier to simplify so all verbs just went play / played / played, break / breaked / breaked?

We don't do that in English, just because.
posted by Meatbomb at 6:32 AM on March 24, 2007

But what I want to know is specifically what function the gendered articles serve today and why they haven't been reformed out of the languages thereby reducing unnecessary complexity.

Slim is right: basically, "asking 'why' has no point... all languages are filled with things that make no sense. all you can do is learn them." There is nothing anyone can tell you about German gender that will make it easier to learn. In general, it—like many such phenomena—is there to provide redundancy. Language is constantly trading off between efficiency (shedding case endings, unstressed vowels, noun categories) and redundancy (adding case endings, gender categories, whatever); too much redundancy makes language too inefficient to be practical, too much efficiency makes it too easy to misunderstand (skip a vowel and you lose the whole meaning of the sentence—which is why those "rational" languages scientists and philosophers keep proposing will never work).

In short, it's not "unnecessary complexity," it's necessary complexity; learn to love it or suffer it grimly, but there's no getting around it.
posted by languagehat at 6:54 AM on March 24, 2007

There’s a hangout in Berlin for 68-ers called ‚Schwarzes Café‘; a ‚Schwarzer Café‘ (or as it’s more often written, ‚Schwarzer Kaffee‘) would be something else. So one function to it is to make punny establishment names possible :-) . Not a very intelligent design decision, but no-one believes anyone consciously designed this!
posted by Aidan Kehoe at 7:24 AM on March 24, 2007

To expand on one of languagehat's points (skip a vowel and you lose the whole meaning of the sentence), in Italian there are more than a few words that have different meanings if you change the last letter and the gender. The most significant ones are escaping me at the moment, but an example is pesca, which means a peach, and pesco, which means a peach tree. (And then there's pesce, which is masculine and means fish). Removing the gender from the equation would destroy the nuance, and require a different kind of redundancy, referring to it as an "albero pesco" rather than just pesco.

Also, it would just sound wrong. Reforming them out would mean years of people having to say what, to them, would feel like us talking about "my teacher teached me" and "I eated a sandwich".
posted by katemonster at 7:25 AM on March 24, 2007

One possible convenience of gendered words: Consider the sentence "I like the bicycle, and I like the window, but I like it on sunny days and it on rainy days."

In English, with no gendered pronouns, additional wordage would be needed to differentiate the "it" that's preferred on sunny days vs. the "it" for rainy.

However, in French (if I'm remembering correctly), one can conveniently just use "il" for one and "elle" for the other and everything is disambiguated.
posted by amtho at 7:43 AM on March 24, 2007

But what I want to know is specifically what function the gendered articles serve today and why they haven't been reformed out of the languages thereby reducing unnecessary complexity.
They probably still exist because using them isn't the hard part, learning is.
As a native speaker of German I know the genders of the words and I don't have to make a conscious effort to retrieve or use them. On the other hand, "unlearning" the genders would require conscious effort and thus be less convenient.
So even though German might just work fine without gendered nouns, for native speakers there simply is no incentive to do get rid of them.
posted by snownoid at 8:43 AM on March 24, 2007

Amtho's point is a good one, but it is important to remember that languages, a lot like natural selection, don't consciously change to meet the needs of an environment. Amtho doesn't say that it does, but the slippery slope conclusion could be made, and that wouldn't be an explanation for why English has limited gender markings and romance languages have much more.

Another thing to keep in mind that all languages are equally complex, but have different ways of constructing and expressing that complexity. English has minimal gender markings (actor/actress, major/majorette, he/she/it, etc.) and has lost much of it's case markings (bits you attach to verbs/nouns/prepositions, etc. that give the hearer information about who the subject/object is, count, mood, tense, etc.) — think of how we make plurals or past tense for I/you/he/she/you pl/us/them...they have all mostly collapsed into the same sounds. Our complexity lies elsewhere...in syntax/sentence structure. In English, we rely much more heavily on the order of the words in the sentence "The dog bit the man" (as opposed to a different order, which gives a different meaning "The man bit the dog") than we do in attaching the little bits to each word in the sentence to give us information about who subject/object, tense, and on.

In many languages, gender can incidently help in that respect, as assigning a gender to the subject can change many of the relative surrounding words in the sentence as you go down the line, doling out information as you read/hear.

Languages don't really do "spring cleanings" of their inventory, and the "unecessary complexity", the behavior you are seeking to have eliminated, is done so from the perspective of a completely different animal.

It's like asking why dogs circle three times before laying down. Cats don't really do this, so why don't the dogs just stop it already?

Now that I sound crazy...
posted by iamkimiam at 10:04 AM on March 24, 2007

Amtho, however if you are referring to two nouns of the same gender (or class, if you will) in a sentence you don't have the same convenience. I think this is just a convenience more than anything else; the order of the nouns and the context in relation to the language syntax of subject and object are of more value in understanding pronouns.
posted by dobie at 10:35 AM on March 24, 2007

In learning German, I was told that the best way to learn to articles associated with each noun was straight memorization. I questioned my German tutor about the function of the articles and she said that there wasn't really any function at this time.

There's no function, really (though it is fun being able to distinguish der Tor, from das Tor), but there are patterns. Nouns ending in -ung, -tät, -heit, and -[ig]keit are almost exclusively feminine. Usually, so are short words ending in -e (Tasse, Karte, Dose, Flasche, Brille, Sprache), unless they are adjectives like der Deutsche. Nouns ending in -nis, diminutives in -chen and -lein, and a lot of words imported from French, Greek, or Latin (Niveau, Büro, Thema, Fenster) are neuter. Nouns ending in Latin -[ism]us are usually masculine, and most ending in -er (not Fenster, though) are masculine. Most very short nouns not ending in -e are masculine or neuter (Weib, Ding, Mann, Zug, Zahn, Fuß, Kopf, Rock, Bild, Ei), but there are exceptions (Bahn, Frau, Uhr, Tür, Wand).

why they haven't been reformed out of the languages

Mainly because you can't do it. Any substantial reform will take many, many generations to complete successfully, and no single person will live that long. Attempts to implement a reform instantly (along the lines of inventing a gender-neutral pronoun for English other than they—this isn't possible) will render the affected speech unintelligible to native speakers, and it won't be the same language anymore.
posted by oaf at 11:12 AM on March 24, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

One of the best ways to learn a language quickly is to forget about "Why". There isn't a reason. And if there is one, it's not consistent. Asking "why" is simply a good way to get frustrated.

Let it go and have fun!
posted by Ookseer at 11:13 AM on March 24, 2007

Our complexity lies elsewhere...in syntax/sentence structure. In English, we rely much more heavily on the order of the words in the sentence "The dog bit the man" (as opposed to a different order, which gives a different meaning "The man bit the dog") than we do in attaching the little bits to each word in the sentence to give us information about who subject/object, tense, and on …

That’s not a great argument, because word order matters in synthetic languages as well. To get it right, you need to give German adverbs in the order time, manner, place—generally, anything else sounds off. If you use an atypical position for the subject (so, not before the first verb), then people will interpret that as your laying emphasis on what you did put in first position, something you could equally have done with phonological stress.
posted by Aidan Kehoe at 11:24 AM on March 24, 2007

Gendered words strike me as a pretty natural and easy way of achieving redundancy: gender is absolute, doesn't change with time, and carries a lot of information in the natural context of talking about people and animals because it is roughly evenly distributed within most natural populations. Learning the gender of words is literally effortless for native speakers.
posted by teleskiving at 3:15 PM on March 24, 2007

Learning the gender of words is literally effortless for native speakers.

Where ‘literally’ means ‘figuratively.’ Cf. this Google search; sure, some of them are not going to be native speakers, but you’ll have a hard time convincing me that Camilo Escovar Plata, the head of (a? the?) Oficina Jurídica in Columbia is not.
posted by Aidan Kehoe at 2:54 AM on March 26, 2007

One thing I've always wondered that relates to this question: do native speakers really even care if you get the gender wrong? When it effectively serves no purpose, does it really grate that much to get der and die mixed up, or can you just wing it?
posted by reklaw at 3:39 AM on March 26, 2007

So....

Functions:
* Redundancy used to ease understanding

Reasons not removed:
* Redundancy is useful
* No incentive for native speakers to change as learning rather than speaking is the hard part
* Words in certain languages have developed which rely on the gendered articles to resolve otherwise ambiguous meaning

Thanks for your answers!
posted by beerbajay at 3:48 AM on March 26, 2007

One thing I've always wondered that relates to this question: do native speakers really even care if you get the gender wrong? When it effectively serves no purpose, does it really grate that much to get der and die mixed up, or can you just wing it?

Think of when someone says ‘Jack jump over the river’ or ‘Man in corner want French fries with ketchup’; singular-vs-plural marking in most cases serves exactly as much purpose, but that doesn’t mean English speakers are happy to hear it dropped.
posted by Aidan Kehoe at 3:18 AM on March 26, 2007

I'm best at German, but also taken Spanish, Latin, and Russian.

German came to me extremely easy, and I think it's because, unlike English--German is mostly logical. In english, I think a lot of things evolved because they "sound right", and it takes a bit of time to get used to the sound of things.

But then, when you see the logical nature of, specifically, german, you can see how expression can be done with soooo much less confusion.

A couple notes...I read a really neat article a couple years ago about the affect of language on a cultures ability to evolve at an engineering level, specifically using Japanese and German as high-order languages, more overtly capable of specificity, versus, say, french or spanish.

Also, and I really appreciated learning this from my old Deutsche Frau, the "imperfekt" nouns, in both English and German, are the most common ones, because they've adapted to "sound best" by being used all the time. The "perfekt" are the ones used less, and so less adapted.
Example: "to be".
I am, you are, he/she is, they are. Very different.
Ich bin, du bist, er/sie/es ist, Ihr seit, Sie Sind, etc. Very different.

I swim you swim he swims she swims they swim we swim, all the same.

Ich schwimme, du schwimmst, er/sie/es schwimmt, Ihr...schwoemmen?, Sie schwimmen...they change as per normal.

Wait till you do some russian, with no "to be" verb @ all, and no conjugation changes for past or future tense.

I swim. I swim tomorrow. I swim yesterday. Interesting.
posted by TomMelee at 1:50 PM on March 26, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

That’s not a great argument, because word order matters in synthetic languages as well. To get it right, you need to give German adverbs in the order time, manner, place—generally, anything else sounds off. If you use an atypical position for the subject (so, not before the first verb), then people will interpret that as your laying emphasis on what you did put in first position, something you could equally have done with phonological stress.
posted by Aidan Kehoe

I agree with you. I wasn't making the argument that syntax wasn't important in synthetic languages. But if I was, it wouldn't be a great argument at all.
posted by iamkimiam at 2:08 PM on March 27, 2007