What determines the gender of a neologism?

February 10, 2011 6:34 AM

In languages where nouns have a gender, how is the gender determined for neologisms or loanwords?

The Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications has a recent example:

"An article about the influx of English words into the German language made the new German term "Afterparty" masculine, when in fact it should have been feminine, thus "eine Afterparty", not "ein Afterparty" (Leaks change German language, 2 February, page 22)."

Who, what, or how was it determined that "Afterparty" is feminine?

posted by roofus to Writing & Language (24 answers total)

Like the rest of the language: it's arbitrary. Other than sexually-differentiated animals, nothing has a real "gender" to speak of, but languages that use declension assign genders to them anyway. There's no real rhyme or reason. I mean, in German, why is "dog" masculine, "cat" feminine, and "little girl" neutral?
posted by valkyryn at 6:37 AM on February 10, 2011

In Russian, from what I remember, it comes down to what things sound like. Computer is masculine, because it's easy to decline like a masculine noun, but metro is neuter, for the same reason, and words like taxi (which looks like a plural) are undeclinable. My introductory Russian grammar book is a few miles away, but I can fill in more tonight if no one else has.
posted by SMPA at 6:44 AM on February 10, 2011

What determines the gender of nouns depends on the language, and really comes down to patterns rather than rules. For example, in French, there's a pattern that words ending in "-age" are generally masculine, although there are exceptions (such as "la cage"). In German, one of the patterns is simply that loan words are pretty much automatically feminine.
posted by baf at 6:52 AM on February 10, 2011

SMPA is right with regards to Russian. In Russian, and probably several other Slavic languages, it probably has to do with how the word ends and which structures the noun best fits with.

In Russian, most nouns that end with a consonant are masculine.
Most nouns that end with a vowel are feminine.
Most nouns that are neutral end with an "o" or "ye" sound and are indeclinable, though many follow the masculine rules for declension.

Internet, which is an English word, is borrowed in Russian and is a masculine noun because it ends with a consonant and can easily decline as a masculine noun as it fit the appropriate grammatical structures for masculine nouns. I can't, at the moment, think of a borrowed word that in Russian has become feminine, but I'm sure some exist.
posted by zizzle at 6:57 AM on February 10, 2011

,,die Party" is already a loanword from English in German. Much like other Germanic languages, English included, the declension/pluralization of nouns in German is determined by the root word, which in this case is ,,die Party," hence ,,die Afterparty."

,,die Party" can be used interchangeably with ,,die Fete," which is itself a loanword from French.
posted by Es ist Zeit, dass es Zeit wird! at 7:02 AM on February 10, 2011

In Italian, the great, great, great majority of loan words are masculine and that is because the great majority of loan words end in a consonant and/or are neutral in their language of origin (English, mostly, which doesn't gender its nouns). Italian, which doesn't have a neutral gender, defaults to masculine. Nouns that are gendered female in the language of origin generally retain their gender in the switch to Italian, for example la toilette, from the French, but they tend to be few and far between.

The exception seems to be words that have an Italian equivalent which is feminine (e-mail, for example, codes feminine, la mail probably because it translates to la posta). Then again, the web is il web, despite the fact that its translation la rete is feminine. There is no hard and fast rule, unfortunately.

So, when in doubt, loan words default to masculine, the rest are exceptions and have to be learned along the way.
posted by lydhre at 7:10 AM on February 10, 2011

If I had to ascribe a gender to "afterparty" in Russian, I would judge it to be feminine. The word "metro" is neutral.

The only thing I can add to what people already said is that as a long time expat of Russia I sometimes give wrong gender to the nouns that entered russian language after I've left the country. So once the word crosses over some sort of unofficial consensus happens among the speakers as to which gender is the correct one. Since I'm isolated from that group I do in fact get it wrong from time to time. Just an example of how fluid language really is.
posted by Shusha at 7:11 AM on February 10, 2011

baf: "In German, one of the patterns is simply that loan words are pretty much automatically feminine."

Really? The politics of that statement are awesome.
posted by mkultra at 7:15 AM on February 10, 2011

Like the rest of the language: it's arbitrary.... I mean, in German, why is "dog" masculine, "cat" feminine, and "little girl" neutral?

Well, funny thing that. In German mädchen ("little girl") is neuter because all German diminutives in -chen are neuter.

I mean, okay, it's arbitrary that German follows that pattern and not some other one. ("Why are all diminutives in -chen neuter?" "Dunno." "I mean, who made that rule?" "Dunno.") But because there is a pattern, that means that the assignment of genders to individual words isn't arbitrary.

So if you wanted to coin a brand-new German diminutive noun by adding -chen to something, you couldn't just up and decide to make your new noun masculine. There's an existing pattern in the language that you'd have to follow, and the existing pattern says it would need to be neuter.
posted by nebulawindphone at 7:16 AM on February 10, 2011

In German, one of the patterns is simply that loan words are pretty much automatically feminine.

I'm not so sure. Quite a few of the internationale Wörter that most people encounter on a daily basis: das Internet, das Handy (mobile phone), das Notebook, das Ipod, das Iphone, das MacBook, das Programm, das App, das Auto, etc are neuter.

Some nouns are made to fit certain grammatical gender rules in German. Most nouns that end in -er are masculine, so der Computer, der Browser, etc.

I assume that the word ,,die Party" is feminine, because it approximates the word ,,die Fete" in its meaning and ,,die Partei" (political party) in its form.
posted by Es ist Zeit, dass es Zeit wird! at 7:57 AM on February 10, 2011

it's arbitrary that German follows that pattern and not some other one.

The language evolved that way, but I think arbitrary is still a good way to describe how it arrived there. The difference between a highly evolved language like English and a pretty rigid language like German is natural vs. grammatical gender of nouns.

In English, a woman is female because she is biologically female. In German a girl is das Mädchen, because the diminutive form of die Magd is created by adding -chen and an umlaut to the stem vowel and hence das Mädchen.
posted by Es ist Zeit, dass es Zeit wird! at 8:00 AM on February 10, 2011

In Icelandic it comes down to sound, usually. It's not arbitrary at all. For instance, yen is neuter in Icelandic because words ending -en are neuter. Nouns are usually adapted to the declension system, scone, for instance, became skonsa, which is feminine since words that end in -a are feminine. Words which don't fit neatly into the system, like party, are usually neuter. Sometimes people put the same words into different genders. Coke, which became kók, is declined in the feminine by some (words ending -ók are generally feminine) but most people consider it a neuter noun.
posted by Kattullus at 8:29 AM on February 10, 2011

In Urdu, it seems quite arbitrary, although sometimes you can figure out a connection with a related word that is already in the vocabulary. I was just talking about this the other day with my family when we were using the word 'market' in Urdu. I've usually heard it used as a feminine noun in Urdu, and there doesn't seem to be a logical reason for it. 'bazaar' (yes, the same word that is used in English) is masculine, but 'dukaan' (shop) is feminine. So perhaps 'market' became feminine because it was a multitude of shops?

Arbitrary.
posted by bardophile at 8:40 AM on February 10, 2011

I asked my German professor this question a few years ago and he said people "just know" what gender new words should be. His feeling was that unrecognized deep structures govern the process and that on balance native speakers will tend to assign the same gender to an unfamiliar noun. I don't know I'd there's research to back that up...
posted by gerryblog at 8:43 AM on February 10, 2011

In Greek, if the foreign word actually has a Greek equivalent the gender usually carries over. This happens a lot with technical/computer stuff where there is an actual Greek term, but nobody uses it because it's unwieldy or contrived and the loan word becomes a drop-in replacement. Other than that it's pretty random, with the neutral being somewhat more common.
posted by Dr Dracator at 9:55 AM on February 10, 2011

In Spanish it sometimes comes down to the gender of related or translated words in Spanish. So, most people say 'la Internet' because 'net' translates as 'red', which is female. But there's no hard rule, and in fact some people might say 'el internet'. It's just customary, and changes from country to country.
posted by signal at 10:46 AM on February 10, 2011

> In Russian, most nouns that end with a consonant are masculine.

This begs the question. If a word is borrowed with a consonantal ending, of course it is masculine, but it can equally well be given a feminine ending when it is borrowed, and there is frequently a competition before the language settles on one; this is true, for instance, of фильм(а) 'film,' шланг(а) 'hose,' зал(а) 'hall,' клавиш(а) '(piano) key,' etc. (there are a whole bunch of them listed on page 105 of The Russian Language in the Twentieth Century by Bernard Comrie, Gerald Stone, and Maria Polinsky). Some words have neuter endings but can be used as either masculine or neuter (e.g., радио 'radio,' and famously кофе 'coffee,' the basis of a great Georgian joke), and of course words ending in a soft sign can be either masculine or feminine and have often varied between them (e.g., ферзь '[chess] queen'). It's all very complicated!

Bottom line: it's arbitrary.
posted by languagehat at 11:18 AM on February 10, 2011 [1 favorite]

languagehat: the basis of a great Georgian joke

Don't just leave us hanging here. The joke may be untranslatable, but it's worth sharing all the same.
posted by Kattullus at 11:24 AM on February 10, 2011

Es ist Zeit, dass es Zeit wird!: "The difference between a highly evolved language like English and a pretty rigid language like German is natural vs. grammatical gender of nouns. "

I'm not sure where you get this concept of a "highly evolved" or "rigid" language, but it's a false distinction. English and German are differently evolved, to be sure, but I don't think you could say that one or the other is more highly evolved.

In particular, it's not that English has a more 'natural' gender system for its nouns; it flat-out doesn't have grammatical gender. You can say that a woman is feminine, but in English to say that the word 'woman' is feminine has no meaning.
posted by FlyingMonkey at 3:37 PM on February 10, 2011 [2 favorites]

In particular, it's not that English has a more 'natural' gender system for its nouns; it flat-out doesn't have grammatical gender. You can say that a woman is feminine, but in English to say that the word 'woman' is feminine has no meaning.

I think my posting wasn't clear enough.

Modern English does not have grammatical gender—it of course had it as Eald Englisc. English does have natural gender: woman, she; man, he. This is largely divided between entities for whom the gender is known (animate vs. inanimate). You can look at pronoun-antecedent agreement for evidence of this as well, if you like.

German has grammatical gender and to an extent in colloquial speech, natural gender: das Mädchen, es—it is extremely common to refer to a girl as sie.
posted by Es ist Zeit, dass es Zeit wird! at 6:02 PM on February 10, 2011

Don't just leave us hanging here. The joke may be untranslatable, but it's worth sharing all the same.

I agree. What’s the joke?
posted by Es ist Zeit, dass es Zeit wird! at 6:03 PM on February 10, 2011

> Don't just leave us hanging here. The joke may be untranslatable, but it's worth sharing all the same.

I agree. What’s the joke?

Ordinarily, I'd say "Wisecracks don't help people find answers," but this is one of those rare occasions when a joke is actually relevant to the question. So (with the warning that finding this joke funny probably requires knowing Russian; also, you need to know that Georgians stereotypically speak broken Russian, getting genders wrong and not palatalizing consonants):

A Georgian goes up to the counter and asks for "один кофе" (odin kofe, 'one coffee,' using the masculine form of 'one'). The woman behind the counter is (like most Russians with any education) a raging prescriptivist, who seethes over the fact that so many people think кофе is a neuter noun because of its ending and say одно кофе (using the neuter form, odno). She is thrilled that this fellow knows the correct gender, and compliments him effusively as she pours his cup. He then says "и один булочка" (i odin bulochka, 'and one bun,' again using the masculine form of 'one' but this time with the glaringly feminine noun булочка, proving that he simply uses один with every noun).
posted by languagehat at 7:49 AM on February 11, 2011 [6 favorites]

And here's a discussion of кофе from Comrie et al. (pp. 109-10):

All the deficiencies of the neuter group notwithstanding, at least one word, and a very common one, has almost completed its shift from masculine to neuter; it is the word кофе 'coffee'. Borrowed from English or from Dutch (koffie) in the beginning of the eighteenth century, the word originally had the form кофий or кофей, which allowed one to identify it as a masculine noun, by analogy with other nouns in -й. The form in -й is commonly found in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century language; SAR (1806-22) lists only the form кофей. The analogy with чай 'tea' was probably a contributing factor that added to the stability of кофей (кофий) in nineteenth-century language; the two words were sometimes juxtaposed in folklore (чаю-кофию). The form кофе, the rise of which is due to pronunciation reduction of the unstressed final segment, is cited as primary in SRJa (1895-1927); the word кофей (кофий) is explained by reference to кофе. In SSRLJa (1948-65), кофей (кофий) is still cited but as prostorečno [nonstandard colloquial]; other dictionaries (e.g. Ožegov (1972)) do not even mention it. The spread of the form кофе, which resembles other nouns in the neuter, created a conflict between the form and the earlier masculine gender of the word. As an attempt to resolve the conflict, кофе was increasingly used as a neuter noun in spoken Russian. Normative handbooks, however, were very slow and reluctant in acknowledging this change and stubbornly insisted on the masculine; the first mention of neuter, as a permissible variant alongside with masculine, occurs in the Academy Grammar (Русская грамматика 1980: i. 469); see also Zaliznjak (1980) and Borunova et al. (1983).

posted by languagehat at 7:24 AM on February 12, 2011

das Ipod

iPod is masculine in German. Probably because [MP3]-Player is masculine. Similarly, you get neuter with iPhone and MacBook because of Telefon and Buch.
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 1:05 PM on February 12, 2011