i like this comment but i feel the need to reply because it touches upon a pet peeve of mine in linguistics: there is a persistent myth in the modern period that grammatical gender is useless, pointless, or somehow arbitrary and is just some sort of vestigial, rotting, lexical limb that made it to the 21st century by fluke.
this is simply not true. just because grammatical gender often appears arbitrary or illogical doesn’t mean it actually is. and just because grammatical gender follows many, many rules does not mean there are no rules. grammatical gender is just a fairly common form of noun class system. as with most forms of noun classing, what the rules are in a given dialect can be a little wishy-washy but they are certainly not arbitrary.
for example, you point out the german Mädchen as an example of illogical noun gendering. this is an opinion often expressed by foreigners learning the language, and even by linguistically-ignorant germans. it makes sense on the face of it, this word has a similar meaning to the english phrase “little girl,” so it is strange the germans decided to sort this word into the neuter gender, no?
well, no. it isn’t strange and it isn’t illogical, in actuality. -chen is a diminutive in german. for those who are unaware, diminutives are suffixes/prefixes in languages that serve to make nouns feel smaller or more cute in a language. think booklet vs book or dog vs doggie for some english examples.
what are some examples of more german diminutives?
das Kätzchen - kitten
das Hündchen - puppy
das Plätzchen - a cookie (depends on dialect exactly what this refers to afaik but generally is always some sort of cookie)
das Ohrläppchen - earlobe
noticing a trend? these are all neuter! and thus we uncover a little grammatical rule that grammatical gender was trying to tell us. all diminutives are neuter.
most every “arbitrary” example of grammatical gender people provide has some sort of similar reasoning or rule behind it, some story or information it is trying to give you that makes speaking the language that much easier.
just because what it is encoding doesn’t seem useful or logical to (rhetorical) you doesn’t mean it is not. grammatical gender is much more than just gender-washing everyday speech for kicks and does carry useful meaning, if you can be bothered to puzzle it out. attempts i’ve seen to “de-gender” spanish (this is just what is local to me) all fundamentally misunderstand what it is they’re even trying to do and often opt for rotely tearing out the entire gendered case system without offering proper lexical and linguistic infrastructure for the language to actually effectively function without it. these attempts sound clunky because they are clunky! and to be perfectly clear i’m not dogging on the premise, just the serious attempts i’ve seen implemented in real life speech and their implementation. i think it’s relevant bc it showcases how modern misunderstanding of what grammatical gender is can realize as actual, negative manifestations in the non-conceptual world. why this is important to think about more than passingly!
Thank you for your thorough response.
You make some good points. I think we’re talking about slightly different topics though.
There’s always some explanation to why certain words or grammar forms evolved. Sometimes those reasons are commonly known, sometimes the “commonly known” reasons are wrong, sometimes linguists argue about the origin, sometimes they have no idea.
For everyday speakers, the “logic” of immediate usage, is more important than the etymology.
German speakers are generally aware of the “rule” that diminutives are neuter. If you look at this list words, some of them have non-diminutive forms;
Die Katze
Der Hund
Die Ohrlappe
Two of them don’t really.
“Platz” is grammatically, the non-diminutive form of “Plätzchen” but it doesn’t mean “(normal sized) cookie” (aside: Not to make fun of our Northern friends but “Keks” gets around that confusion)
“Magd” is the non-diminutive form of “Mädel” but girls aren’t (generally) “little maids.” I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone say, “magd” to refer to a living person.
Also notice that when we strip off the diminutives, the remaining words are no more “logical”. Cats and earlobes aren’t inherently feminine and dogs aren’t inherently male.
My usage of “logic” in the context of German grammar, is that grammatical gender is often at odds with both self identified gender and biological gender. German speakers are generally comfortable saying “Der” about subjects, that nobody would think of as male. German speakers are likewise comfortable saying “Sie” about subjects that nobody would think of as female and, “Das” to subjects that are very obviously not neuter.
The reason for contrasting several languages was that I suspect there are different cognitive loads involved in correctly gendering people, depending on language.
Many people notice that native Chinese speakers routinely “randomize” he/she/it. They don’t just misgender trans-people, they often just forget which one means which.
German speakers are pretty used to playing around with endings to imply additional meaning. “Dutzen” is often done without the word “du”. Speakers easily put together the correct endings for the singular and listeners instantly recognize the implication.
As a final example, I’d offer the sentence, “___ ist ein fesch__ ___.” I posit that if I insert “Die” vs “Der” into the sentence, most German speakers would instantly correctly fill in the rest of the blanks with, “-es Madl” or “-er Bua”. If you try to say the wrong one it just sounds weird.
The big thing that people get wrong and which makes me so very tired is that IT’S NOT SOCIETAL GENDER, it’s just a case of terrible terminology that we’re stuck with. A chair isn’t feminine or whatever, it’s just that words related to femininity happen to be in the same class as other words.
I really wish we could all agree to call it basically anything else, like “genre” which shares the same root but doesn’t create the connotation to societal gender.
i like this comment but i feel the need to reply because it touches upon a pet peeve of mine in linguistics: there is a persistent myth in the modern period that grammatical gender is useless, pointless, or somehow arbitrary and is just some sort of vestigial, rotting, lexical limb that made it to the 21st century by fluke.
this is simply not true. just because grammatical gender often appears arbitrary or illogical doesn’t mean it actually is. and just because grammatical gender follows many, many rules does not mean there are no rules. grammatical gender is just a fairly common form of noun class system. as with most forms of noun classing, what the rules are in a given dialect can be a little wishy-washy but they are certainly not arbitrary.
for example, you point out the german Mädchen as an example of illogical noun gendering. this is an opinion often expressed by foreigners learning the language, and even by linguistically-ignorant germans. it makes sense on the face of it, this word has a similar meaning to the english phrase “little girl,” so it is strange the germans decided to sort this word into the neuter gender, no?
well, no. it isn’t strange and it isn’t illogical, in actuality. -chen is a diminutive in german. for those who are unaware, diminutives are suffixes/prefixes in languages that serve to make nouns feel smaller or more cute in a language. think booklet vs book or dog vs doggie for some english examples.
what are some examples of more german diminutives?
das Kätzchen - kitten
das Hündchen - puppy
das Plätzchen - a cookie (depends on dialect exactly what this refers to afaik but generally is always some sort of cookie)
das Ohrläppchen - earlobe
noticing a trend? these are all neuter! and thus we uncover a little grammatical rule that grammatical gender was trying to tell us. all diminutives are neuter.
most every “arbitrary” example of grammatical gender people provide has some sort of similar reasoning or rule behind it, some story or information it is trying to give you that makes speaking the language that much easier.
just because what it is encoding doesn’t seem useful or logical to (rhetorical) you doesn’t mean it is not. grammatical gender is much more than just gender-washing everyday speech for kicks and does carry useful meaning, if you can be bothered to puzzle it out. attempts i’ve seen to “de-gender” spanish (this is just what is local to me) all fundamentally misunderstand what it is they’re even trying to do and often opt for rotely tearing out the entire gendered case system without offering proper lexical and linguistic infrastructure for the language to actually effectively function without it. these attempts sound clunky because they are clunky! and to be perfectly clear i’m not dogging on the premise, just the serious attempts i’ve seen implemented in real life speech and their implementation. i think it’s relevant bc it showcases how modern misunderstanding of what grammatical gender is can realize as actual, negative manifestations in the non-conceptual world. why this is important to think about more than passingly!
edit:formatting
Thank you for your thorough response. You make some good points. I think we’re talking about slightly different topics though.
There’s always some explanation to why certain words or grammar forms evolved. Sometimes those reasons are commonly known, sometimes the “commonly known” reasons are wrong, sometimes linguists argue about the origin, sometimes they have no idea.
For everyday speakers, the “logic” of immediate usage, is more important than the etymology.
German speakers are generally aware of the “rule” that diminutives are neuter. If you look at this list words, some of them have non-diminutive forms; Die Katze
Der Hund
Die Ohrlappe
Two of them don’t really.
“Platz” is grammatically, the non-diminutive form of “Plätzchen” but it doesn’t mean “(normal sized) cookie” (aside: Not to make fun of our Northern friends but “Keks” gets around that confusion) “Magd” is the non-diminutive form of “Mädel” but girls aren’t (generally) “little maids.” I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone say, “magd” to refer to a living person.
Also notice that when we strip off the diminutives, the remaining words are no more “logical”. Cats and earlobes aren’t inherently feminine and dogs aren’t inherently male.
My usage of “logic” in the context of German grammar, is that grammatical gender is often at odds with both self identified gender and biological gender. German speakers are generally comfortable saying “Der” about subjects, that nobody would think of as male. German speakers are likewise comfortable saying “Sie” about subjects that nobody would think of as female and, “Das” to subjects that are very obviously not neuter.
The reason for contrasting several languages was that I suspect there are different cognitive loads involved in correctly gendering people, depending on language. Many people notice that native Chinese speakers routinely “randomize” he/she/it. They don’t just misgender trans-people, they often just forget which one means which. German speakers are pretty used to playing around with endings to imply additional meaning. “Dutzen” is often done without the word “du”. Speakers easily put together the correct endings for the singular and listeners instantly recognize the implication.
As a final example, I’d offer the sentence, “___ ist ein fesch__ ___.” I posit that if I insert “Die” vs “Der” into the sentence, most German speakers would instantly correctly fill in the rest of the blanks with, “-es Madl” or “-er Bua”. If you try to say the wrong one it just sounds weird.
The big thing that people get wrong and which makes me so very tired is that IT’S NOT SOCIETAL GENDER, it’s just a case of terrible terminology that we’re stuck with. A chair isn’t feminine or whatever, it’s just that words related to femininity happen to be in the same class as other words.
I really wish we could all agree to call it basically anything else, like “genre” which shares the same root but doesn’t create the connotation to societal gender.