I know a lot of languages have some aspects that probably seem a bit strange to non-native speakers…in the case of gendered words is there a point other than “just the way its always been” that explains it a bit better?
I don’t have gendered words in my native language, and from the outside looking in I’m not sure what gendered words actually provide in terms of context? Is there more to it that I’m not quite following?
Thank you, Today I learned that grammatical gender can in fact have purpose. Some questions though:
In that first example for Agreement, does this depend on the nouns in question coincidentally having different gender, or does the grammar enforce that? (Such as switching one if they would otherwise match - although that might conflict with the Derivation thing.) And can a sentence in those languages refer to 3 or more nouns? That would seem to break the disambiguation effect.
Yup - the example wouldn’t work if both nouns had the same gender. And gender is intrinsic to the noun, you can’t change it (you can change the noun though).
That’s why, usually, languages with a productive gender system keep a comparable amount of nouns in each gender, since this maximises the odds that multiple nouns in the same sentence got different genders.
Yup, they can.
In both cases (same gender nouns, or 3+ nouns), the solution is typically the same as in a non-gendered language: you use the noun instead of a pronoun, or rely on context to disambiguate it.