I don’t have the source with me, but I recall a paper about listening to various languages under different signal/ noise thresholds. If I recall correctly, languages like German that have multiple declensions were about to better able to parse noisy samples because of the redundant information. Sorry for not having the source off hand though.
Supposedly it helps understanding what would otherwise be considered vague statements in an ungendered language, and with being able to understand what’s being said even in a loud environment.
Personally I think 90% of the drama around it comes from the bad decision of calling it gender instead of something else, because now english media has put the concept on blast for the silliness of assuming the moon has a penis and the sun has a vagina, when the purpose it’s supposed to serve doesn’t actually have anything to do with clarifying that specifically as much as clarifying which of two or more similar sounding words that sound like “sun” or “moon” you’re trying to actually refer to.
Maybe clarifier classes? Call it CC (X) where X is the indicator that tells you which class it’s in in that specific language. So CC(O) for masculines in Spanish, or CC(T) for feminines in Arabic
Are you able to provide an example as to how greater complexity makes it easier
Edit: Thanks for the explanations. I get that multiple languages use gendered nouns to mean something that is clearly not ‘gender’ in the biological sense but key to understanding context. Seems strange as an English speaker where noun gender is vestigial if it even exists at all and even then it doesn’t matter if someone gets it wrong
For example, you hear a word that sounds (exactly/a bit) like another word, and can tell it’s not that other word, because the other word has a different gender. Or you only really need to learn one word because both are very similar. Some examples:
Spanish : La Nina/La Nino. Both basically the same world (female/male child) and sound the same, unlike boy/girl in English.
Dutch : Het jacht = the boat / yacht, de jacht = the hunt. No need to guess the meaning of the word from the context, you can go by gender.
Spanish: El Capital = Capital as in money, La Capital = Capital as in Capital City.
French: Un Livre = a book. La livre = pound sterling.
This is an off the cuff example. Yes you can rephrase to get around this. It’s just an example.
The chair and the table don’t go together because it’s made of wood.
The chair and the table don’t go together because it’s made(female version) of wood.
Since you ‘know’ tables get female articles and such, you know the speaker is talking about the table and not the chair. This is how Romanian works.
Yes, I am aware that singular chairs are male and plural chairs are female in Romanian which wouldn’t clarify anything if the sentence was “The chairs and the tables don’t go together because they’re made(female version) of wood.”
try making a really simple language, and figure out that it gets really difficult to speak because you start confusing shit. excessive complexity isn’t good either but some complexity is needed, and gender gives some of that. I have nothing to back this up though
Sometimes more specific (sometimes. Verbs carry some widely different meaning and depend on propositions to differentiate), but not always more concise. If you’ve done or compared German-English translations, you see the English is always shorter, both in word and—especially in—character counts. My experience has been usually about 20, up to 30, percent.
oftentimes grammatical gender actually makes the language easier, paradoxically, and I’m sure there’s a really good explanation out there
I don’t have the source with me, but I recall a paper about listening to various languages under different signal/ noise thresholds. If I recall correctly, languages like German that have multiple declensions were about to better able to parse noisy samples because of the redundant information. Sorry for not having the source off hand though.
Supposedly it helps understanding what would otherwise be considered vague statements in an ungendered language, and with being able to understand what’s being said even in a loud environment.
Personally I think 90% of the drama around it comes from the bad decision of calling it gender instead of something else, because now english media has put the concept on blast for the silliness of assuming the moon has a penis and the sun has a vagina, when the purpose it’s supposed to serve doesn’t actually have anything to do with clarifying that specifically as much as clarifying which of two or more similar sounding words that sound like “sun” or “moon” you’re trying to actually refer to.
Maybe clarifier classes? Call it CC (X) where X is the indicator that tells you which class it’s in in that specific language. So CC(O) for masculines in Spanish, or CC(T) for feminines in Arabic
Are you able to provide an example as to how greater complexity makes it easier
Edit: Thanks for the explanations. I get that multiple languages use gendered nouns to mean something that is clearly not ‘gender’ in the biological sense but key to understanding context. Seems strange as an English speaker where noun gender is vestigial if it even exists at all and even then it doesn’t matter if someone gets it wrong
For example, you hear a word that sounds (exactly/a bit) like another word, and can tell it’s not that other word, because the other word has a different gender. Or you only really need to learn one word because both are very similar. Some examples:
Spanish : La Nina/La Nino. Both basically the same world (female/male child) and sound the same, unlike boy/girl in English.
Dutch : Het jacht = the boat / yacht, de jacht = the hunt. No need to guess the meaning of the word from the context, you can go by gender.
Spanish: El Capital = Capital as in money, La Capital = Capital as in Capital City.
French: Un Livre = a book. La livre = pound sterling.
This is an off the cuff example. Yes you can rephrase to get around this. It’s just an example.
The chair and the table don’t go together because it’s made of wood.
The chair and the table don’t go together because it’s made(female version) of wood.
Since you ‘know’ tables get female articles and such, you know the speaker is talking about the table and not the chair. This is how Romanian works.
Yes, I am aware that singular chairs are male and plural chairs are female in Romanian which wouldn’t clarify anything if the sentence was “The chairs and the tables don’t go together because they’re made(female version) of wood.”
try making a really simple language, and figure out that it gets really difficult to speak because you start confusing shit. excessive complexity isn’t good either but some complexity is needed, and gender gives some of that. I have nothing to back this up though
German.
Gerwoman.
How do they make things easier? (Asking as a German).
It’s a mouthful, but concise. (Telling as a non-german).
I agree that German is concise. I just don’t see what the gendered nouns are contributing to that quality or any other one.
Who said anything about gendered nouns? The question was about greater complexity making things easier.
In my eyes, the German language achieves that.
The title of this post is “Why do some languages use gendered nouns?” …
I was replying to a comment, not the title.
Sometimes more specific (sometimes. Verbs carry some widely different meaning and depend on propositions to differentiate), but not always more concise. If you’ve done or compared German-English translations, you see the English is always shorter, both in word and—especially in—character counts. My experience has been usually about 20, up to 30, percent.
Deutsch ist total einfach. Weiß doch jeder.