#WHY AREN'T THEY ALL NEUTER NOUNS?

[actual-corpse]

Every night I go to sleep

And dream up horrors beyond human comprend

And then I wake up and realize

There's no end

Every moment is a waking nightmare

Somsomskmsksmdomdbuckstabu

I have emotions that run so deep

Makes it super hard to sleep

Zu groß Zu groß

HOW THE FUCK CAN MERE MORTAL HANDLE THESE HORRORS

IT HURTS

*screaming. Maybe tearing at my eyes or something idk*

[hbmmaster]

in zoology, animal species are given standard "latin" names consisting of two words, the genus name and the species name. typically, the genus name is a noun, and the species name is an adjective. following the rules of latin grammar, adjectives need to agree with nouns with grammatical gender, so if the genus name is a feminine latin noun then all species of that genus are given (in principle) adjectives marked with feminine latin suffixes.

in practice of course, new genus names don't always use actual latin words, so these latin grammatical gender rules need to be grafted onto words that aren't really latin. and this is where one of the weirdest conventions of zoological binomial nomenclature comes in!

how exactly do you determine what the latin grammatical gender of a word is if it isn't a latin word? according to the ICZN, it's simple:

if the word is from greek, use its gender in greek

otherwise, if the word is from a modern european language with grammatical gender that uses the latin alphabet, use the gender in the source language (yes it is that specific)

otherwise, if the name ends with -a it's feminine

otherwise, if the name ends with -um, -u, or -o it's neuter

otherwise, it's masculine

unless of course if the zoologist with naming dibs says explicitly that they think this genus should have an irregular gender.

anyway these rules are fascinating to me. why are they this specific? grammatical gender systems compatible with latin's adjective suffixes are found throughout the entire indo-european language family, so why restrict it to modern european latin-script languages (and greek)? I don't know!

[3oey]

Important addition to this post: i love that (at least as a german speaker) there is some ambiguity in assigning a gender to english nouns and you get into heated fights with your friends about the correct gendered article of words that aren't actually gendered in the first place.

In most cases you're good with using the gender of the translated word: it's die Stadt (feminine) so it's die City. Easy, makes sense. But it doesn't work all the time.

Like for the word "mood" i've heard people use both masculine (der) and feminine (die) articles. Der Mood. Die Mood. And neither of them sounds wrong! (I personally say der Mood but i can't explain why. It just sounds better)

The words "song" and "track" are both masculine even though the german translation das Lied is neuter.

For the word "squad" I've heard people use all three different articles and honestly? I can't even say which one sounds best?? They all make sense in some way and i even use them interchangeably because i can't decide either

What bugs me the most is the word "journey". People say die Journey because it's die Reise, yeah i get where they are coming from. But der Journey just sounds so much better and more right to me 😭

my favourite thing about not being a native english speaker is using english words while speaking in my native language but also conjugating/declining them with that language's grammar rules

[protoindoeuropean]

It's pretty clear broadly how and why the original "animate"/"inanimate" split developed in PIE, but do we have a good idea why the feminine did?

The obvious underlying reason is the focus on natural gender, which was initially expressed through derivational suffixes (which is what Hittite attests still with the suffix -ššara- used to make feminatives, e. g. išḫā- 'lord', išḫaššara- 'lady', both common gender), but was then grammaticalized with its own set of endings. Significantly, what grammaticalized was not the same thing as in Hittite, but instead the suffix *-h₂-.

The main issue is that we also see this same suffix forming abstract nouns, as well as this same thing appearing as the ending forming collectives, which is attested as the plural of neuter (inanimate) nouns in the later languages (e. g. Greek -α as in πάντα 'all [things]').

The first idea (first formulated back in the 19th century) is that these collectives and the feminine gender are connected. Which seems a bit weird, but the formal similarities are quite striking, considering the forms are identical in the nominative and not only that, the collective often has the same verbal agreement as well, being used with verbs in the singular, not the plural (which is common for collectives in IE generally). So a word like *h₁ek̑u̯eh₂ could be both a collective plural of *h₁ek̑u̯os 'a horse', so 'horses, a herd of horses', as well as 'a mare' – and both would be used with a verb in the singular. The idea would be then that the starting point for the development of feminine gender would be domecticated animals, where often the herd is composed of mostly female animals and only a few males (cows – bull, sheep – ram etc.), and the collective noun would be used individually for a single member of the herd (that would be typically female) to separate it from the male, denoted by the form in the regular singular.

There are problems with this because all the striking similarities notwithstanding, the exact process of how this kind of gender genesis would proceed is not clear and there aren't any obvious parallels in other languages of the world (though generally, the genesis of gender is hard to observe in any case).

The other idea I know of (by Luraghi, who dealt with this issue in a couple of articles some ten years ago) would be to separate the *-h₂- of the feminine gender from the *-h₂ of the collective. As far as I understand her account, the abstract nouns in *-h₂- would start to form their own paradigm and this already existing paradigm would then simply be used to form a distinction within the animate gender, splitting off feminines into the abstract noun class (not because of any semantic relationship between abstraction and feminine, but simply because it's a different class of nouns), at the same time providing it with the motivation to generate further agreement, leading to the creation of a separate gender.

The main reason for this different account – besides the lack of obvious typological parallels for the first account – is that it seems that there aren't any examples in the IE languages that would bridge the gap between the collective and the feminine (so a word that would still have both functions). Recently, however, one of my professors found such an example in the Slovene dialectal material, where a word corresponding to standard gospôda (f.) means both 'gentry, lords and ladies' (same as standard) and at the same time also 'a lady'. There's more to this as well, but this is all I'm going to say on that front, because I'm not sure if this was published already or not, so yeah ...

[official-transsexual]

@pies-cie-jebal:

"Pronouns" are any word that replaces a noun or noun phrase; most English pronouns are not gendered. For Anglophones, it's easy to assume that the sole purpose of gendered pronouns is to demonstrate a person's gender because we're speaking one of the few languages derived from Proto-Indo-European that doesn't utilize grammatical gender, but if you take that logic to France you might find yourself wondering why all the motorcycles are ladies ("la moto") and all the bikinis are dudes ("le bikini"). Now, I'm not really trained in linguistics, but I'm pretty decent at academic research, and it only took me about 5 or so minutes to find that the gendered pronouns "him" and "her" are believed to both be derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *ko- (meaning "this") along with the "neuter" (non-gendered) pronouns "here" and "it." From there, I did another 10 minutes of digging (+ a bit of time to scan through the sources to confirm that they aren't being misrepresented) and found that current research suggests that grammatical gender in Proto-Indo-European language actually originated as "animate" vs "inanimate," with the "animate" category eventually being divided into grammatically "masculine" or "feminine" terms, and the "inanimate" category reframed as "neuter," as evidenced by the lack of a distinct "feminine" construction in the oldest preserved branch of the family (from Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction by Fortson, pp 103-104, I also recommend The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World by Mallory & Adams for further reading on the subject). So no, pronouns haven't been ~working to express human gender since the beginning of human language~ or however you phrased it.

Not all modern languages have gendered pronouns, either. There are several families of human language where gendered pronouns simply don't exist, or only exist due to the influence of other language families.

I'm a non-binary person on HRT who started coming out around 15 years ago. I've never used "they" as a personal pronoun. Your prescriptive claims about how you think gendered personal pronouns in English should be used do not actually hold true in the real world.

"Males and ftm," "women and mtf." You should take some time to learn what TERF dogwhistles look like before commenting on any more of my posts, because holy shit. I was so caught up in your lack of research about linguistics that I almost missed this, but yikes, thanks for making it clear that you don't think trans women are women!

I’ve got to figure out a way to be less wordy on these…

Anyway, policing pronouns is bad for a multitude of reasons, & GNC ppl using pronouns not normally associated with their gender aren’t the ones harming trans people.