English Noun Genders

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha. This is Hannah calling from Sarnia, Ontario.

Hi, Hannah. Welcome to the program.

Thanks for having me.

Well, my question is concerning gendered nouns.

When I was in university, I took a German course, and by far the hardest part for me was memorizing the genders of the nouns.

So there’s feminine, masculine, and they have neuter, too, right?

Mm—

Mm—

Anyway, so just as an English speaker, that was such a foreign concept to me that, like, a chair would have a gender or a door or anything like that.

And I recently found out, I just learned, that English has Germanic origins.

So it got me to wondering if English is Germanic in origin, then where did all those genders go?

Because we obviously don’t have genders for our nouns.

Yeah, you’re right. And we used to. Thank goodness we don’t anymore.

It’s made it a lot easier.

Yeah, but back in the time of Beowulf, Old English, we did have three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter.

And they didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

I mean, if you look at French, you know, lune for moon is feminine and the word for sun is masculine.

It was exactly the opposite in Old English.

It just didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

And it wasn’t until Middle English, which is about the 12th century to 1500 or so, roughly, there was a whole lot of change.

That happened in the language. And one of the things that happened was that those nouns with gender also had inflectional endings. Do you know what that means, inflectional endings in an inflected language? The inflected here comes from a Latin word that means to bend. And in languages like Latin and Greek and Sanskrit, the different, and Old English, the different endings of a noun told you how it functioned in a sentence. And during Middle English, we became more reliant on word order rather than those bent endings on the ends of nouns. And so as those disappeared, you paid less attention to gender as well. And there were a lot of other different factors going on during that period, but it was a very powerful period of change in the English language.

That’s interesting.

It demonstrates one of the things that’s, well, there are two things happen in any language at any given time. One, it is becoming more complex, and two, it’s simplifying. And when when it simplifies, it tends to lose the features that are confusing.

And genders can be confusing because they are semantically arbitrary.

The male and the female have nothing whatsoever to do with human genders as we know them.

Yeah, that’s why they’re so confusing.

To an English speaker where all of our nouns are neutered, it’s definitely confusing when you’re learning French or a gendered language like that.

La lune, it’s arbitrary that it’s feminine.

It doesn’t mean that there’s something mother-like about the moon at all.

Yeah, and I remember reading about an African language where large things were masculine and small things were feminine.

So women’s breasts were masculine and men’s breasts were feminine.

I mean, there’s just really not a whole lot of rhyme or reason there.

So you had a tough time learning the German because of that or memorizing them? Or did you have tricks that you used?

I basically just use the flashcard trick and put them everywhere.

So, like, I would label everything in my house and try to memorize them that way and learn the gender with the word.

Yeah, exactly.

But, I mean, I also know some French, and it’s still a struggle for me in French, even though I’ve been studying French for five-plus years now, and I still get confused.

Yeah, the wholesale memorization is the solution for an English speaker who’s trying to learn a gendered language.

Yeah, tough.

Well, bonne chance.

Merci beaucoup.

Thanks, Hannah.

Au revoir.

Au revoir.

Bye-bye.

What a great question, though.

And this is a question that comes up to anyone who is learning a second, third, or fourth language, right?

Yeah.

Thank goodness.

It never quite goes away, even when you begin to understand it.

You still keep looking at gender and trying to explain it to yourself.

But it is semantically arbitrary.

It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with male and female.

We’ll link to some more information about genders online.

And if you’ve got a question about language, call us, 877-929-9673, or send email to words@waywordradio.org.