English does have grammatical gender, except it's just pronouns. That still counts. It does sometimes extend to inanimate objects, like boats are feminine. Languages with no grammatical gender whatsoever would be like Finnish, Hungarian, and Bahasa Indonesian, which have no pronouns indicating gender.
The reigning hypothesis back when I was in school learning Anglo-Saxon was that Middle English lost its gendered articles because people in the north and south parts of England were speaking a more streamlined dialect with one another. The northern English had dialects more influenced by Danish and Norwegian, while the south spoke with more Norman French influence. That meant not everyone agreed on which object had which gender and it could get weird talking to your northern relatives, especially because it's my understanding Danish doesn't have genders that exactly correlate with masculine and feminine.
Eventually people starting using "Þe" (the) for every noun to ease communication and genders just sort of drifted out of Middle English.
That one case isn't inherent to the language, but i think it is a property of English that you can selectively apply gendered pronouns to otherwise non-gendered things and people can understand when you do it. Like if I started calling planet Earth "she" or a big tall tree "he" people aren't gonna stop me and ask why I'm speaking so strangely.
Some languages have animacy as a semantic feature, designating if something is alive/animate or not, and breaking animacy in English is done through gendered pronouns usually. It's done differently in other languages, like the Sinhala language in Sri Lanka has two completely different verbs for "to be" if something is alive or not.
grammatical gender and thing-chuds-think-is-sex2 aren't automatically the same. languages that have piles of linguistic genders generally don't have that many social roles, but "it's unfortunate we use the word gender for both of these things" is the limit of my knowledge here.
Yeah, the term "gender" used to mean just like a category, but narrowed in meaning to be specifically about all the stuff we think about these days when we hear it. It makes a lot more sense when you realize it's historically from the same root as "genus" and "genre".
hungarian not having grammatical gender works out almost the same in practice tho... eg, we ended up with two words for comrade, one for women. just terminally stupid shit.
English lacks gendered noun classes and doesn't require agreement between separate words, you're right. But pronouns are still reflective of grammatical gender and they're artifacts from the Anglo-Saxon language, which did have arbitrary gendered noun classes. There are other nouns that indicate gender too, also artifacts from earlier forms of English, like waitress or actress. The feminine suffix -ess comes from Middle English, and the feminine suffix -en comes from Anglo-Saxon, like in the words maiden or chicken.
Maybe a distinction could be made between abstract, arbitrary gendered nouns (like a lamp is feminine) and gendered nouns specifically for describing people.
But pronouns are still reflective of grammatical gender and they’re artifacts from the Anglo-Saxon language, which did have arbitrary gendered noun classes.
Sure, but there’s a vast difference between a special category of nouns (i.e., pronouns) being gendered and every noun being gendered.
Maybe a distinction could be made between abstract, arbitrary gendered nouns (like a lamp is feminine) and gendered nouns specifically for describing people.
The latter is called gendered pronouns, she made that exact distinction. No "maybe" about it
English does have grammatical gender, except it's just pronouns. That still counts. It does sometimes extend to inanimate objects, like boats are feminine. Languages with no grammatical gender whatsoever would be like Finnish, Hungarian, and Bahasa Indonesian, which have no pronouns indicating gender.
The reigning hypothesis back when I was in school learning Anglo-Saxon was that Middle English lost its gendered articles because people in the north and south parts of England were speaking a more streamlined dialect with one another. The northern English had dialects more influenced by Danish and Norwegian, while the south spoke with more Norman French influence. That meant not everyone agreed on which object had which gender and it could get weird talking to your northern relatives, especially because it's my understanding Danish doesn't have genders that exactly correlate with masculine and feminine.
Eventually people starting using "Þe" (the) for every noun to ease communication and genders just sort of drifted out of Middle English.
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That one case isn't inherent to the language, but i think it is a property of English that you can selectively apply gendered pronouns to otherwise non-gendered things and people can understand when you do it. Like if I started calling planet Earth "she" or a big tall tree "he" people aren't gonna stop me and ask why I'm speaking so strangely.
Some languages have animacy as a semantic feature, designating if something is alive/animate or not, and breaking animacy in English is done through gendered pronouns usually. It's done differently in other languages, like the Sinhala language in Sri Lanka has two completely different verbs for "to be" if something is alive or not.
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My friends do exactly that with random nouns as a bit, and it has been pointed out before.
As a boat, John McCain uses She/Her pronouns and I find this hilarious.
grammatical gender and thing-chuds-think-is-sex2 aren't automatically the same. languages that have piles of linguistic genders generally don't have that many social roles, but "it's unfortunate we use the word gender for both of these things" is the limit of my knowledge here.
Yeah grammatical gender is just a way to categorize nouns and it just happens to be called gender, at least according to a quick google search.
Yeah, the term "gender" used to mean just like a category, but narrowed in meaning to be specifically about all the stuff we think about these days when we hear it. It makes a lot more sense when you realize it's historically from the same root as "genus" and "genre".
hungarian not having grammatical gender works out almost the same in practice tho... eg, we ended up with two words for comrade, one for women. just terminally stupid shit.
Hard disagree. There's a vast difference between a special category of nouns (i.e., pronouns) being gendered and every noun being gendered.
English lacks gendered noun classes and doesn't require agreement between separate words, you're right. But pronouns are still reflective of grammatical gender and they're artifacts from the Anglo-Saxon language, which did have arbitrary gendered noun classes. There are other nouns that indicate gender too, also artifacts from earlier forms of English, like waitress or actress. The feminine suffix -ess comes from Middle English, and the feminine suffix -en comes from Anglo-Saxon, like in the words maiden or chicken.
Maybe a distinction could be made between abstract, arbitrary gendered nouns (like a lamp is feminine) and gendered nouns specifically for describing people.
Sure, but there’s a vast difference between a special category of nouns (i.e., pronouns) being gendered and every noun being gendered.
The latter is called gendered pronouns, she made that exact distinction. No "maybe" about it