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Noun Genders

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Sidney View Drop Down
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  Quote Sidney Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: Noun Genders
    Posted: 06-Apr-2015 at 12:42
Most languages classify nouns into masculine, feminine or neuter. Is this part of early languages (Egyptian, Sumerian, Hittite, etc), or did it develop later?

What is the point of this? How does it help the construction of language?
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  Quote medenaywe Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 06-Apr-2015 at 14:54
Ancient language had not gender.All was "it".Smile"It"still consists all genders:male,female&it.
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  Quote Sidney Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 06-Apr-2015 at 15:20
So when, and why, did certain words become 'masculine', 'feminine' or 'neuter'?

(eg in French, 'carrot' is feminine, 'lemon' is masculine; but in German both words are feminine).
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  Quote Aeoli Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 07-Apr-2015 at 06:07
I am also wondering it

"This system is used in approximately one quarter of the world's languages."  


"Grammatical gender is found in many Indo-European languages (including SpanishGermanHindi and Russian, but not Persian, for example), Afro-Asiatic languages (which includes the Semitic and Berber languages, etc.), and in other language families such as Dravidian and Northeast Caucasian, as well as several Australian Aboriginal languages like Dyirbal, and Kalaw Lagaw Ya. Also, most Niger–Congo languages have extensive systems of noun classes, which can be grouped into several grammatical genders. On the other hand, grammatical gender is usually absent from the AltaicAustronesianSino-TibetanUralic and most Native American language families."  

and why persian language doesn't have it


Edited by Aeoli - 07-Apr-2015 at 06:08
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  Quote medenaywe Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 07-Apr-2015 at 12:39
If you mean time-period-age i will start with first update of human language="Greek".Second update="Latin".Than all that we see today Sidney.European languages came after 9-10th century.
Most of them between 10-14 century,literature forms.It was connected with fall of Byzantine Empire
,somehow?
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  Quote Sidney Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 07-Apr-2015 at 19:12
Medenaywe, grammatical-gender nouns are not the preserve of European languages. They appear in Arabic and in Hindi, and predate the 10-14th Centuries and the fall of Byzantine Empire.
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  Quote medenaywe Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 08-Apr-2015 at 10:11
now we knew where did they come!SmileIn Europe&Africa of course.
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  Quote Sidney Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 08-Apr-2015 at 15:13
So did the ancient Egyptian language have gendered nouns?

And why do gendered nouns exist at all!?
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  Quote medenaywe Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 08-Apr-2015 at 23:20
Demotico has no gender.Gender&Plural&Pronouns could have distroyed numeral structure of sentence if it had existed.(They are still realized with prefixes&suffxes that we have to count). 
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  Quote Sidney Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 13-Apr-2015 at 12:45
We can surmise that from the existing writing, but I wonder if spoken Egyptian was different?
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  Quote red clay Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 13-Apr-2015 at 17:10
Does anyone know if any of the South and Mesoamerican languages used gendered nouns. Ex. Nuhatl.
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  Quote Centrix Vigilis Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-Apr-2015 at 04:44
they exsist because language developed in part from a referent basis.

Hence gender nouns were based on gender referents.
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  Quote Centrix Vigilis Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-Apr-2015 at 04:54
ref.Red. dunno really but the answer if anywhere will be found here:

'Corbett, Greville G. (1991). Gender. Cambridge University Press.
Corbett, Greville (1994) "Gender and gender systems". In R. Asher (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Oxford: Pergamon Press, pp. 1347–1353.'

Apache-Comanche and others, are more animate-inanimate based; with gender absorbed-adopted viz any in use by Euro's. during the colonialization periods of the Western hemisphere; iirc from my His 101.
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  Quote Sidney Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-Apr-2015 at 13:32
Originally posted by Centrix Vigilis

they exsist because language developed in part from a referent basis.

Hence gender nouns were based on gender referents.


That sounds tautological to me. Could you give me some examples to help me understand what you mean?
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  Quote Centrix Vigilis Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-Apr-2015 at 16:20
http://languagelore.net/?p=2984

the political bull shit aside..as I remain neither concerned with sensitivity or pcness in general.. read this:

http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/gender-sensitive-language/

and..lastly but not least... is...imagine the 'gender' noun or pronoun used to refer ie.referent to the male sexual organ. it would not be used as a feminine. but a masculine because of the masculine referent.

iow....'his' not 'her'. because 'her' don't traditionally have one.

And I thank GOD for that.

Amen.
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"

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