Don't the native speakers of English feel proud that their language has no grammatical gender? Only TWO Germanic languages have no grammatical gender - English and Afrikaans. Other languages that have no grammatical gender are Finnish, Estonian and Chinese.
However, look at most Indo-European languages and you will see that inanimate objects and anything else are counted as "masculine", "feminine", "neuter" and other ones.
For example, in French there is -
une arbre - a tree (feminine)
un chemain - a lorry (masculine)
It must have been very annoying for French children to learn the gender of each noun at school.
What is the point? Does it really matter what article you put before the noun? Why not have it as gender-free as in English? It makes more sense.
Adam, you picked some bad examples, since "arbre" is masculine, and the word for lorry is "camion."
<<It must have been very annoying for French children to learn the gender of each noun at school.>>
It's probably no more annoying than for English-speaking children to memorize the spelling of their language.
Can anyone recommend some reading on the subject of the history of grammatical gender?
"It's probably no more annoying than for English-speaking children to memorize the spelling of their language. "
I wouldn't say so. Are English worse more difficult to spell than in other European languages? For example, look at the German -
"Wertschaftgermainshaft"
Bit of a headache for a German to write that word AND learn its grammatical gender.
"It's probably no more annoying than for English-speaking children to memorize the spelling of their language"
and pronounciation....and irregular verbs and more
Well, though, for native English speakers, they'd learn the pronunciations first, /not/ the spellings first. And as for irregular verbs in English, I at least don't remember having to memorize any of that kind of stuff in school (which I already knew perfectly well), just spelling. Remember how native speakers are taught their own native language in school is different from how people are taught a given language as a second language.
Adam, obviously you don't know much about German; German spelling, at least compared to English spelling, is /very/ easy, as long as you don't try to treat it like English spelling. Oh, but you got that wrong; I think it should be "Wirtschaftgemeinschaft", and at least how that is spelled, well, I can tell how to pronounce it pretty much by just looking at it.
<<It must have been very annoying for French children to learn the gender of each noun at school>>
No. :)
When you hear the nouns and their genders all the time you learn them effortlessly.
PS: un Chemin = a way [path].
Oh, and by the way, that word is feminine, as are all -"schaft", -"heit", -"keit", -"ung" and -"ität" words and so on, which is something one'd figure out pretty quickly if one studied German at all.
Gender is acquired naturally and spontaneously with the rest of the grammar of a speaker's first language. Knowledge of gender is automatic and it requires no effort.
Every three-year-old Croatian child knows perfectly well that they are supposed to say "plavi brod", "plava ptica" and "plavo nebo" (the blue ship, masculine; the blue bird, feminine; the blue sky, neuter). They also know that they are supposed to say "o plavom brodu" (about the blue ship), "o plavoj ptici" (about the blue bird) and "o plavom nebu" (about the blue sky). They also know which of the four tones they are supposed to use on which syllable. It's all automatic.
Norwegian has three genders, just like German and I just had to LOL when i read about the children having to learn it in school! It is just like English speaking children not having to "learn" how to conjugate verbs in persons...it comes naturally! But both conjugation in persons and especially genders are hell for non-native speakers...
Yeah, as an English speaker it seems pointless to have genders, but I'm used to it from my knowledge of Spanish and German.
Heh; ich finde Konjugation mit Person und Zahl auf Deutsch ziemlich leicht. Die schwierige Teile mir Konjunktivbiegung und sich Genus und Mehrzahlform für Wörter erinnern zu müssen sind. (Erzahl mir bitte, wenn mein Deutsch lauzig hier ist.)
Das sollte "Erzähl mir bitte" da sein.
Although German likes to push the verbs far back you can say, as this is not a subordinate clause:
Die schwierige Teile mir (=für mich?) SIND (FÜR MICH) KonjunktivbEUgung und sich Genus und Mehrzahlform für Wörter erinnern zu müssen.