What is the purpose of grammatical gender??

<<Comparing that to what happens in Romance languages is just absurd, if those examples counted for anything Romance languages would have 3 genders too>>

In what way would they have 3 genders? English has three pronouns (he, she, it) which can take the place of nouns which refer to concrete objects,while Romance languages only have equivalents to "he" and "she".

>>>Xie, the original picture was round for the sun, I think.

It was the past. Life would have been much easier if the whole script isn't that rectangular. But really, people usually can't tell.... 人 had been very complicated, somewhat like a farmer with all the stuff he needed for ploughing and so on, but now it's reduced to this shape only. The same for 母 - it doesn't make much sense now with the boobs only...

<<In what way would they have 3 genders? English has three pronouns (he, she, it) which can take the place of nouns which refer to concrete objects,while Romance languages only have equivalents to "he" and "she".>>

In the way Romance languages also have genderless nouns. Even if their pronouns usually shift to "he" by default, it's a neuter, not masculine.

Guest Wed Apr 23, 2008 11:29 pm GMT:

<<I wouldn't have thought gender came about in order to sometimes not have to repeat the noun, that's more like a useful side-effect.

That's not what I meant so say! I did'nt say something about the reason why grammatical gender came up. I also woulden't consider it a useful side-effect. It evolved sometimes somewhere, maybe on different places, and has proven itself practical and so it spread.

I've read it's to do with a natural human propensity to simply somehow see gender in inanimate objects.>>

Obviously, since there are languages completely without grammatical gender e.g. turkish languages, there is no ''natural human propensity to simply somehow see gender in inanimate objects''.
Of course, animism sees spirits even in inanimate objects, but does spirits have gender? Early turk peoples have been animists, so why don't have turkic languages evolved a gender system?

You should think about the plausibility of that what you read!

<<You should think about the plausibility of that what you read!>>

Plausibility??
And who are you to say otherwise? This is not religion, you don't have to believe it or not.

These languages with grammatical genders must have reasons for those, same was Turkish has its own reasons. One isn't more legitimate than the others.

''That might be the case for Portuguese, but it isn't for German, where most of the time there's no logical reason for the assignment of gender.''

No, it's not the case of Portuguese. Many feminine words from Continental Portuguese (a omeleta, a pampa) became masculine in Brazilian Portuguese (o omelete, o pampa).

And even (a) dó, (a) alface is not used with masculine: (o) dó, (o) alface...

And even (a) dó, (a) alface is now used with masculine: (o) dó, (o) alface...
No logic whatsoever in genders.
But in Brazil, in colloquial language, feminine words can be used with masculine adjectives....''A gente está cansado'', ''Muito bom essa água'', Ela falou: Obrigado.

It seems that feminine is disappearing, lol...

It's true, "omeleta" or "omelete" is a feminine noun in European Portuguese because it came from French in which is also feminine.
But "pampa" (which is actually very, very rarely used) can either be feminine if it refers to the plains, or masculine if it refers to the horse.

"dó" was never feminine!! If it's for the musical note is masculine, if it's for compassion is genderless.

The correct use for "alface" is and always was masculine, it's just referred colloquially as feminine because it's easier to say and has an association with cabbage and salad.

"A gente está cansado" is clearly a subversion of the language and is totally illogical and ungrammatical.
"Muito bom essa água" is also not the best Portuguese ever, though it could be thought as an abbreviation of "É muito bom beber essa água" and then it would be fine.

Girls can either say "obrigado" or "obrigada" because it depends if she's referring to herself as a girl or has a human being (if you know what "obrigado" really means).
I've seen some guys using "obrigada" as well, and I guess that's OK because they're also referring to themselves as a person.

Guest Wed Apr 23, 2008 5:13 pm GMT:

<<guest1

"by refer to them by pronouns",
"create new words by assigning a different gender for a different meaning to one and the same noun"

I'm not so sure. Give us some examples.>>

In German, there is ''der Tag'' (masculine) which means ''the day''. By talking about computers, programming etc. you my hear ''das Tag'' (neuter) which is clearly taken from englisch ''the tag'' and would be pronounced like the englisch word. I've read about this function of gender somewhere, maybe here in antimoon. Maybe this was more common long times ago.

Guest Wed Apr 23, 2008 5:44 pm GMT:

>><<Grammatical gender or noun classes makes it much easier to avoid to repeatedly mention the same things by their proper terms, but by refer to them by pronouns.>>

Are you kidding? English use the pronouns in the same way.<<

English does use its pronouns in a similar, but more restricted way. Pronouns like ''he'', ''she'', ''his'', and ''her'' can refer to people, or beloved animals with the respective sex, and as I read here in antimoon,
to ships (she, her) also, further to things you are very fond of, so that you (personally) consider them as animated. (Other people may consider you as silly for that!) You can't refer with it to e.g. arbitrary things of dayly life.

>><<You also can create new words by assigning a different gender for a different meaning to one and the same noun. >>

That's mainly in german (das/der See; das/der Geisel) but rarely in other languages.<<

Consult your German dictionary!

''Auf dem Tisch liegen eine Gabel, ein Löffel und ein Messer.''

There are a fork, a spoon and a knife lying on the table.

''Gib mir die Gabel! --> Gib sie mir!

Give the fork to me! --> Give it to me!

''Gib mir den Löffel! --> Gib ihn mir!

Give the spoon to me! --> Give it to me!

''Gib mir das Messer! --> Gib es mir!/Gib's mir!''

Give the knife to me! --> Give it to me!

zatsu Wed Apr 23, 2008 5:48 pm GMT:

>><<Grammatical gender or noun classes makes it much easier to avoid to repeatedly mention the same things by their proper terms, but by refer to them by pronouns. You also has the possibillity to refer to things mentioned somewhat earlier. They are like pinters in a programming language or like registers in a microprocessor.>>

I totally agree with this.
Grammatical genders are the main reason why nouns can be often omitted or then referred to with pronouns and verb conjugations alone.<<

Guest Wed Apr 23, 2008 6:24 pm GMT:

<<Altrernatively, you could have hundreds or even thousands of genders, so it would be rare to have more than one noun from the same gender in a paragraph.>>

Normally, pointers are hold in registers in a microprocessor, so that access to it is very fast. (There may be some very old microprocessors where registers were located in the memory, enabeling very fast context switch, if accessed by some approbriate mechanism.) That's due to the fast technology a microprocessor is produced in and due to the fact that there are only a few registers, so that the address decoder is very small and very fast therefore. If you want to have more registers for being able to refer to more data simultaniously i.e. you want to refer to more words
simultaniously, you may add on additonal stage in the address decoder (the bigger the decoder gets the more space will it take, the more will the chip cost, the slower will it be), but for humans, you must remember more things you speak about. So increasing the number of genders above a certain limit will not work due to the limitations of human memory.

Guest Wed Apr 23, 2008 6:24 pm GMT:

>><<Wouldn't it be more effective to dynamically tag each noun with a suffix as you go along?>>

Example (1,2,3 are dynamically assigned pronouncible "gender" suffixes):

Here's a knife1, fork2, spoon3, soupspoon2, and bufferknife3. Their2 handles are blue, their3 handles are green, and its1 handle is black.<<

@zatsu:

I think the point is not about the suffix but about the dynamical assignement of a ''gender'' via suffixes.

This will not work! You'll get confused because you will not remember to what the respective tag refered to a few sentences, phrases, words or moments before. Thats the reason why gender is fixed. You know to what word is refered to, or to what class of words it is refered to, even if you didn't hear the words before. (You might have met other people already speaking about a certain topic.) According to your proposal, a person joinig others had to first ask about the actual assignement of the tags before he or she could paritcipate in the conversation. In situations of emergency, this would be too time consuming and most likely to be misunderstood and therefore causing an evolutionary drawback.

Guest Thu Apr 24, 2008 2:00 pm GMT:

>><<In what way would they have 3 genders? English has three pronouns (he, she, it) which can take the place of nouns which refer to concrete objects,while Romance languages only have equivalents to "he" and "she".>>

In the way Romance languages also have genderless nouns. Even if their pronouns usually shift to "he" by default, it's a neuter, not masculine.>>

A neuter noun is not genderless! It's gender is neuter!

Are there any languages with transexual grammatical gender?

Guest Thu Apr 24, 2008 3:00 pm GMT:

>><<You should think about the plausibility of that what you read!>>

Plausibility??
And who are you to say otherwise? This is not religion, you don't have to believe it or not.

These languages with grammatical genders must have reasons for those, same was Turkish has its own reasons. One isn't more legitimate than the others.<<

What's the issue? Did I insult you? Your statement was very general and I gave you a counter-exemple.

''transexual grammatical gender''? -- What do you mean by that?

There are languages with genders like ''animated'' or ''inanimated''. Grammatical gender doesn't have anything to do with sex!

In Burushaki, there are four genders: human masculine, human feminine, countable objects, and uncountable ones, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burushaski_language#Grammar