What is the purpose of grammatical gender??

Xie   Thu Apr 24, 2008 12:14 am GMT
Now.

日 - Sun. Why can't it be a circle with a dot or a vertical stroke in it? If it's true that my ancestors loved square stuff and got rid of everything round, why can't it be a rectangle with a dot (we have it in zhuyin, actually) or a vertical stroke in it?

月 - Moon. Why can't it be a full moon? If it's true that a crescent is more notable, then why should its curve lean towards the left but not the right? Were my ancestors all right-handed?

水 - water. Why can't it be just a dot of water? Our word for dot is much more like a droplet. It looks more like a cross than a droplet.

川 - stream. It was written as 3 vertical curve lines indicating streams of water on a river. Why can't it be 2 or 4 strokes? Why should they be so straight now? Why can't it be horizontal (oh, 三 [3] has occupied that slot)

山 - hill/mountain. It was 3 peaks together. Why can't it be three triangles? It looks more like a 3-pointed fork than a graphical hill.

They are just arbitrarily formed word forms and there's no why's but just how's. Etymology, morphology and natural gender... that's ok, but that's that. They re all cultural prodiucts.
Guest   Thu Apr 24, 2008 12:22 am GMT
糞 - shit. Why does 米 (rice) above 異 (different) mean "shit"? That doesn't make much sense. LOL
Guest   Thu Apr 24, 2008 12:38 am GMT
Arbitrary characters used to communicate meaningful things, is a completely different story, Xie.

The 'gender' assigned to inanimate objects, is a meaningless noun class, and the question was about its usefullness.

The Chinese characters for sun, moon, water - however arbitrary they may be - definately serve a purpose; grammatical gender does not.
Xie   Thu Apr 24, 2008 12:57 am GMT
Well, you can go on with political satires as well *grin*

I'm just giving very straightforward examples - namely ideographs - and there are much more examples that are as arbitrary. Over 90% of them are actually combinations of sound symbols and radicals in general, and there are no fast and hard rules except... like what the lame learners would say, memorizing them. Isn't that analogous to genders? What's the use of the 214 Kangxi radicals? Many of them, like gendered words, belong to some such radicals just because of their structure (cf. morphology of genders). Genders are spoken but these ideograms are written.

I'm giving a very broad definition of our notion about genders here. Even if you have no genders, ideograms and whatnot, why should you use a particular word in a language? Why should a rose be r-o-s-e? Why can't it be d-o-g or g-o-d? The biggest mistake of learning genders would really be reciting as if they were Kangxi radicals. As I wrote, this partialism is inherently bad for "learning" because you'd be taking them out and learning them in isolation. Over-analyzing cases are already lame enough - what about taking genders out? Even onomatopoeic words could be fairly arbitrary across languages, and this is the fundamental feature of all of them.
zatsu   Thu Apr 24, 2008 1:15 am GMT
Hmm, I actually never put much thought into it, but guess the use of grammatical gender or not shows different views of world, different sensibilities.
Most "feminine" nouns are directly associated with women belongings or the image and attributes of the woman, and it works the same way for men. It's deeply linked with culture, society, and also religion (yeah, both the apple and the snake are feminine...).
I wouldn't definitely call grammatical gender meaningless, I think it's interesting, it's interesting how the feminine and masculine genders were dropped from Old English (though they still appear in some nouns) as it's interesting that the neuter was dropped in most Romance languages (though it's still present in some nouns as well).
zatsu   Thu Apr 24, 2008 1:43 am GMT
Xie, thanks for your input!
I agree with you, words or ideograms, those are language features that shouldn't be over analized or their legitimacy argued.


<<月 - Moon. Why can't it be a full moon? If it's true that a crescent is more notable, then why should its curve lean towards the left but not the right? Were my ancestors all right-handed? >>

It's funny how you mention right-handed people writing to the opposite direction because I believe it's another language/ culture feature.
I've noticed while learning kanji that they're mainly written in a clockwise direction, but Western people are taught to write in an anti-clockwise direction...

Also, China is located on the Northern hemisphere, so that actually is a crescent moon, right?
Only on the Southern hemisphere the drawn C really stands for crescent^^
Guest   Thu Apr 24, 2008 1:56 am GMT
<<Is there an Indo-European language without genders? >>

English? (It's almost gender-free, anyway)
Guest   Thu Apr 24, 2008 2:01 am GMT
<<月 - Moon. Why can't it be a full moon? If it's true that a crescent is more notable, then why should its curve lean towards the left but not the right? Were my ancestors all right-handed? >>

The crescent moon curves this way in the evening (waxing crescent moon), and the other way in the morning (waning crescent). I suspect more people are awake to see the evening crescent moon (waxing).
K. T.   Thu Apr 24, 2008 2:04 am GMT
Xie, the original picture was round for the sun, I think. How do you study characters in HK? Are you taught them without seeing what the pictures orginally represented?
zatsu   Thu Apr 24, 2008 2:15 am GMT
First pic for the sun in my kanji book is actually a smily, lol.
Then it's round with a dot in the center.
K. T.   Thu Apr 24, 2008 2:18 am GMT
Mine has the sun with rays, then the circle with the dot.
gist   Thu Apr 24, 2008 2:38 am GMT
<<Is there an Indo-European language without genders? >>

English? (It's almost gender-free, anyway)



What English lacks isn't the genders (it has 3 genders, more than most of Romance) but rather the substantival and adjectival inflections (declensions and genre agreement). In fact every word in English has a gender.
Compare with Turkish, which has no gender, and see the difference:
tiger/tigress with kaplan/disi kaplan
lion/lioness with aslan/disi aslan
Here disi (read dishi) means female but it has no gender.
tiger/ tigress are two different genders

So no, English isn't gender free, just inflection free.
Guest   Thu Apr 24, 2008 3:05 am GMT
English tends to sound quite awkward when you have to specify someone's sex. "Dr. Brown is a female/woman doctor", sounds quite cumbersome.

Some people argue that English is less sexist in this way because you normally use the same term to refer to either sex in a given profession. However, you would never hear 'male' added to word so it's as though the word implicitly refers to males by definition, but in the odd case that there is a woman you can add 'female'.
Guest   Thu Apr 24, 2008 3:47 am GMT
<<What English lacks isn't the genders (it has 3 genders, more than most of Romance) but rather the substantival and adjectival inflections (declensions and genre agreement). In fact every word in English has a gender.
Compare with Turkish, which has no gender, and see the difference:
tiger/tigress with kaplan/disi kaplan
lion/lioness with aslan/disi aslan
Here disi (read dishi) means female but it has no gender.
tiger/ tigress are two different genders

So no, English isn't gender free, just inflection free.>>


Those are the exception, not the rule! What's the male/ female of cat? What's the gender of table or pencil?
Comparing that to what happens in Romance languages is just absurd, if those examples counted for anything Romance languages would have 3 genders too
Guest   Thu Apr 24, 2008 4:50 am GMT
[What's the male/ female of cat?]

Tomcat and queen.


[What's the gender of table or pencil?]

neuter