Gender

On syntactic linkage, we mentioned that Latin nouns fall into various classes called ‘genders’ and that they are misleadingly named ‘masculine gender’, ‘feminine gender’ and ‘neuter gender’. The different classes of noun are grammatically important because which class a noun belongs to determines which case suffixes it takes and which case suffixes any modifying adjectives take. English nouns fall into classes that are more closely linked to natural gender. There is a major split between animate and inanimate nouns, linked to the use of it as opposed to he and she. The animate nouns split into male and female, which governs the use of he as opposed to she.

The labels ‘masculine’ and so on applied to classes of Latin noun can be seen as not entirely arbitrary if we take into account the fact that nouns denoting women, in whatever capacity, are typically female: mater (mother), filia (daughter), femina (woman) are feminine; pater (father), filius (son), vir (man) are masculine; servus is ‘male slave’, serva is ‘female slave’ and so on. Neuter nouns appear at first sight to offer no generalization, but an important one can be made: no nouns denoting animate beings are neuter. That generalization does not apply as neatly to IndoEuropean languages as a whole, but it remains true that relatively few neuter nouns denote animate beings. The ones that are usually mentioned are the neuter German nouns Kind (child), Weib (woman), Mädchen (girl), Fräulein (young woman), Tier (animal), Pferd (horse), Krokodil (crocodile).

Current thinking on gender is that there is always a semantic core to gender systems, but the degree of semantic justification can vary from almost complete to very little. There are languages, such as the Bantu language Luganda, spoken in areas of Uganda and Kenya, which have classes of nouns based on such properties as whether they denote humans, animals, round objects, thin rigid objects, thin flexible objects, and so on. There are many nouns that fit the pattern, but the language has a general class into which go all new or borrowed nouns. Work on the Australian language Dyirbal (North Queensland) has shown that the working of a gender system might require knowledge of a society’s myths. In Dyirbal myth, the moon and the sun are husband and wife; the words for moon and husband are together in one class and the words for wife and sun are together in another class. Nouns to do with fire and light go in the same class as the noun for sun. The satin bird brought fire from the clutches of the rainbow snake, and the noun denoting the bird is in the same class as the words for sun and fire. The bite of the hairy mary grub has the same effect as bad sunburn, and the noun denoting that grub is also in the same class as the noun for sun.