Pretty much every other language seems to have grammatical genders… so why doesn’t English? Well, it used to.
Old English had three genders, meaning there were at least three different ways of saying “the”. In this video, I explain how that worked and why it isn’t the case anymore.
I also talk about the fact that we actually DO still have grammatical genders in a few rare instances.
APOLOGY: I realise I wrote the Greek for pen along with the other words for shirt. For this, I am eternally sorry.
==CHAPTERS==
0:00 Intro
1:03 Old English’s 3 genders
2:00 When we had no word for “a”
2:54 Which objects had which gender?
4:07 Adjectives
4:59 Why no genders now?
6:17 Our journey to genderlessness
6:55 Goodbye
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, English,English language,grammar,gender,grammatical gender,Old English,German,Masculine,Feminine,Neuter,etymology,linguistics,learn English,language facts
Fun fact: The word "neuter" in german is "neutrum" which comes from the latin combination ne utrum. Ne utrum translates to "none of the other two". My latin teacher in germany told me that. Oh by the way latin also has 3 genders.
Why do we need genders in language? Why doesn’t it fall out of fashion with other languages?
You seem to have slowed down by 10 to 15% since the last time I watched one of your videos.
As a native Chinese and the only other language I have to learn is English, I am so glad that both of them don't have genders. it doesn't make sense at all (no, none of any trivia examples justify the need for having genres in languages for irrelevant items)
As a German, I agree that having three genders is a nightmare. I know foreigners who speak better German than the average native speaker, but they struggle terribly with articles.
Sometimes, even native speakers are in doubt. Sometimes two genders are allowed or vary depending on the region, at least in the spoken language. In a few cases, the meaning of the word also changes depending on the article, for example, "die See" (the ocean) and "der See" (the lake), or "das Tor" (the gate) and "der Tor" (the fool).
Il y a des langues où 2 a aussi un genre. Pour 3 je n'en connais pas 😮. Peut-être dans une langue de chasseur-ceullieur où il est important de savoir si on a vu 3 lions ou 3 lionnes ?
All I can say is that this gendering when/if allowed would give the new 🏴Wokies’ a nightmare: with inventing so many different ways to speak they’d neuter everyone👀
Norwegian: masculine, feminine and neuter.
Gender is a crucial aspect of the Arabic language as well
Though not in terms of definite articles as in Arabic there is one article used to define all words but rather in demonstrative determiners, yet what is crazier is that these determiners do not only identify the gender but also the number of that given thing.
In Hebrew all the body parts are masculine, so a woman's legs, and the rest of her body parts are male, though body in the plural is female.
I didn’t know that rats could talk
Our language has turned into its new period between 700-800 ad. It doesn't have a gender. We can't even imagine why languages should have genders😅
Slavic languages the moon is male, unlike most others including the classical, but the sun is….neuter! In Bengali I was told that there is no female pronoun, because disrespectful not to use a female's (given) name
Why on earth does any language ascribe genders to inanimate objects?
You are so entertaining! Also so intelligent! Thank you. Fascinating subject.
English has "his" and "her" but spanish only has "su" wtf!
There is also brunet and brunette.
Kannada doesn't even have definite article. You conjugate by gender, but men and boys are male, girls and women are female, and things are neuter. At least that part of Kannada is so super straightforward.
It is not the object that has gender, it is the word itself which has gender.
Hmm, I'd say that referring to countries and boats as "she" is more of a term of endearment, personifying a beloved object with a beloved gender, than actual grammatical gender.
This is certainly the rationale that sailors have given over the years that, on long journeys, they would otherwise be without a good woman by their side and, depending their lives upon their vessel, "she" would nurture and look after them, and they would be predisposed to treat "her" with due respect, being the lady that "she" was.
Not least because, though it might be felt "disrespectful" to do so, you absolutely can refer to France or the HMS Enterprize as "it", if you want, and you commit no grammatical sin. It's fine to use "it". It doesn't have a hint of "sin" to it in the "Sprachegefuehle" of English. Unlike Americans pronouncing "buoy" or "soldering iron", for example.
As you rightly say, it's not known. But I'm convinced by the "English as a Lingua Franca" argument that with Celts, Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, Norman French, etc. all mixed up and bringing completely different grammatical genders to every word… ah, synchronising this all up is far too confusing (not least when one set of languages – Celtic, French – only have two genders, while the Germanic roots of English has three).
So let's just call the whole thing off, yes? Used as a Lingua Franca – a second language for some – then they could never get the genders right, to erase the genders they're used to from their first language. It all got muddled up and then just gradually ignored and then dropped altogether.
English still has genders :the only one is neuter
I will kiss the arse of whoever stripped out the damn gender crap !!!!
getting rid of gender words like he and she in English is overdue, I don't like 'they' instead of he and she because 'they' implies a plural, at least to me.. maybe 'che' instead of he or she and perhaps 'hith; in place of her and his.. I'm sure we could come up with a few substitutes
Using genders in languages absolutely makes no sense. As a hungarian, i could never understand why other nations do it. In hungarian there are no genders at all, nor even he and she. Ive been learning english for a wile but i still struggle with the he and she pronouns. Not like i don't know which is man which is woman, but my mind is just not wired in the way that if i talk about someone then i must think about their gender too. For example if i point at and talk about a pedestrian where the gender is irrelevant, then just don't distinguish whether he/she is a male or female. And it's an absolutely weird way of thinking when someone distinguish different objects like stone or newspaper and treat them as a man or woman. And they never ask why it's like that. It explains a lot of nonsense that happens on the planet.
I think I might have to lie down.
You can contemporarily spell blonde however you want regardless of spelling I’ve never heard that explanation of the differences before
Gender is elitist. Like Sanskrit has gender, devised by grammarian panini. BUT PERSIAN HAS NO GENDER, IT IS PRACTICAL, most indian languages too lack gender, abandoned Sanskrit
Dutch too has abandoned gender like ENGLISH. just move on. Stop bothering whether there is hole or not