Re: Help Systems & Gender Differences

[Mike Pope <mikep -at- ASYMETRIX -dot- COM>]

Further comments on Andreas's and Karen's notes re: gender ...

>Andreas Ramos said:
>> It doesn't seem to me to be so arbitrary.

>It *is* arbitrary. Whether a language has noun classes or not
>is arbitrary, and how those categories are expressied is
>arbitrary. There are lots of languages without noun classes

If it weren't arbitrary, genders would be the same across languages,
which they emphatically are not.

>> There are some deep grammar rules at work here.

>Some of it is phonological, too.

Grammatical, too: diminuitive suffix in German gets you a neuter gender,
thus the non-intuitive gender of "girl" and "miss". Or is that what you
meant?

>> It may be arbitrary that we only have three genders (male, female,
>> neuter) vs. seventeen in other langauges, but there are genders,
>> nevertheless, or perhaps "personality types".

>That's the point: there are natural categories, but the assigning
>of gender to them, rather than nb. as in Bantu, is arbitrary. The
>assignation of gender is demonstrably not, as you seem to be
>arguing, a basic human need.

Someone (and boy, do I wish I could find this reference)
once speculated that the origin of grammatical gender was
not to match natural gender, but as an early form of case marking --
nouns that tended to be subjects (nominative) were one gender, nouns that
tended to appear as objects (accusative) another, etc.  At least one
unscientific reason to entertain this notion is that gender and case
tend to be marked the same way -- eg declension of articles, etc.
Who knows? Anyway, if you buy this theory, then yes, gender is a
"basic human need" that would now have been superseded by new,
improved ways to indicate grammatical functions of nouns.

 -- mikep -at- asymetrix -dot- com