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Grammatical gender

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Cool Breeze  +  353402 Fri, 20 Apr 07 02:06 PM
 Nona The Brit wrote:
I'd be interested in this as I've never understood why an inanimate object needs a gender!

Hi Nona and all

Inanimate objects don't need a gender at all but in some languages nouns just have gender, for inexplicable reasons. My language, Finnish, isn't related to English in the least and is grammatically completely different from it. Yet our languages share one characteristic: neither has grammatical gender for nouns.

This hasn't always been the case, though. Before 448AD no one spoke English in Britain and when the first Germanic tribes invaded Britain, one of the tribes, the Saxons, came from what is Germany today. So there is German blood in the average Englishman. Smile [:)] The language they spoke was grammatically closer to modern German than modern English. In those days Old English had three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and even strong masculines, just like modern German. Even the personal pronoun I was spelled ich, normally with a dot above the c.

The grammar was greatly simplified and streamlined due to massive foreign influence that lasted for about 500 years: the Vikings (800-1000) and the Normans (1066 till about 1360). French was spoken in the English Parliament up to the year 1362.

The gender of a word in the Romance languages understandably usually corresponds to the gender that word has in Latin, from which the Romance languages are derived.

Cheers
CB
Cool Breeze
Joined on Fri, Apr 7 2006
Senior Member 3,926
"I hope you'll all live to be 150 years old - and the last voice you hear is mine!" Frank Sinatra on stage in Oslo, Norway, 28 September 1991
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Anonymous, 1 yr 282 days ago

My year 11 students are still struggling with the concept of grammatical gender (they are not thick !) It is really difficult for us Brits.

Good luck to all you English learners,

David, Charlotte, Lisa, Alan, Marc and Madame Barclay

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