Why doesn't English have genders? Well... it did!
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- Опубликовано: 9 май 2024
- 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 
Развлечения
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.
That's a glorious fact! Thanks
Swedish has Masculine, Feminine, Neuter, and Non-Neuter. But, mostly everything is Non-Neuter (den) or Neuter (det).
So basically neutral
Whew...
That's a relief...
I was just a bit worried that these people were walking around thinking...
That object is male... and that object is female... and that object got its balls cut off!!!
The Languages that derive from Proto-Indoeuropean language provide all in all 4 genders: "masculine", "feminine", "utrum" and "neuter". But no language uses all 4 genders. English has just one gender for nouns, which has no official name, but I think it is most similar to utrum. Italian has two genders (masculine and feminine). Swedish also has two genders, but they are utrum (mainly used for things that live, like men and women but also for animals, gods and ghosts) and neuter (for non-living things). German is an example for a language with 3 genders (masculine, feminine and neuter). Some African language even have more than 20 genders (Swahili has 22). But when a language has so many genders, you no longer call them "genders" but "noun classes". And I think that also for European languages the term "noun class" describes the concept of this feature much better than "gender", because the term "noun class" describes clearly, that it is a grammatical feature of nouns, not a property ob the objectes named by the nouns.
I remember learning about this at uni. You summed up a whole lecture in about 7 minutes. Amazing video, Rob!!
Thanks Emma! And thanks for watching 👍
This guy is riveting; should start his own cult if he hasn't already.
@@I_Have_The_Most_Japanese_Music he’s got loads of videos on TikTok, been watching them all afternoon whilst sitting in the sun in the garden 👍
@@lordpetrolhead477 😄
Who was the teacher that took so long then? te he
@5:00 Persian also did away with gender at about the same time. It's completely genderless and highly simplified! It seems that when a language gets used by many different peoples to communicate with each other, it gets simplified along the way.
Found your channel yesterday...the how to read French one. I'm really enjoying watching these, you present them so well. I've always been interested in language and it's origins. I speak Italian, Greek and terrible French. Words are fascinating and there is so much here I didn't know. Thank you, I'll keep watching.
My native language (Faroese) has 3 genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) and my 2nd language (Danish) has 2 genders (common gender and neuter), and my 3rd language (English) has none. Things just got easier as I progressed through my language learning, lol.
genders aren't hard especially if you are a native speaker
You could technically say that there are hints of the 3 genders of Old English. He, she, and it refer to male beings, female beings and objects, respectfully.
By contrast, Turkish has only one genderles pronoun "oh." The writer Orhan Pahmuk wrote that when he was a little kid, he thought that Allah was female. This was because in Turkish, there is only one genderless pronoun: "O." Therefore, there was no obvious sign what gender Allah was.
@@John-qd5of😂😂😂 I suppose he was misgendering his god!! 🤣🤣🤣
You have my sympathy. The harsh cold winds of the Faroe Islands would be Purgatory for me.
@@craftah Not if you’re a native speaker, no, but it can be quite difficult when you’re learning a new language, because the grammatical genders don’t always make sense, and the same words have different genders in different languages.
For example, in German, a knife is neuter, a fork is feminine and a spoon is masculine, while in Faroese they are masculine, masculine and feminine. :)
In Finnish we have a lot of difficult weirdness, but some things are so logical it’s weird it’s not more common:
1) No gendered objects
2) not even he or she, just ”hän” for anyone
3) almost never any silent letters
4) every alphabet is always pronounced the same unique way. For example ”i” is always [i] (like english letter E), not context sensitive like english ”Titanic”
nevermind all the agglutination
🤔 If your people hope to conquer the world, I may defect so a reasonable language takes hold 😉
Finnish is relatively young as a written language so it doesn't have all this historical baggage that English does. Compare it to the Latin alphabet used for Turkish, which was developed in the 1920's and is also nearly completely phonetic like Finnish
@@murkotron yes in that sense we’re horrific😅
Finnish has no gendered objects? Interesting! Did it used to have genders, like English did?
As a native Spanish speaker myself, having realized English objects are non-gendered was something that relieved me. When I studied French, the whole gender assignment towards objects was super natural, but just like the apple example, Spanish and French disagree with some other examples, such as account (compte: Feminine in Spanish, masculine in French) or vehicle (voiture: Masculine in Spanish, feminine in French).
In times of doubt, I just look it up and that's it. 😊
es cierto. Solo se inglés. Estoy aprendiendo español. No es fácil de recordar. la serpiente, el agua
Meanwhile, German has a Neuter gender for words, thus an apple is... feminine (apparently).
vaya, la señora manzana. iqual en español. la (the feminine) manzana. la mesa, la silla, femenina etc.
As a native French speaker learning Spanish ATM, the difference in gender doesn't bother me when the words are completely different (la voiture, el coche) but when they're similar it really messes with my brain (la vidéo, el video / la couleur, el color / etc.) haha!
@@thetightwadhomesteader3089 agua is actually feminine 😂.
I've just discovered your channel and I am absolutely thrilled about it. I love everything related to language and each of your videos is so informative and well done...also (or even particularly) for non-native english speakers as I am. Even the comment section is on another level. Looking forward to inhaling every word. Thank you so much. I am absolutely thrilled!! 😆
I came from Hong Kong, Cantonese (Chinese) and English are the 2 languages I speak for most of my life, and none of them have grammatical genders. Imagine my face when I saw: Le La, Un Une when I started learning French. It was and still is such a nightmare
I'm learning German and adding a third gender DOES NOT help.
Languages are all about repetition, mimicking and unconscious memory. If you have a steady immersive learning of French then it comes in naturally (like walking, cycling, swimming, etc.). 5 year old French kids are fluent in French, so why not you ?
Also what you need is an optimistic perspective, a will to learn French for a reason that stimulates you : the culture, arts including "bande dessinée" (comics), the cuisine, wines, fashion, the history, the musicality of the language, it's sofistication and "superiority", the French people, professional perspectives, a distinct and unique "French" view on the world, etc.
Try to be (for a while) of the same mindset as the French : it may sound ridiculous but the French are genuinely persuaded that they live in the most beautiful country, that they have the best "art de vivre" and that they are the most civilised people on earth (with the most civilised language !).
Of course if you are force-feeding yourself with the language then it becomes a nightmare...
As an example I woud recommand you watch around 5 times (!!!) a French movie you really like and gradually repeat and (mimick!!!) dialog parts...
Also the immersive part is important : you could spend a weekend eating french food, listening to French music, radio, news, reading in French, watching French movies, news, talking with French people, commenting in French RUclips posts, etc. basically LIVING IN A FRENCH BUBBLE.
Don't ask yourself too many questions, enjoy a glass of tasty French wine and let the French language slowly and pleasantly come up to you head...
@@jandron94 beautifully said. This even helped me
@@RobWords while as a Spanish native speaker I am used to genders, and while learning French and Portuguese it wasn't that big of a deal even if the words that were a different gender than in Spanish confused me, I am starting to learn German soon, I hope the third gender does not mess me up.
@@patax144 I don't think it will. I learned German in my middle teens, and these were the hardest things about the language for me: verbs (several conjugations, as in Latin, plus very many irregular ones); case for nouns and adjectives (subject, object, possessive, dative); two forms of the adjective (strong and weak); a rigid word order (again, as in Latin). It meant a lot of rote learning, of declensions and conjugations. It was more like learning Latin than learning French--but at least with Latin I didn't have to attempt to speak it! That said, the language is very rich and has some beautiful poetry. I hope you will enjoy your studies!
You referred to blond/blonde at 4:53 as an exception in English. It's not an exception. It's a part of a special rule where borrowed words (in this case, from French) are used as in their source language until the time comes when they're fully assimilated into English.
Some other examples of French-borrowed inflected nouns or adjectives are fiancé/fiancée, divorcé/divorcée, and né/née. In all cases, pronounced the same, but written differently.
The English word "naive" started as one of these. It was borrowed from French also - naïf (masculine), naïve (feminine). Eventually its French origin began to fade from collective memory, and now "naive" (without the dieresis) is the most common form of the word in English, at least in the US, where I'm from (I'm not sure about elsewhere). I can say, for example, that my brother is naive about his kids' behavior when he isn't around, and it wouldn't be incorrect - except for the fact that I don't have a brother.
And they will be assimilated. Resistance - as we all know - is futile
Maybe for people who has English as native language don't see this, but for me, for example, English is almost another latin language. You have so many words I can understand, not because I studied English, but because is almost the same, or sometimes is exactly the same word in my language. In your comment there are many words I recognize very easily. Referred, exception, part, special, case, used, language, time, assimilated, examples, adjectives, pronounced, differently. All these words are almost the same in Portuguese.
@@davidbio1 English is descended in a general way from Latin, yes. Our technical terms are pulled pretty much straight from Latin or Greek. Our everyday stuff is Latin-influenced also, but not quite as clearly as in the Romance languages (Italian, Spanish-Portuguese-Romanian, French etc.). Because Great Britain (where English was formed) was conquered and ruled in whole or in part by the Romans, but also by the Vikings and by Viking descendants such as the Normans. Therefore, we often have two common words for things, one from the Romance thread and the other from Germanic.
@@davidbio1 The base words are Germanic (Anglo-Saxon), and the more subtle complex words are Romance (Norman French), add in a different branch of Germanic (from the Vikings), Latin and Greek for technical stuff, a bit of modern French and other European languages, and words from the countries we colonised, and then mash it altogether, simplify the grammar, randomise the spelling and pronunciation, and add a lot of idioms, word-play and slang, and you've got English. What's interesting is that we often have pairs of words with slightly different meanings from Anglo-Saxon and French - the differences often reflect the Anglo-Saxons being ruled by the Norman French, so peasants farmed cows and sheep, and the gentry consumed beef and mutton.
Great video, I studied English, German and linguistics at a French Uni many moons ago, and still to this day I am fascinated by languages and their interaction throughout history, the forgotten links, the etymology of words etc. I have added this video to my favourites needless to say! Thank you for posting this.
I feel like I could have written this post because you have articulated exactly how I feel about language! It is so interesting and I wish I studied it at university.
great video until the end.
Really enjoy your channel, and even more so, now that I am learning Greek. You make sense of the chaos!
I had a bit of a hard time learning German because of the gender mismatches between it and my native language. I never realized how learning English was actually so simple before starting to study German. German feels like learning English with the difficulty slider cranked to 11.
Yep, x the difficulty of German by at least 3 for Polish! 7 declensions and even people's names change their endings!
German is actually simple, once you have studied and got used to French genders and the word order. Unlike English it is logical and doesn't have umpteen different pronunciations for the same letter groups, we have umpteen ways to pronounce "-ough" for example
@@musicloverUK same goes for czech and many slavic languages
@@Neil070 can I complain about German word order? Ok, good XD
The "logical" word order imo would be "subject, verb(s), object, complement". That way you answer "who did what, to whom, and how". You add the words from the most important to the least important. Now, in German, when you have two verbs in a sentence, you can't simply add the complement in the end, you have to think beforehand! I mean, who does that? Do Germans always know every sentence before they say it?
The subject is not necessarily the most important part of the sentence, and this is perfectly reflected in the German V2 word order (verb as the second topic of the sentence). Thus you can put the object in front if you want to stress it. "Den Mann sah ich nicht, aber die Frau" - "The man I did not see, but the woman".
What do you mean by "two verbs"? Composite forms like "habe gesehen" (have seen)? In this case, the "habe" occupies the V2 position, and the other parts of the composition are appended ("Ich habe den Mann nicht gesehen"). Of course, you have the verb in mind when you start speaking.
Mind blown. Not about the gendered language (although that's cool), but about blond/blonde. As a Canadian, I assumed one was the British spelling and the other American, because... well, so many other words have that. :D
Likewise. I'm British and thought the same thing.
I picked up a smattering of German whilst in Germany with the British army, mainly to pursue my hobby at the time of RC modelling. I could make myself understood, but was very much aware of my language shortcomings.
I found the native Germans were very sympathetic to my pathetic attempts and were very helpful.
Most Germans do speak english anyway, but seemed to regard an Englishman attempting to speak to them in their language as a compliment. After all, most English men EXPECT 'Johny foreigner' to speak english because it's regarded as the international language.
Ditto about the blond / blonde...
Public education ' is an oxymoron
Yes, blond/blonde is standard Yank usage - but unfortunately too many of us Americans are ignorant of the proper usage 😕 Owen Wilson is blond, and Scarlett Johansson is blonde.
I'm German and I kind of assumed the same!
So the question then becomes, which do people actually in Canada or the UK?
This is a very well done production in many aspects. Clear narrative, informative and light hearted. Fun watching.
Your English is so polished, it's music to my ears.❤
I have heard a theory that the reason English grammar became greatly simplified was a direct result of the Norman conquest. The Normans couldn't be bothered to learn Old English, but they still needed to communicate with their subjects, so a creole or pidgin English emerged that was simpler for both to learn, and the "new" English eventually replaced the old one. Am I right or was the eventual loss of genders in English unrelated to William the Conqueror?
Yep. Look at Afrikaans which creolised from a huge number of languages thanks to Dutch settlers, Malay and Indian slaves, Bushmen and others integrating into the same society. Afrikaans is incredibly easy to learn and has a very efficient grammar system. For example, it only has one form of 'to be'.
Yes, Anglo-Norman is the actual language used then, however old english already had oddities from the german mother tongue of the anglo saxons, its a northern german language, but it seems to have picked up odities from the people the anglo saxons killed, the native britons of England, and then merged with Anglo-norman.. for example, the video says there is no gender, but "it" is the neuter gender, and English has that. A language with no neuter gender refers to everything as "leave him/her on the table" not "leave it on the table", some languages have no "it"
Theory I like is that the creolization happened, but it was due to interaction between Old English and Old Norse... the genders didn't quite match up between the two (a given word might be masculine in one and feminine in the other), so they just got rid of the whole schmeer.
This is a false theory, as English is not a creole at all. Simplification does not equal creole anyway.
This simplification of the grammar is a blessing for everyone who learns English as a foreign language.
On the other hand the Norman conquest also brought many French words into English, increasing the vocabulary significantly. The basic vocabulary of English you need to learn is quite big. E.g. when referring to the animal suus scrofa domesticus English uses "pig", "swine" and "hog" in parallel for no real reason. To make it even more confusing when it is going to be eaten it becomes "pork" (from French).
And secondly, with these changes in the spoken language and the Norman-French influence, the spelling of English became a complete mess. English spelling almost lacks any logic, for many words you have to memorize both, the pronounciation and the spelling. This is why spelling contests exist in English speaking countries. In most languages (Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Slavic languages ...) such a contest would be completely pointless as the spelling strictly mirrors the pronounciation.
English is, in some cases, quite similar to Plattdeutsch (Low German), which has been recognized as its own language, just like Frisian. Plattdeutsch just has one article for feminine and masculine words, as well: de. Sounds rather similar to "the", if you ask me. And if you have something neuter, then you just say "dat", quite similar to "that". But you can say "de" also, as far as I know. So it's "de Appel", "de Beer" and "dat/de Water". Just like "the apple", "the pear" and "the water" in English.
Frisian seems to always get the label of closest to English, but I always thought Low German gets overlooked in that regard. I've noticed in Dutch cognates with English words that have the "th" sound end up being a "d" so I assume this is often the case with Low German as well. Of course at one time I believe all the Germanic languages had the "th" (dental fricative) sound, now it's just reduced to English and Icelandic.
@@kbm2055 Low German certainly is closer to English than High German is to English, arguably even closer than Low German is to High German due to missing the vowel shift. And there are many Low German words which are "English" and not "German", like (Standard) German "wie", which is "as" in English, also is "as" (pronounced differently though) in Low German.
My grandparents spoke Low German and when I visited relatives in Germany I found their accents easy on my ears. When my grandparents spoke English they had Low German accents.
To my ears, people from Schleswig-Holstein, where the original Angles came from, speak German like English people do. Sometimes when I hear a British or American person speaking very good German, I can't distinguish them from residents of, say, Flensburg speaking their native tongue.
Like Afrikaans
Very interesting and incredibly well explained!
Congratulations, I loved the video!!! 😀
Well done: easy to understand, and slowly--helpful, when you are explaining something that I would consider "difficult".
The most confusing thing for me when learning German, was how “die” (feminine) turns to “der” (masculine) in dative! Spanish has el and la, but those remain the same, no matter what case you use. German is on a whole other level! 😂
We have genders and plurals, but no cases in Spanish. The hardest bit for English speaking learners is the Spanish conjugation, but again many languages have proper conjugation. English is quite an easy language to learn quickly enough to understand and make yourself understood in normal basic life: no genders and very simple conjugation in all tenses. The best bit of Spanish is how the rules have very few exceptions and the language itself is quite helpful once one puts some effort into learning those rules. Also, we don't bother with ridiculously confusing vowels: 5 vowels, 5 sounds, always the same. As simple as that.
@@shaunmckenzie5509 I'm not sure I agree it's an ugly language. It sounds nice to me but very fast!
@@shaunmckenzie5509 I guess that taste needs to be respected, but bad manners like calling another language "very ugly", not really. Personally, and many also agree with me, I find that a limited number of vowels, such as in Italian and Spanish, not only sound nicer and clearer but will also make it easier to learn. Also less spitting than German or English speakers, and easier to understand as not tons of mute letters as in French.
@@shaunmckenzie5509 There, there, finally learning to at least hold insults! Your social skills are improving, you are welcome. The main difference with Italian is the hard "J" sound and that comes from Arabic, 8 centuries of invasion leave their mark. But then also with Celtic and Germanic languages, of which we have dents too.
I don't quite agree with that description. It's not that "feminine" articles turn "masculine" in German, it's that none of the definite articles are unique to a specific combination of gender/case/number.
Logically, you might expect 24 distinct article variants: 3 genders × 4 cases × 2 numbers (singular, plural) = 24. But in reality there are only 6 different definite articles in German, each occurring in multiple positions of the full table: der (6), die (8), das (2), des (2), dem (2), den (4).
Sure, "die" is the article for feminine/nominative/singular, but it is also used for feminine/accusative/singular as well as nominative and accusative plural for all three genders. Similarly, "der" is the article for masculine/nominative/singular, but it is also used for feminine/genitive/singular and feminine/dative/singular as well as genitive plural for all three genders.
(Is it a good system? No. Does it make sense? Also no. But hey, it's how the language works.)
At least in the plural table you get some simplification, but in the opposite way compared to Spanish: Instead of articles staying the same across cases, German plural articles stay the same across genders. For example, "den" is the dative plural article regardless of whether the noun is masculine, feminine, or neuter.
I love the style of your videos, they're so casual yet professional. Please keep making more!
This was such a fun watch, subbed!
Excellent!!!!👍🏼
Mercy beaucoup🌻
that such amazing information is explained so calmly
and with
such a sweetly quirky twist
(a Janus Apple??? Who knew???)🎉
I read that with the collision of Norse and Anglo-Saxon cultures there was a simplification of grammar as the languages were melding and changing each other.
Yes I heard that on the excellent history of English podcast.
I saw a video about language that said something similar.
In traditional Westcountry dialects, countable objects like a newspaper or a stone can be referred to as "he" or "him" and mass nouns like sand or water are referred to as "it". I don't know whether this is a relic of the gender system or a later development after gramatical gender was lost, but I used to hear it regularly when I was a boy; "Pass 'im 'ere, youngun."
No way?? I had no idea. Thanks for that!
My neighbour, who has lived in the West Country all his life, does exactly that. A plant in his garden is 'im and the coal, for he still has a weekly delivery, is 'it'. It doesn't seem to bear any relationship to the gender in other Germanic languages. For example in modern German 'plant' is 'die Pflanze' (feminine). So what I read about the male /female genders in Dutch being rolled into a common gender rings true for English as commonly spoken in the West Country.
I am from Somerset and have never heard of this before.
My partner is from the Forest of Dean, his family do this too.
Perhaps it's a feature of the Celtic language
Fascinating, informative video, Rob, thank you! At school, I often inwardly sighed when we had the added work of all those noun genders in learning Latin, French, and German. And, then, the added burden of tying in the all those correct adjectival agreements! But, to be fair, it was nice when they started being more & more automatically fixed in the mind, and we (well, mostly!) got it right ;-) . Japanese, on the other hand, was refreshingly different in that regard (plus, I was even younger then, and more receptive, probably with better brain plasticity or something, lol). 🙂
I took a course in old and middle English when I was at school. I distinctly remember that I had to memorize different forms of the indefinite article for three geners, three numbers (sigular, dual and plural) and 5 cases (Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative and Ablative) in old English. They definitely existed at one point, and then only two forms remained. (Just like singular and plural forms of some nouns like man/men. )
I am hooked after just two explanations! You are showing just how fascinating the history of language is! Love your style of explanation. If you had been my teacher at school I just might have learned to speak a second language.
Yeah but he takes fucking forever
In Norwegian, particularly in "bokmål" (the Danish based written language) we're in the process of merging the masculine and feminine grammatical gender (neuter is not endangered). We tend to use the masculine indefinite article "en" for both masculine and feminine (traditionally using "ei") while still using the appropriate definite suffixes "-en" for masculine and "-a" for feminine, but this is also slowly merging to just "-en".
But there's a new trend were the feminine article and suffix is used for any gender as a sort of diminutive instead. So we might end up with two genders common gender and neuter like has happened in some other Scandinavian dialects, but with the feminine markers retained with a new grammatical function.
Woah, this is worth a video in itself. Thanks.
I was going to say, isn't this how Swedish is? I'm currently learning Swedish and learned that they used to have male/female and now have common and neuter genders... neither of which says "gender" to me, but maybe there is just no other good term.
@@EricaGamet yes, in Swedish masculine and feminine is completely merged into common gender.
(in most dialects at least, could be some where it isn't. After all we have dialects in Norway retaining a full case system, so why not)
And yes, grammatical gender has nothing to do with social gender or biological sex. It's just called that since the grammatical phenomenon of "gender" in Latin happened to have two genders associated loosely with biological sex. And they named the phenomenon.
I'm English but I'm learning Bokmål, and I was super happy when I learned that you can treat feminine words like masculine, its much easier for me to learn this, because remembering all of the genders is so confusing! They are especially foreign to me because we dont have them!
If I'm being honest I still dont see the point in genders, it just adds unnecessary confusion in my opinion, but I've only been learning for about 8 months so what do I know?
Love your channel. This is just so great😊
I appreciate your share of knowledge on these subjects
Im shocked this channel doesn’t have more subscribers. You explain things in such a clear concise way which is also fun to watch. And your videos are super high quality. Good work man!
Well that's very kind, thank you
It's the non-blinking, creepy smile face that makes people run away.
I agree, but not everybody is a languages nut like we here appear to be. It seems that most of us also have abilities with several languages, hence the multilingual comments written, read and responded to in whatever language seems the most suitable, and we are therefore in a minority because of that too.
So glad YT recommended this channel! I have so often wondered about weird plurals in the English language and about when it stopped using genders. Rob explains things so clearly and precisely - with a brilliant touch of humour thrown in!
I live in Italy so am very familiar with masculine/feminine and asking permission to give someone the "tu" (or the "thou" 😆).
Thank you for the great education and entertainment 👏👏
I just discovered this channel. It's fascinating. And a fun fact, in Spanish we also have a neuter article: "lo".
You know this is doggone fascinating stuff, thanks for doing this. It is interesting and entertaining.
What a wonderful video, and it's extremely rare that people take the time to pronounce German words properly. It seriously means a lot to us! Thank you! Subbed!
Wow, I had no idea the English language used to have genders. Thank you for the very informative and also entertaining video! As a side note, Romanian also has 3 genders. The neutral noun is masculine when it is singular, but feminine as a plural.
You are so entertaining! Also so intelligent! Thank you. Fascinating subject.
New subscriber here. I love watching your videos as they capture my imagination, thank you!
Thank you so much for your contribution. I was really laughing after about thirty seconds into the video since we have this problem in Belgium in French and Dutch and it can be very frustrating. All the best from Brussels. 😀
I am so much in love with your videos.
In my country India, Hindi is not gender neutral, it has two genders for everything, Sanskrit has three, while some languages are gender neutral too, for example, Bangla (Bengali) is gender neutral. When a Bengali speaking speaks Hindi, they find it very troubling to fix gender. More trouble is when a "Marathi" speaker and a Hindi speaker exchange notes, because both aren't gender neutral, but things that are feminine in Marathi are masculine in Hindi. So interesting.
Wow, that is amazing. It perhaps demonstrates that there's nothing intrinsic about choice of grammatical gender.
@@thoutube9522 yes, but it seems to me that in many languages nouns that end in A are feminine. I know only few European languages, so please correct me, if I am wrong.
@@pawelzielinski1398Yes, perhaps there is something intrinsic in that. Or maybe it's because many Western European languages have Latin roots. I'm not sure if that's true of Slavic languages.
@@thoutube9522 What is true?
Latin had immense influence on Polish.
Until at least XVI century that was the language used in any serious literature (poetry and prose) and science. The most famous Polish scientist of these days was fluent in Latin. His seminal work was also written and published in Latin and had profoundly changed how people perceive our place in the universe.
My wild guess is that about 10-15% of Polish words have Latin roots. Maybe more.
And when it comes to law or medicine or theology/church affairs it's probably much higher.
That's why it has always been easy for me to recognize the meaning of so called "difficult" English words (as they are the same or very similar in Polish because they often have Latin or Greek origin), but the real challenge was with native Germanic words in English.
@@pawelzielinski1398 I had no idea. Excuse my ignorance, and many thanks for correcting me.
Fascinating! Thank you for your explanation.
In Portuguese it is very easy, usually the genders of words ending in -a are feminine and nouns ending in -o are masculine. For example "mesa" (table) is feminine and "morro" (hill) is masculine. Easy peasy!
Yes, but what makes a table woman and a hill man? If i put a table on a hill, can they have a kid?
@@gaborhertelendy9428A mesA
O morrO
It's about matching sounds not about men and women
Except for the huge amount of words that doesn’t end in “a” or “o” (o cabide, a verdade, o lençol, a mão, o amor) and the ones that end in “o” or “a” but have opposite genders (a modelo, o clima, o dilema, a tribo, a radio)
@@shadowmoon1657
Makes no sense
@@gaborhertelendy9428 absolutely no one in portuguese cares if it is masculine or feminine. Its not about giving the object a sexual gender, its about matching sounds.
So once upon a time I decided to take classical Greek in college.
Completely kicked my ass .... but would absolutely do it again!
In the French school system, Greek used to be taught as a mainstream course. That went away only about 40 to 50 years ago I think. However, today, latin is still taught as an option. My son's studying latin in the French school system. Although I hated languages as a kid, I now think that's so awesome. In the US system, you're generally stuck with only Spanish or German. However, you sometimes get more options in the French school system, such as Italian or Portuguese. I'm guessing it's simply because France is in Europe after all. English doesn't count as a foreign language in the French school system (i.e. it is mandatory). So students may end up studying up to four languages, such as my son: French, English, Spanish and Latin.
@@szk4023 French and Spanish are sibling languages and are descended from Latin.
While still no easy feat, it should be noted that learning is best done when ideas already have a natural connection between them. Most formal education treats each subject in isolation when there are many commonalities in the abstract.
In my opinion, this treatment of knowledge does a disservice to the general public by creating schisms between ideas that would otherwise be connected. It prevents creativity.
Take Hedy Lamar, for example. Very little to no formal training in the sciences, yet she was able to combine player piano technology with wireless communications to give us the frequency hopping encryption that is so ubiquitous today that nobody even stops to give thanks to a disgraced actress from the thirties for giving us secure wireless communications everywhere we are: WiFi, Bluetooth, Cellular.
All of this was possible because she wasn’t constrained by formal “education.” She was free to let ideas mingle in her mind unlike somebody who constrains themselves within the confines of their expertise.
The mind is amazing. Just think, a baby learns to see color within two months after birth. The brain naturally develops millions of simple languages to help describe the reality outside and to mold it to the simulations ran in our minds.
People never stop to think about how “color” is just a symbolic language the visual cortex “speaks” to the prefrontal cortex to describe the electromagnetic ripples that tingle the photoreceptors in the retina.
Light is the physical reality, and color is the language created to describe it.
Want a good exercise to demonstrate this?
Try describing “blue” to somebody that has been blind their whole life. It’s impossible. Their brains never developed the language of color, so they have no way of translating your words into an experience they’ve never had.
@@szk4023 Latin and Greek do not count as "foreign languages". They are dead languages. When I was in high-school (in Belgium, in the early 1980s), I had two foreign languages (Dutch and English), about 3 hours/week. On top of that, I had Latin (6h/week) and ancient Greek (5h/week). I think basic Latin (2h/week) is still the norm in the first year of high school, then it becomes optional. But I'm not quite sure.
Fascinating stuff. Love the series. I only speak two languages English and Profane. Profane does away with many parts of speech like adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections and really only retains nouns and verbs. Sometimes it is best to be simple to get your message across.
These profane words have often been referred to as Language enhancers
As for me - having learned five languages by age five and adding other later -
I can comfortably curse in ten languages if need be - however I refrain from
cursing where possible.
The advantage to speaking two or more languages = even when one in not
fluent - is listening to the conversations of others - particularly when these
people don't know or suspect that someone around then understands the
language - A is said in Spanish Pared tiene oidos
@@andrew_koala2974 What languages did you learn and who taught you FIVE languages by age five? Well done!
When I worked in Saudi Arabia with my small team of TCNs, I felt it was my duty to instruct them in art of speaking english colourfully.
To wit 'fxxxxxxg this!' and 'fxxxxxxg that!' and 'txsspxt!' and 'wxxxxr!' etc.
I like to think I had enhanced their chances when applying for their next employment during interviews.
A likely scenario springs to mind ....
Interviewer - "Do you speak english?"
Applicant - "Fxxxxxg right, I do, cxxt!"
@@Blurb777 It's not completely unheard of. Kids are ridiculously good at picking up languages through exposure, certainly good enough to pick up at least the basics of multiple language if there is a wide and consistent variety of languages.
My first language is Spanish . I use to love telling my over protective mom that I was hanging out with my friend because in English friend doesn’t have a gender like in Spanish. So I would say it and act like I already gave her enough information 😂
That’s awesome
So when you read a headline in an English paper: "Teacher had sex with student" you really have not many details what was going on.
In Polish the same headline would clearly indicate the gender of both people involve in the situation. Same with German. English creates ambiguity.
@@pawelzielinski1398yes it creates ambiguity in situations where the gender is of interest, but I'd argue that the majority of the time it's actually superfluous information and therefore creates not only needless complexity in the language, but also keeps this silly idea alive that people's gender is so core to their makeup that it needs to be taken into consideration in every circumstance.
hmmm I think you get the main piece of information in 'teacher had sex with student' xD@@pawelzielinski1398
@@briandhamby nah, if you are native speaker...then you don't have to learn those genders... besides having a crappy spelling system is even worse and it's way more stupid because people can actually do something about it and they don't. It takes the Japanese like 20 years to learn how to spell college-level words... in Italian, Spanish, Finnish, etc it only takes you half a year.
Very interesting!!
Could you also do a video about the different names for animals names, male and female, adult and baby?
Love your channel 😁👍
In Portuguese, due to the difficulty of communication between Europe and South America in the XX century, many recently imported words were adopted in different ways, for example in Portugal 'a console' became 'uma consola', in the feminine, but in Brazil it became 'um console', in the masculine.
"Wifmann" being male makes sense from a German perspective. It seems to be a composite of wif(?) and "mann" in the sense of human. In German the article always follows the gender of the second part of a composite.
Wif = woman (cognate with German weib) - mann = human. Wifmann = female human. A male human adult was "wer" (where we get werewolf)
If I had to guess the literal meaning might be “with man” or “wifed to man”? Which eventually got shortened to wife?
@@gamingnscience I gave the definition above. "With" is "mid" in Old English, hence: midwife. Wifmann means female human.
@@ulujain damn, old English considered women mid. Very based
@@gamingnscience i think and correct me if im wrong, old english words for man and woman were "wer" and "wif" with "mann" being the neuter term for any individual. over time "mann" became the gendered term for masculine individuals with "wif" combining with "mann" to become "wifmann" or feminine individual. "wifmann" is in effect the origin of the word woman. we still see the use of the term "wer" for a masculine individual in cases like werewolf which is a man-wolf or a wolfish man. also "wif" can be found in terms like wife, a female spouse.
Having only just discovered your delightful linguistic channel, I can only now comment. I was born and raised in the Netherlands, but taught myself to read English when I was 3, and my mother taught me to read Dutch when I was 5... Anyway. I once had a Dutch teacher in school and he invited questions we had about the language that he hadn't covered. So I asked why ships and cars - for instance - were called 'she' and 'her' His unbelievably rude answer - that stopped me in my question-tracks completely - was that 'anything you can put something 'into', with a rude gesture, was called 'she' or 'her'. Dutch is a very quirky language though, and I believe people who say that it's one of the hardest languages to learn, because where it does have rules, there usually are more exceptions to those rules than 'followers'!
No way bro said 👉👌 💀💀💀💀💀
Heard that German builders have the place a window is put ( a space ) in one gender, and the window itself another.,
Very nice. I'm subscribing✨
Well, you are pretty much brilliant. Not only do I find your content fascinating, but your style of presentation, the cadence of your voice, and your unmistakable English accent make it all unexpectidly entertaining.
Agree👍
Fascinating as ever! Other Germanic languages are also in the process of losing their grammatical gender- in Dutch, Danish and Swedish they still use neuter but masculine and feminine have merged into 'common' gender. Perhaps a similar thing happened in England in the Middle Ages. When I was studying Spanish and German at the same time, I had a similar feeling when it comes to the genders of objects not matching up. In German you say 'der Tisch' (masculine) for a table and 'la mesa' (feminine) in Spanish, I can see a situation where the English simply gave up with gender once Norman French had been introduced.
I like it that in Dutch we call common gender, commuun genus (dutchified Latin) or zijdig (sided) and neuter is called onzijdig (non-sided). But what I think is strange, it was also in the video, that diminutives are always neuter. In Dutch we ‘de man’ (the man, common gender) en ‘het mannetje’ (the little man, neuter) and ‘de vrouw’ (the woman, common gender) and ‘het vrouwtje’ (the little woman, neuter). The strange thing is that if we did the same as in English (they don’t use or don’t have a diminutive) and use the little man, literally ‘de kleine man’ in Dutch, it doesn’t change to neuter, it stays common gender. This in contrary to ‘het mannetje’ which is neuter. So in English it is in both cases the little man while in Dutch we can use ‘het mannetje’ en ‘de kleine man’ which have different genders.
Another example: “sun” is masculine in Spanish (el sol) and feminine in German (die Sonne), while “moon” is feminine in Spanish (la luna) and masculine in German (der Mond).
Apparently, in Arabic, like German, “sun”(الشمس - ash-shams) is feminine, while “moon” (القمر - al-qamar) is masculine.
@@romanr.301 I agree with the Arabic and Deutsch, as women are constant in their presence and shining warmth, as it were, men (look down, lads) are constantly changing, including from full to...insomma, è evidente vero? ; )
In Danish the “gender” is between et and en. It’s not technically called Gender and it isn’t assigned to be masculine or feminine, but it works the same way.
English lost all its genders in a similar process that leads vulgar latin to lose its neuter gender (that's why all romance languages, except for Romanian, have only 2 genders).
The reason is very simple: Phonological change.
Genders are usually marked in the end of the words. As soon as the native speakers of some language start to reduce the words and eat the end of them (something very common in English), genders are lost.
So, for exemple, in Spanish is, in general, the vowel "a" that indicates the feminine gender, while the vowel "o" usually indicates the masculine gender.
Chica alta (tall girl)
Chico alto (tall boy)
If, for some phonological evolution, Spanish native speakers start to reduce vowels in Spanish and end up eliminating the final vowels in the words, then there won't be any distinction between both genders, so no genders anymore.
Chic alt
That's also the reason English and the Romance languages lost their cases.
Super!! As Spanish, we also (of course) have moved on a lot...particularly since we became 'democratic'. Politics are also the road to allow things to be 'accepted' mire easily as society develops and accepts or chooses to 'let go', be free...Look at all the English words in modern Spanish! Technology, Art, Sports, Politics etc...I.LOV E YOUR VIDEOS!! 7:16
As always, your video is really interesting and entertaining for a somewhat nerdy non-native English speaker like myself, who had the wonderful opportunity of growing up withing the rather gender-less Hungarian language :)
As a native Russian, I can say that genders in German are extremely difficult as they don't have define rules. You have to remember a gender for every word. Also, old English had the same approach. The only way is to remember a gender for every single word. In Russain, it's way more simple. You can always define gender by a word's ending even if you hear the word for the first time.
You can reliably guess the gender by how the word ends in German though, can't you? Like how -e is often feminine and -er is often masculine?
@@arthurhenriqued.a.ribeiro2078 If I'm not mistaken it works approximately for 70% of words. So the main problem of the approach is you can't rely on it. For instance "Name" is not femonine. There are cases when the sense of a word differs depending what gender you use, for example "Mark". It can be feminine or neutrum and it impacts on the word meaning. In Russian it's just impossible.
@@user-lt4kh9ot1y Another example is "See" which can be either masculine or feminine, depending on meaning (m: lake, f: sea). And the masculine article "der" is used as a feminine article in other cases (dative and genitive). Much less intuitive than word ending agreement
In Spanish, too - there are only a few exceptions, those of which are easy to learn.
@@itsgiag As an Spaniard myself, i think they are 'easy' for native speakers but a nuisance for anybody else. Yes the general rule is that words ending in 'a' are femenine and words ending in 'o' are masculine, but not only this has exceptions, there are lots of words than don't end in 'a' or 'o'.
There is also the rule of no putting 'la' before some words that start with 'a'. For example, 'el águila calva', where 'águila' is feminine, 'calva' is the feminime form of the adjective 'calvo', but 'el' is the masculine definite article.
Loved the look, feel, and editing/graphics of this vid. Great info:)
Cheers Nick!
Usually, I'm very precise with spelling, but blond/blonde is the only one I interchange... I assumed it was like theater/theatre or color/colour (which I'm certain you taught me about recently but I don't remember anything about all of a sudden!
your closing words are thought-provoking and wonder about a linguistic perspective on the sociology of gender constructs.
OH WOW THANK YOUUUUUU SO MUUUCH. I've been having difficulties understanding this one...thank you
I've been slowly working through all the videos on this channel, I do love all the quirks of our language. At a glance, our language seems so different from every other European language, but when you turn back the clock, those differences aren't so pronounced.
I do like how "that" survived its initial meaning and became a pronoun for distant objects.
When I was in the US Army stationed in Germany, I was told to say "duh" if I didn't know which article to use because the Germans would know what I meant. What you didn't cover in here is that depending on the part of speech or tense, those basic der, die and das, would morph into several other articles, such as dem and den, among others (been years and I can't remember them all).
Sorry but if you’re gonna learn German, you’re gonna have to learn all the articles in different cases. You can’t go around it.
@@FransceneJK98 But if you're only going to be there a couple years and want to get the main point across, you're not going for fluency.
In German, my mother tongue, it must be most confusing for those about to learn German, that feminine article "die" becomes "der" (exactely the masculine form) when used in the Dativ case: "Die Schule" ["the school"] becomes "in der Schule" ["at school"] / "Ich gehe zur (zu der) Schule" ["I'm going to school"] .
@@michaelwurthner8505 I studied German in high school for two years (before transferring to a school that only offered Spanish as a foreign language option). I found articles the most confusing part of the language. I had less trouble years later studying Russian in university, and Cyrillic is much different from just adding on some umlauts or an Eszett. I enjoyed studying foreign languages, but have never become fluent. it's difficult when there's no one to practice on.
You used German, French, and Spanish ad examples for comparison when talking about English and as someone who speaks all these languages, it was a treat to see the comparisons made. I rarely see videos about languages where they compare equivalents of X language to Y language to Z language. I love it. Can you please do more on this topic? Old English? Also, spellings have changed a lot from 12th century to 16th century. I read the Geneva Bible of 1560 and they write the “u” as “v” and omit some vowels etc. thank you for this video!!! I’d love to see other languages compared. Dutch-Afrikaans; Farsi-dari-Arabic; Aramaic-Hebrew-Arabic; Russian-Slovak-Serbian-Croatian-Bulgarian. Etc ❤
For me, the worst part of German isn't even the genders per se, or even their declensions, but rather how every single word in-between changes in very specific ways, you have to put an "n" there, an "e" there, an "r" there, it's a nightmare. I don't think I'll ever be able to speak German without sounding like an obvious foreigner with a botched grammar but so be it, I have accepted it and still want to learn it.
I will never be able to speak English without sounding like an obvious foreigner, but I am OK with that.
@@pawelzielinski1398 I guess that part is probably inevitable, but your English grammar seems pretty solid.
I think you just need enough exposure and correct practice so if you say ich liebe meine Hund und meine Vater, it sounds weird and you naturally correct it. I think partly a noun you learn needs to feel like the gender it belongs to, so that I’m a sentence you get a feeling of what changes need to occur if it’s masc, fem or neuter
It’s the same with Arabic and Russian. Good luck in your studies!! Don’t give up
I'm trying to sharpen up my German, and having forgotten noun genders is the worst challenge. There are some patterns I remember, but there was a reason why teachers had us always give the article when saying a noun: das Haus, die Brille, der Bleistift (I think). There's a book called Der, Die, Das written by a guy who did some computer analysis to try to find more patterns, but basically the only solid way to remember them all is to learn them with the nouns. And Germans grow up doing that, so they're just natural to them.
Thank you SO much... I have wondered about this for years...
I had personally come to the conclusion that you suggest here - that as languages blended - and genders conflicted - they just naturally fell away.
Cannot tell you how happy I am to come across your videos.
As an English language learner myself, I really find it much more helpful than other European languages that English doesn't have genders of objects. and I’ve always wondered why English is like that. So this video was really interesting for me and I really enjoyed it.
Thanks a lot for sharing this useful and intriguing information.
2:42 i thought it says "he woes god crying"...
i thought it said he was god crying
Great video! My language is Slavic, and we also have three genders, but no articles at all. Both nouns and adjectives have to be in the same gender though, as well as numbers, which my British friends say is maddening. :-)
Whaa? Are all numbers the same gender?
@@RobWords It all changes 😄 For instance, you would say "Vidim dva siva psa" (I see two grey dogs, where dog is masculine), but also "Vidim dvije sive mačke" (I see two grey cats, where cat is feminine). All nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numbers are always declined, which means that they all change slightly depending on the case that they're in. And we have seven cases 😂😂
@@m00n3east5 Oh good grief 🤯! That doesn’t sound like a language you could just "pick up as you go along".
Yeah, I guess not 😄
@@RobWords it’s easy when you speak other Slavic language. English doesn’t have genders but I always think of genders in my native tongue. For example, hammer must be masculine ;) and camera is feminine because of a ending. That rule is true for Slavic and Italian language. Just like with names - Anna, Alexa, Joanna you know that these must be names for girls.
My two first languages are Spanish and Portuguese, so I kinda take all of this gender mess for granted. It helps that genders on ES and PT tend to agree, but it's still that kind of complexity you learned as a kid and dont think too much about.
I don't think i would be able to learn another language with genders.
.."o planeta"...
My native language is also portuguese and i never really thought about that, certainly would make learning another language with genders way harder.
@@Blankult em português e espanhol não faz tanta diferença o gênero. Você vai entender mesmo que a pessoa diga "o caneta" ou "os caneta". Mas em línguas como alemão faz muita diferença, porque os adjetivos não só concordam em gênero, número e grau como em português, mas também concordam com a função (declinação) se é do caso dativo, genitivo, nominativo ou acusativo. Em português a gente só preservou a declinação para pronomes, tipo eu, me e mim (eu sou. Ele me viu. Isso é para mim). Mas em alemão e outras línguas adjetivos e artigos também sofrem declinação. Só que para saber como declinar você tem que saber também o gênero. E aí pode acontecer de você falar algo incompreensível. Como se em português alguém falasse "livro, dar ele ela". Quem deu o livro pra quem? Está no passado, presente ou imperativo?
Teoricamente alemão só tem três gêneros: der = masculino, die = femino, das = neutro. Mas na prática, você tem que escolher entre der, die, das, den, dem, des, a depender do gênero e caso, e repetir a mesma lógica para os adjetivos. Tudo concorda em gênero, número, grau e caso.
Romance genders generally agree, not just among two so closely related languages as Castilian and Portuguese but also with Italian, French, etc. That's because Latin also had genders (although it had three, incl. neuter, now generally lost, typically into masculine form).
My native language is Spanish. I've learned other romance languages: Portuguese, French and Italian. Most of the time genders are the same but when they don't, at first I tend to make mistakes. I still can't believe, for instance, milk in these three languages is masculine but in my mother tongue it is feminine. My mind is like 🤯
The milk (English)
O leite (Portuguese)
Le lait (French)
Il latte (Italian)
La leche (Spanish)
This is just one example. I'm already used to these differences but it takes some time to get used to
Very fascinating, thank you!!
There is a tendency that grammar is simplified when different cultures with different languages are merged into one culture. It makes sense, since there are so many people that have to learn this new language. The case of English grammar seems to be no exception. Thank you for a very interesting video!
That was most enjoyable! I minored in French in college, and took two semesters of German “for fun”, and a Latin class “for fun”. I had a fascination with languages at the time. Linguistics is a really convoluted pursuit, but your focus on discreet aspects encountered among English speakers is a good approach to understanding how English was influenced, and why it’s the universal language.
Thanks for the content. I've just found this channel. I thought I was the weird guy who studied the roots of the English Language. I've done it ever since I learned in a book, as an aside in the story, that Polis comes from Greek, and means city, so Policeman literally means 'Man of the City'.
That’s awesome.
I love studying word origins and root words. I’m obsessed.
As opposed to man of the united......
I learned that one from Sir Terry Pratchett, as it is a plot point in one of his books 🙂
And megalopolis means "big huge city" ... and politics means +/- "city business"!
as a hungarian, i really appreciate that english also doesnt have object genders (tho it has gender pronouns which give you guys quite a trouble nowadays), and although i speak german quite alright, i really dont know the gender articles. I totally gave up on french not in small part because of the gendered objects.
Recently im very enthusiastic about japanese, beacuse it not only doesnt have genders for objects, theres also no plural form of nouns, and also you dont need to inflect verbs to match the person, so its great!
The Japanese were always way ahead of the curve. :)
As aTurkish person speaking a god blessing non-gender language, I appreciated the non-genderless of English more, when I began learning French and German later in my life. In Turkish we also do not have "he-she-it" we just have a simple "o" and "onlar" as "they" in plural.
but Japanese like Hebrew and I’m sure many others have different words for “I” as in me, based on two genders.
*` **#Ő** vibráló""*
And only two irregular verbs in the entire language. I seriously preferred learning 2000 kanji over having to deal with irregular verbs, noun cases, gender, articles, verb agreement, and all that crap
I imagine that some language change came about with the growing use of movable type and its consequent facility for broadening access to knowledge.
That, alone, could call for a more distinct standardization of the language so as to reach the masses on a single level.
See, this is one of the reasons why I like learning East and Southeast Asian languages; very few if any have grammatical gender. And this coming from a Spanish speaker, who’s used to it. 😅
Good luck with the tone.
I think the “she” for ships probably comes from a lot of interaction with the Spanish on the Atlantic in the 16th and 17th century. “La Fragata” and “La Caravela” would have been types of Spanish ships that would have been common and were feminine in gender.
Or it's just an universal thruth among sailors that something so loved but high maintanance like a ship, must be feminine
@@Teun_Jac Even without that stereotype about women, there is a near universal traditional of giving ships female or non-human names, like Elizabeth or Titanic.
Just to add to this, women bear children much in the same way ships bear passengers.
Caravela é portuguesa caralho!!!
Also they have broad bottoms
Very interesting! I didn't know the difference between blond and blonde, so that's cool to know. I love your conclusion!
Icelandic is kinda similar, we still use to some point sá (masc.), sú(fem) and það (but still the definitive article is used more in the ending of words now, adding n's or ð's). And like in old english we don't have an indefinite article.
Irish doesnt have an indefinite article either, nor scottish.
Fun fact: the correlation between object genders in German and Portuguese is almost perfectly negative. Hence, we in Brazil use that when we want to make a caricature of a German trying to speak Portuguese. Just turn the V's into F's, "ão" into "on" and switch all genders. Kind of like the backwards Я for Яussian.
Brilliant!
I guess you are overstating the negative correlation a bit. Between German and French (which should mostly have the same genders as Portuguese) the same applies. Some of the most prominent offenders are Sun and Moon (the Sun is masculine in Romance languages and the Moon feminine, and in Germany both genders are reversed) and the large number of French loan words ending in -age in German, which for some reason all became feminine in German even though they are originally masculine. Except of course for 'la plage' (beach, feminine in French), which doesn't exist as a loanword in German, and is translated by the masculine noun 'der Strand'.
@@johaquila Alle haben kapiert, dass das ein Witz ist. Nur der Deutsche wieder nicht 🙄
@@TheSandkastenverbot Als Witz bezogen auf ein fast zufälliges Verhältnis wäre es langweilig. Was den Witz gut macht ist doch gerade die Tatsache, dass das Verhältnis eben wirklich nicht zufällig ist sondern bei Substantiven ohne natürliches Geschlecht (sowas wie Frau oder Ochse) die beiden Sprachen wirklich öfter das entgegengesetzte Geschlecht haben als dasselbe. Wer das nicht weiß, unterschätzt aber den ursprünglichen Witz, und deshalb hab ich mir erlaubt die Pointe zu erklären und ein bisschen weiter auszuführen.
What do you mean about the backwards Я??? That letter is pronounced "yaah".
@Notacet below described some very logical aspects of Finnish. I believe that some aspects of Chinese are similar with respect to this. i.e. no articles and no masculine feminine nonsense. One thing that seems like a very good idea to me as well is that Chinese doesn't conjugate verbs. They use auxiliary verbs to designate the tense. ETA: I also think that Chinese may not have the ridiculous rules for subject/verb agreement that most languages seem to have.
I don't speak Chinese so I might be wrong about this. If anybody that happened by I'd appreciate it if you corrected me or expanded on what I wrote. Thanks.
I also liked Tragoudistros.MPH's comment below that he would consider defecting to Finland if the Finn's decide to conquer the world. I like that idea. Not only because they have such a logical language but because I've been there and they seemed like pleasant people to me.
Great video -thank you! I feel that French in Quebec might be saved if they ditched genders and accents. Everyone complains that French is needlessly difficult, and so many francophone adults still have a hard time of it, to the extent that I've seen some who's written English is better than their French.
When You said NEUTER, I was afraid it meant what we do to cats and dogs! lol! When I studied English Grammar, I never knew it had had genders. They just didn't teach us that. Your video is very educational, and interesting! Thanks for all the information about ancient English! ~Janet in Canada
Commonly misspelled in English is the loanword "fiancé." It's often misspelled because English speakers don't understand that "fiancé" refers to a man, and "fiancée" refers to a woman. This distinction is quite useful and efficient, avoiding the need to actually use more words to explain the gender of a person getting married.
Just like the blond(e) example RobWords used, this is because it comes directly from French. And because it started as an adjective and had that masc/feminine adjective modifier on it. A fiancé is someone you're engaged/betrothed to.
Oh, yeah, and the name, René (masculine] and Renée (feminine].
That was the other one I thought of too. A lot of people get the spellings wrong.
I told my husband this as soon as we got engaged because I knew he wouldn’t know lol
Ok I did t know this at all. I guess the spelling could be different though but not the way you say it.
Great lesson. I've always been insecure about my knowledge of Polish genders when speaking. The only way to learn these in practice is to hear others using the language and engaging in conversation. Most Polish speakers from Poland get used to correcting my own Polish when they hear me speak 😕 (I was born in England to a Polish family).
Such a great channel, thank you
I've always tried to explain this in a fun way to my friends and always failed :) this video is both informative and fun, and doesn't go into too much detail like I evebtually end up doing ahaha
Thank you for bringing Old Norse into the history of Old English! Sometimes teachers/writers skip straight from Old English into OE + Norman French and ignore the couple of centuries when English inhabitants and Danish or Norwegian newcomers interacted. A couple of points: first, for Americans, blond/blonde spelling is a little different. Adjective (for men or women) is blond; noun for women only is a blonde, whereas a man would be a blond (not often used). Second, in Old English, the personal pronouns for the third person (he, it, they) began with "h," but the endings made it clear which word was which. But when the various endings began to blur into one, probably because of the influence of Old Norse (as this video says) and then of Norman French, confusion arose, and English borrowed "th" for the plural (they, them, their) from Old Norse and "sh" for the subjective form of the feminine singular (she)--but "her" was retained, possibly because it wasn't too like "him: or "his." Quite commonsensical! Where the "sh" came from is not clear; probably not directly from "seo." Finally, "Man" in Old English basically meant "human being"; a male man was a carlman, and a female man was a wifman--carl meaning a man, and wif a woman or wife. "Carl" was used in the Middle Ages as a term for a man (male), but in time "man" came to be the preferred word. And "man" was dropped from "wif." Lastly, in American English there's a further step where "she" is now almost never used for countries and seldom for ships (or cars) except by people who are in the business and/or cling to the time-honored usage!
Were or Wer was also the old english for human as in werewolf and wergild, man(person)-wolf and man(person)-price
Possible Carl descended from germania kerl.
Well I got my own bit wrong wer or were means an adult male not a human, Carl or kerl is the origin of the term churl, meaning rude and/or peasant, early middle ages would have been ceorl a social rank just below Thane and above slave or indentured servitude??? So I wonder if OP confused what in essence is a Freeman (ceorlman or carlman) for male human instead of free person
@@alanthomas2064 I am pretty certain the various words were from the same original Old (or Photo) Germanic root. OE also had the word cheorl (I may be misspelling this!) which gave us the modern English churl--but it wasn't derogatory, it meant a man of the ordinary people, not a nobleman (eorl, or modern earl) and not a slave, just your common-or-garden commoner.
@@elainechubb971 I think your computer corrupted proto into photo? Autocorrect is a flaming nuisance, as an Aussie would say.
I love the fact that Vikings, the invaders, brought changes to language. So maybe also to the way of thinking. loved your video!
Yeah, many words came from the vikings such as “they” and “skirt”
Interesting video, thank you for making it. Although I found it surprising that you didn't mention Italian. After all, both Spanish and French are derived from it, Latin actually, but the source of their use of genders definitely comes from the Roman language imposed during the imperial time. And genders in Italian are extensive, possibly more than in other languages.
When I was learning Portuguese, I really got to experience the confusion of gendered words. It's actually kind of fun to think about the relationship of similar words that have opposite genders (for example: shoe is "calçado" and sidewalk is "calçada" -- it's almost like they're mating, physically and linguistically).
In Slovene, an example of standard ending is:
najstnik (m) = male (or unspecified) teenager
najstnica (f) = female teenager
Sonce (n) = Sun
Sončnik (m) and sončnica (f) by word formation both mean "the Sun thing". But:
sončnik (m) = a parasol
sončnica (f) = a sunflower
@@heimdall1973 Hm. Fascinating. Both are related to the sun so it makes sense to link them linguistically. I just wonder how the original namer decided that a parasol should be masculine and a sunflower should be feminine. Anyway, thanks for the info!
@@jacobopstad5483 The same word construction turns krog (m) = solid circle into krožnik (m) = plate (to eat from) and krožnica (f) = circle edge.
dim (m) = smoke
dimnik (m) = chimney (or flue)
dimnica (f) = smokehouse
What makes any of these objects male/ female, I haven't a clue.
@@heimdall1973 Oh, cool. I get the connections but I wonder what they would call a square plate now
In Galician we have some words like that. For instance, "dedo" means finger but "deda" means toe.
Being an American, living in Germany and learning German, I find your videos very interesting to see the similarities between German and Old English. Frawe and Frau.. fascinating
These similarities are of course not accidental. The word "Anglo-Saxon" refers to the Angles, who lived around today's border between Germany and Denmark, and the Saxons. Saxons in this context refers to those Saxons who lived on the North Sea coast of today's Germany and the Netherlands. Their dialects were early forms of German.
When these people colonized/conquered Britain, the language evolving from their dialects became the new prestige language of the island, replacing the old Celtic languages. This is why Old English (also known as Anglo-Saxon) was extremely similar to Old Low German (the contemporary form of German spoken near the coast) and also to Old High German (the contemporary form of German spoken further south, ancestor of Standard German).
The Celtic languages had some influence on English, mostly simplifying it but also adding a weird complication: Obligatory use of 'do' in negations. Then the Vikings came from Scandinavia and gave a slight north Germanic touch to English. Then French-speaking Vikings came from the north coast of France and brought a large supply of French vocabulary to English.
By the way, the word 'frouwe' (standard Middle High German spelling) actually means noble lady. Over many centuries, Europeans have had the tendency to refer to women as if they had a higher social status than they actually had. This made the words gradually change their meanings. Today, in German a Frau is just any woman rather than a noble lady, and in fact, in some contexts politeness requires saying Dame instead even for a woman who is neither noble nor particularly refined. What was once the standard word for a woman, Weib/wife, has become the German word for a vulgar woman and the English word for a married woman. Similar things happened in the Romance languages.
I know this video is very old but I felt obliged to say that you put the greek for pen for both the pen and the shirt lol
First impression of this channel: x 1.5 speed is a good info density.
My understanding is that Middle English was basically a creole, starting as a trade language between English speaking natives and Old French speaking Normans. Grammatical genders and cases were lost because creoles tend to jettison as much as they can to make them simpler and easier to learn and use. Modern English emerged when the ruling class gave up French as the language of law and government and began speaking English; this may have been a major cause of the Great Vowel Shift.
Very interesting, you made me look it up. It's called the Middle English creole hypothesis.
I think given the timing it is also possible that differences between how the Anglo-Norse and Anglo-Saxon cultures ended up settling on a standard gender for everything might have already been making things awkward. Seems plausible you could already have inconsistencies between the dialects there which had yet to be ironed out in the time since the Anglo-Saxons had taken over again. Then these French speakers show up in the 11th century with no doubt yet another bunch of inconsistencies between genders. Would seem to make sense also given it was the Northern dialects that seemed to get the idea of hey lets just get rid of that headache entirely first. Granted the other languages would all have been more similar almost mutually intelligible in fact but not identical, but if anything that would make the pattern easier for some monks or something to probably notice and maybe start to think of that idea. I say monks as they were frequently likely to actually be literate and spent considerable time reading, writing, and copying manuscripts so I'd imagine they would be better placed to notice something like this. There are certainly partial translations of scripture in English that go back far enough (7th century for some portions of the bible for example) to see this evolution over those centuries.
@@seraphina985 I'm with you except for the monks! While monks would be best placed to record and analyse the evolution of language, I highly doubt they would set the trend. Language evolves as it is spoken - by the common majority - hence our widely differing regional accents and dialects. Also, given the general attitude of the typical British working man or woman, the idea of them trying to speak 'like those daft posh monks' makes me giggle.
@@Fledhyris I meant that more in the sense of them noticing and raising awareness then the people deciding that all this palaver every time a different rich b****d takes over the local castle is a fools game.
Also the Normans were basically christian vikings who spoke norman french and would have understood other viking dialects so yea proably made it easier all round to jetison the unecessary.
This is so very interesting. I'm a native English speaker, who's studying Japanese, which is another genderless language (outside of the myriad of ways to say "I", but that's a whole other ball of wax 😅), I have really zero frame of reference for how gendered language works. It's so cool to learn this history to my native language.
People already say modern English is difficult, I guess they should be glad we have what we do now instead of this old English. 😂
You must've heard Spanish even if you're not fluent - lots of gendered examples there.
@@dodgeplow This is assuming they have frequently encountered and have enough of an interest in Spanish to have some sense of the langauge beyond 'this sounds like Spanish'.
For example, I sometimes watch Japanese TV, but I didn't know that Japanese doesn't utilize gendered language much until just now. However, I do know about Spanish's gendered articles because I learned a few words and phrases online as a kid (and I took a couple years of French).
@@georgeandrews1394 An assumption, but I'd think he'd have heard plenty of it. It's the language spoken by the second most number of people on this planet after Mandarin Chinese. If he's in the Americas or the UK it'll be fairly present in typical culture. Now if he's in Oceana, less likely, but plenty of international movies and other culture media make it a frequent encounter to English speakers.
Japanese has word classes aka genders. They define what counting word you must use for correct Japanese.
Also in Japanese it's best to avoid saying pronouns whenever possible. Either by just dropping them or replacing them with a name or proper noun
old english would probably be easier because it seemed way more well-structured. you'd learn rules instead of doing everything case-by-case, word-by-word like modern english.
Whatever the reason, i do feel that negating gender on a lot of things, especially when gender or sex is unknown, facilitates communication in that it removes gender bias for the most part.
That has it's own set of issues, but compared to having the word for trono for throne/big chair in spanish and silla for chair/little chair, wherein the male word is big and the female word is small/diminutive, having a throne and a chair both be gender neutral means that a man sitting on a little chair and a woman sitting on a throne are not outside of gendered expectations baked into the words themselves.
Then you get comedy, sometimes simple like "Sam works on an oil derrick" cut to a tiny lady doing the work of a man twice her size, and often complex plots where having the person's gender apparent in their name ruins the entire premise.
And so on.
Thank you for the video!
im learning german for a few months and i am fluent in portuguese which already has genders. memorizing if it is die der or das is very hard as there are no tricks to simplifying it (my german tutor is very good he always helps me simplify things into rules and expand vocab). The only trick that I know if is that if the word ends with "e" its likely feminine.
There are a couple of endings that always have the same gender. Words ending in -keit, -ung, -heit, -schaft for example are always female. If you google it you‘ll find more ‚tricks‘.
Enjoyed watching and learning new things. 😊 I'm Filipino, and although many of our words are bequeathed to us by Spain, the native language does not have gender, especially the pronouns. This is why so many Filipinos, more often than not, interchange he and she when speaking in English. It is common to hear something like, "My son told her teacher that she forgot her assignment."
Thanks for this! I'll listen extra closely to my Filipino friends to see if I can spot this.
@@RobWords If your Filipino friends have been living in UK, or abroad for quite a while, or are quite educated, they may not have that issue. It applies more to people here in my country, especially those who are not proficient in the language which, regretfully, are quite a lot.
@Victor K Yeah. I remember that from my Spanish back in university. 😊 Conjugation. O, as, a, amos, ais, an. And the ones for verbs ending in ER and IR. 😊 It was only years after I left uni when I met someone who told me that I need not use he or she in a sentence because the conjugation for third person makes it rather redundant. 😊