Animatrice masculine or feminine11/28/2023 Greek nouns in -ma are neuter, and their genitive ends in -matos. Plautus (died 184 BC) used many Greek words, but was happy to give them Latin endings not much later, on the other hand, it became a sign of education and refinement to pronounce and inflect Greek words as if Greek. In the second century BC, Greek was increasingly becoming a prestige language. The gender of world countries in Polish: red is feminine, blue masculine, yellow neuter, and green plural names. People sometimes stick to these rules in formal writing and on other occasions when they feel observed but the normal situation is that Virus becomes masculine because all the other Latin loans in -us are, and Email becomes feminine because Post is. For example, German children are taught at school that Virus should be neuter because it is so in Latin, and Email should be neuter because in English it is referred to with it. Occasionally, we are told what gender a noun should be. The reason is one of awareness: we tend to notice unusual pronunciations and accents, but we are normally less aware of grammatical features like gender or case, which we handle subconsciously. Such concessions in pronunciation are made more often when that language is considered prestigious and is taught in schools, as is the case with French but even then, gender is normally adapted to the native system. For loanwords, many people make concessions in pronunciation the initial sound in genre is not found in native German or English words. Germans, whether or not they know any French, will know that Genre is a French word, just as English speakers recognize genre as a loan. The Nine Muses, Lodewijk Toeput, 1580 (private collection). German also borrowed Genre in this meaning, but in German the word is neuter. Modern French genre is still masculine and was reborrowed in the meaning “literary kind”. Genus turned into masculine generem (accusative), and then into Old French gendre, whence it was borrowed into English as gender. In later Latin, the neuter eventually disappeared, being mostly absorbed by the masculine. Grammatical gender is about classifying nouns, and that classification can be based on sex, but also on other criteria. I will use male and female for biological sex and masculine and feminine for grammatical gender to keep the ideas separate. When the Romans started to get interested in grammar, genus came to mean “kind” of noun or “gender”, but because genus could also refer to biological sex, male and female, these concepts were occasionally conflated. The Greek cognate of our word, genos, was similarly vague, and eventually acquired grammatical usages as well. There can be different genera or “kinds” of animals, such as birds and mammals and reptiles and there can be many other kinds – basically, whenever a Roman would classify the world, the entities would fall into several genera. Eichhoff’s Vergleichung der Sprachen von Europa und Indien (2nd ed., Leipzig, 1845). ![]() Latin genus declined alongside its Sanskrit and Greek cognates, from F.W. However, on our little journey together, we will also touch on some questions of broader interest: how did ancient scholars think of gender? Can nouns have more than one gender? And does grammatical gender influence the way we think about the world? We will begin our journey with the word gender itself. But my essay is not a magic bullet: it will help you to make sense of grammatical gender assignment, and in that sense it will help you to learn languages, but it will not eliminate the effort of learning altogether. If you bear with me, you will see how different languages assign gender to nouns and how this is not a random process and hopefully you will come to think of gender as not quite as pointless as it may have seemed before. This, then, is what I will try to do for Latin, but also for other languages. Some students assume that Latin and Greek gender must be straightforward to me and one, who had to take a German course, turned up in my office, stared at me accusingly and said, “In your language, spoons are masculine, forks are feminine and knives are neuter explain yourself!” ![]() My first language is German, and German nouns, just like Latin and Greek ones, belong to one of three genders, masculine, feminine or neuter. Now that I’m back to teaching Latin, I occasionally get similar complaints from students. Perhaps this shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone, as it is a very different tone system. ![]() Every time they were stuck, they would immediately turn to the one student whose first language was Cantonese and ask him, “What are the tones in this word?” But he was struggling just as much. Dida has four distinctive tones, a feature which some students struggled with. Many moons ago, when I was a student at the School of Oriental and African Studies, we were analysing the sounds of Dida, a language spoken in Ivory Coast.
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