The french noun 'espace' is feminine as in space - the cosmos. In these references the noun 'espace' retains its gender no matter the gender of the noun preceding 'espace'.

In the following case the noun 'espace' is masculine: I need more space -> je manque d'espace. Even here the inherent difference of language is shown -> the literal translation from the french je manque d'espace is I miss the space, although to a francophone that would not be the case.

As is the case with many languages nouns that act as adjectives retain their properties or in some cases
the words are combined into longer singular words, thus eliminating the original intent of the definitions.

The literal translation of un chien de l'espace would be a dog of the space. If one wanted a definite article as per: the space dog -> le chien de l'espace would be the translation.

Kenn

[/quote]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't "chien" and "chaton" both male nouns? So "a space dog" would be "un chien d'espace" and "space cats" would be "chatons d'espace"?[/quote]

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Kenn

What is left unsaid is neither heard, nor heeded.
Ce qui est laissé inexprimé ni n'est entendu, ni est observé.

Just as interesting is the question of where all this language gender complication came from in the first place... We get along just fine without most of the tedious grammatical contortions that other more 'strict' human languages seem to carry.

Is there a brief-ish answer as to why 'everything has a gender' for some languages?

Are there any languages with no gender at all?

And then there's English!

Cheers,
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Just as interesting is the question of where all this language gender complication came from in the first place... We get along just fine without most of the tedious grammatical contortions that other more 'strict' human languages seem to carry.

Is there a brief-ish answer as to why 'everything has a gender' for some languages?

Are there any languages with no gender at all?

And then there's English!

Cheers,
Martin

For the Romance languages (those that stem from Latin) the whole gender thing comes from the source, although the French (as usual) take this to extremes.

Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Rumansch (Romanian) are the "formal" Romance languages. Many other languages have borrowed liberally from Latin, too, (some of them the concept of gender...) English being one of them...

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Hello, from Albany, CA!...

Just as interesting is the question of where all this language gender complication came from in the first place... We get along just fine without most of the tedious grammatical contortions that other more 'strict' human languages seem to carry.

Yes and no. We’ve mostly abandoned grammatical gender, along with marked cases, partly because grafted-on Romance patterns differed from those of the root Germanic language, creating impractical complications. But we pay a price, in that we sometimes need a whole phrase to express an idea that another language can convey by marking a single word in a certain way, and we have less choice of word order, which is much more important to English syntax than it is in some other languages. These “contortions” would be just as “tedious” to us if we hadn’t absorbed their usage in early childhood—witness some of the errors in idiom made by those for whom English is a second language, even after years of exposure to native speech and writing.

Is there a brief-ish answer as to why 'everything has a gender' for some languages?

A couple of notions that come to mind: removing ambiguity (you can distinguish a “him” from a “her” without additional cues, but not two “it”s from each other) and reinforcing patterns of inflection (where the class of a noun is correlated with certain characteristic changes according to its grammatical function).

Are there any languages with no gender at all?[/quote]
Yes, quite a few: see Wikipedia on noun classes. Note that many have more than two: Latin, Greek, German, and many of the Slavic languages have three, as did Old English.[/quote]

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[...]

Is there a brief-ish answer as to why 'everything has a gender' for some languages?

A couple of notions that come to mind: removing ambiguity (you can distinguish a “him” from a “her” without additional cues, but not two “it”s from each other) and reinforcing patterns of inflection (where the class of a noun is correlated with certain characteristic changes according to its grammatical function).

Are there any languages with no gender at all?

Yes, quite a few: see Wikipedia on noun classes. Note that many have more than two: Latin, Greek, German, and many of the Slavic languages have three, as did Old English.

Interesting and a good link, thanks.

Glad I don't have to learn:
Perhaps the most noun classes in any Australian language are found in Yanyuwa, which has 16 noun classes.
rather than just the three in English.

This one has an interesting focus:
Klingon ([noun classes of] being capable of speaking, body part and other)


I think this subject is one to leave to search further during the lull at Christmas!

Cheers,
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

[snip]
Yes, quite a few: see Wikipedia on noun classes. Note that many have more than two: Latin, Greek, German, and many of the Slavic languages have three, as did Old English.

One could make the case that modern English has three classes - "he, she, & it"...

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Hello, from Albany, CA!...

Glad I don't have to learn:
Perhaps the most noun classes in any Australian language are found in Yanyuwa, which has 16 noun classes.
rather than just the three in English.

This one has an interesting focus:
Klingon ([noun classes of] being capable of speaking, body part and other)


I think this subject is one to leave to search further during the lull at Christmas!

Cheers,
Martin

Umm, those weren't links... could ya post the URL's?

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Hello, from Albany, CA!...

One could make the case that modern English has three classes - "he, she, & it"...

An open-an-shut one, I should think. ;) But they’re vestigial, only being marked in personal pronouns. I don’t know when they disappeared everywhere else, but it was probably between Old and Middle English—to the extent that I can recall reading Chaucer in the original many years ago, I don’t remember noticing any gender-specific articles, suffixes, or whatever associated with common nouns.

Anyway, this is going on rather long for an OT digression here … maybe someone would like to start a thread in the general Science forum.

The little language diversion deverts over onto:

Languages

for quite a few thoughts.

Who knows?

Cheers,
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Thanks Martin . . . have a Good Weekend

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BOINC Wiki . . .

Science Status Page . . .

It is awfully funny that any language would call an inanimate object masculine or feminine. I wonder who ever thought of that thing. I wonder who thought up Latin. In the Americas they usually call a computer, in Spanish, una computadora (feminine). But in Spain they call it "un ordenador" (masculine).

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