Languages with masculine nouns for various female entities, or feminine nouns for male entities

Question

This is not an area I'm familiar with, so if any of the following description/discussion is misguided, I apologise in advance:

In languages with gendered nouns, the nouns for woman and man are normally feminine and masculine respectively. It's also usually the case that the grammatical gender of kinship terms reflects the sex of the individuals referred to. So mother, sister, grandmother and so forth will usually be feminine, and father, brother, grandfather will be masculine. This is sometimes referred to, I believe, as natural gender, where the grammatical gender happens to reflect biological gender in some way.

However, linguists are often at pains to point out that grammatical and biological gender are totally and utterly different things! This is clearly true. It would be unwise to suggest that French people conceptualised tables themselves as being female or having female attributes, even if the word table in French happens to be of feminine gender. Instead, it's probably better to think of grammatically gendered nouns within a given language as being grammatical classes/families of noun in the same kind of way that various European languages have -ar/ -ir and -er families of verb.

So my question is: are there languages which, for example, have (any, or a reasonable number of) grammatically masculine nouns for female kinship terms or grammatically feminine nouns for male kinship terms?

Also of interest would be languages with a grammatically feminine word for boy or grammatically masculine word for girl or similar.

In other words are there languages where the grammatical gender occasionally or often does not reflect natural gender?

https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/26216/do-speakers-of-languages-that-use-gendered-nouns-automatically-use-the-same-gend/26218 — Adam Bittlingmayer, Oct 19 '19 at 05:01
Any feedback on the downvote? I can't improve my question(or contributions) without some! — Araucaria - him, Oct 25 '19 at 15:16
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Irish yet. As in many other gendered languages, various derivative suffixes enforce a specific gender, such as diminutive -ín which creates masculines. One such word, probably the best-known example of what you’re asking about here (apart from Mädchen) is cailín (m) ‘girl’. — Janus Bahs Jacquet, Sep 05 '22 at 08:44
@JanusBahsJacquet Exactly the kind of example I was looking for, yes. — Araucaria - him, Sep 05 '22 at 18:36

Draconis · Answer 1 · 2019-10-18T20:41:10.100

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In German, diminutives are almost always neuter, even when they refer to humans, like Mädchen "girl". In Ancient Greek, similarly, παιδίον "child". German also has some non-diminutive neuter words for humans, like Weib "woman".

In Latin, words for humans tend to be either common (they take on the grammatical gender of their referent) or epicene (they have a fixed grammatical gender that never changes). Epicene nouns are thus "wrong" about half the time: homo "human" is always grammatically masculine, and persona "person" always grammatically feminine, though they're well-attested referring to humans and people of both genders.

This isn't quite what you were asking, but in many Bantu languages, gender #1 is used for individual humans, gender #0 (also known as gender #1A) is used for kinship terms, and gender #2 is used for groups of humans. However, words that define a person by a specific quality (like "giant" is defined by size, or "blind person" is defined by blindness) are in gender #7 instead. These languages generally don't have a masculine/feminine split, but this shows that even when you have an animate/inanimate distinction instead, words for humans don't always obey it!

edited Oct 18 '19 at 20:41

answered Oct 18 '19 at 16:52

Draconis

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παῖς can be masculine or feminine, but never neuter. – fdb Oct 18 '19 at 18:48
@fdb Right, I was thinking of paidíon. Corrected. – Draconis Oct 18 '19 at 18:56
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In German "Weib" and (archaic) "Frauenzimmer" are also neuter, but not diminutive. – fdb Oct 18 '19 at 20:27
@fdb Huh, didn't know that. I'd always thought it was die Weib. – Draconis Oct 18 '19 at 20:40
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Mark Twain made quite a good thing out of the story of the Fishwife and its sad fate. – jlawler Oct 19 '19 at 02:17
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There's also the perennial first-declension masculine nouns, still the same in Spanish as they were in Latin - poeta 'poet', for instance. – jlawler Oct 19 '19 at 02:18
Fräulein, Mensch, Bübchen. There are also words like Opfer or Star that are used for people. – Adam Bittlingmayer Oct 19 '19 at 05:07
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@jlawler Did those become feminine in Romance? In Latin they had first-declension forms, but still took masculine agreement (poeta bonus, nauta malus, etc). – Draconis Oct 19 '19 at 17:11
They're still masculine in Spanish. I presume the other Romance languages follow suit in most cases, since -a is most often feminine, whatever the declensional situation. – jlawler Oct 19 '19 at 19:17
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It's mostly those Latin 1st declension nouns that derive from the Greek, I believe. – Araucaria - him Oct 20 '19 at 14:40
@Araucaria I think, words like incola "inhabitant" and agricola "farmer" are native Latin words (not borrowed from Greek) – Sir Cornflakes Oct 29 '19 at 14:49
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@jknappen Yes, I think that's right. But the non-Greek ones don't appear in Spanish very much, I don't think. – Araucaria - him Oct 31 '19 at 19:04

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 24 '19 at 14:32

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Others have already mentioned that German has

words with a fixed grammatical gender that can be used for both males and females, such as "Mensch" (m), "Person" (f), "Kind" (n), "Star" (m), "Opfer" (n), and
words with neuter gender that denote either only females ("Weib", "Mädchen", "Fräulein") or only males ("Bübchen"), where the latter is less frequent.

Interestingly, there are also a few words that have masculine gender but denote exclusively females, or vice versa. These words have one thing in common – they are used for males or females that don't fit the stereotypical role model:

"Memme" (f): weepy, fearful man,
"Schwuchtel" (f): male homosexual,
"Vamp" (m): vamp, femme fatale,
"Drachen" (m): quarrelsome wife,
"Blaustrumpf" (m): educated, intellectual woman.

There's even a non-human example: "Drohne" (f) is the male bee (perceived as weak), "Weisel" (traditionally m, sometimes f) is the queen bee (perceived as strong).

answered Oct 24 '19 at 14:32

Uwe

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Memme at least is definitely not used exclusively for males in my experience. – Cubic Oct 24 '19 at 15:07
@Cubic That's a bit strange. "Memme" originally meant "mother's breast", then "mother" or, even more generally, "woman". Calling a man "Memme" means accusing him of behaving like a woman. Calling a woman "Woman" would not really qualify as an insult. – Uwe Oct 24 '19 at 15:38
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Last time I checked the average person doesn't check the etymology of a word to decide if its usage in a particular situation is appropriate. And certainly not for slang terminology. – Cubic Oct 24 '19 at 16:52
@cubic I can confirm that Du feige Memme was used as a slur on boys when I was at school. – Sir Cornflakes Oct 24 '19 at 17:21

score 4 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 05 '22 at 03:41

Some Punjabi examples:

مُندیر A grammatically feminine plural form of "boy," used in contexts like "me and the boys," or even as a substitute for "gang" (rappers like to use this word a lot)

داڑی The word for beard is feminine

مُچ The word for mustache is feminine

لنگ This word can mean gender or sexuality and has masculine and feminine forms

استری لنگ This word can be used to mean "grammatically feminine," and it is grammatically masculine, even though the word above it is derived from has a feminine option

مادہ Another masculine word for female

In the Slavic languages, “beard” is also feminine: брада/борода/brada/boroda. In Ukrainian, “human being, person” is людина which is feminine. — Yellow Sky, Sep 07 '22 at 18:16

Sir Cornflakes · Answer 4 · 2024-01-03T16:55:50.813

German has some terms like this, but not for kinship terms.

Some neutra are: das Kind "the child", das Opfer "the victim", das Weib "the woman", das Mitglied "the member (of an organisation)", das Medium "the medium (in a seance)", das Idol "the idol"

Always masculine, even when referring to feminine people, are: der Säugling "the suckling", der Star "the star (in pop culture)"

Always feminine, even when referring to masculine people, are: die Person "the person", die Persönlichkeit "the personality", die Emminenz "the emminence", die Hoheit "the highness"

EDIT: A very special one is this diminutive without a non-diminutive form used on men: das Herrchen "the owner of a dog"

EDIT2: Another nice finding for an always feminine German word for persons: die Ikone "The icon". I found the wonderful sentence Die Triathlon-Ikone Jan Frodeno bestritt ihrer letzten Wettkampf bei der Ironman-Weltmeisterschaft in Nizza "The-FEM triathlon icon Jan Frodeno had her last competition at the Ironman World Championship in Nice." as an image caption in our local newpaper. Of course, Jan Frodeno is masculine and has not transitioned, it is the grammatical gender of die Ikone that causes the female determiner in this marvellous sentence.

score 3 · Answer 5 · answered Oct 21 '19 at 18:34

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In Riffian, feminine nouns are marked with the grammatical morpheme t-radical(-t), for example: ahermuc/boy -> tahermuct/girl.

But, some feminine nouns don't follow this construction. For instance:

-kinship nouns:

imma / mother

illi / daughter

However, the gender agreement is always applied, for example: illi tamzyant / little daughter (compare to: memmi amzyan / little son).

answered Oct 21 '19 at 18:34

amegnunsen

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Wow, I'd never heard o imagined "circumfix"es before. Amazing (to me and my provincial linguistic experience). Thank you. – Araucaria - him Oct 24 '19 at 23:54
@Araucaria amzyan means little and illi means (my) daughter and memmi means (my) son. – amegnunsen Oct 25 '19 at 05:57
Yes, of course. Didn't read carefully. So adjectives agreeing with feminine nouns take the same circumfix? – Araucaria - him Oct 25 '19 at 08:39
@Araucaria Yes, it shows that there is an agreement. – amegnunsen Oct 25 '19 at 12:01

score 3 · Answer 6 · answered Dec 12 '19 at 18:42

In the Ukrainian language, there are several words for 'girl', among them two are of the neuter gender: дівча [diwˈtʂa] and дівчисько [diwˈtʂɪsʲkɔ].

Дівча belongs to the so-called 4th noun declension, neuter gender nouns with consonantal stems in -t: nominative plural of дівча is дівчата [diwˈtʂata] where -a is a standard neuter gender plural marker, like in Latin. This declension also includes all the names of baby animals which are all, naturally, neuter too, irrespective of their actual sex, e.g. 'puppy' – цуценя [tsutsɛˈɲa] (pl. цуценята [tsutsɛˈɲata]); 'lionet, lion cub' – левеня [lɛvɛˈɲa] (pl. левенята [lɛvɛˈɲata]).

Дівчисько is formed with the suffix -иськ- that creates nouns with augmentative / grotesque meaning which are used for their comic / pejorative effect and which are automatically neuter gender, like the German diminutive -chen/-lein.

score 2 · Answer 7 · answered Nov 22 '19 at 16:46

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French has la sentinelle, sentry (typically a male soldier), and le mannequin, model (typically a woman).

answered Nov 22 '19 at 16:46

Anton Sherwood

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Languages with masculine nouns for various female entities, or feminine nouns for male entities

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