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Since what point in time did noun classes in Indo-European languages become associated with the sexes?

I read that greek/latin used words that translate to "kind" to describe the noun classes (as we use "gender" today), so maybe the speakers of those languages didn't have the association that one noun class was masculine and one was feminine?

minseong
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    In Latin, Greek, modern German, and I suspect modern Slavic languages, there are three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. – Michael Hardy May 03 '21 at 17:51
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    @MichaelHardy in Polish we have 3 singlular (masculine, feminine, and neuter thought neuter seems to be vestigial) and 2 plural (masculineperson and nonmasculineperson to translate directly). At leas on primary school not linguistic level. – Maja Piechotka May 04 '21 at 06:30
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    @MichaelHardy No need to suspect, all of Slavic languages have three mentioned genders. At least in singular, plural is a bit different story. – dosvarog May 04 '21 at 08:37
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    "Gender" itself originally meant "kind". It's related to "genus", "genera", etc. It shortly after picked up the sense of "sex" and that gradually became it's primary meaning as "sex" became more of a taboo word. – hippietrail May 05 '21 at 03:51
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    @MaciejPiechotka Polish masculine singular can even be subdivided into animate and inanimate sub-genders. So, together with the person/non-person distinction relevant for plural forms, you can even count five genders: masculine person, masculine animate, masculine inanimate, feminine, and neuter. – Ralf Kleberhoff May 05 '21 at 08:19
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    You are fighting an impossible battle. 1) You cannot impose todays weird and wonderful concepts on the past, which did not have them. It is a common error, and hysterical. If you want to know the past, get rid of todays notions and learn the past,. as it was. 2) "gender" is a concoction; an ideology; a collective, it does not exist in reality. Reality, a the level of every single cell, the DNA, is Sex. 3) since it is natural to separate the sexes, the answer is, right at the beginning 4,000 BC. – PerformanceDBA May 05 '21 at 09:02
  • @PerformanceDBA Historical linguists disagree on whether Proto-Indo-European originally had a masculine/feminine distinction or not, which is why this is an interesting question. The oldest attested Indo-European languages have no such distinction. But that aside, linguistic gender is a fundamentally different thing from biological sex. Even the staunchest of biological determinists should agree that the Latin word for "road" is feminine and "year" masculine for cultural/historical reasons, not genetic ones. – Draconis Sep 19 '21 at 23:11
  • @Draconis 1) that is todays linguists imposing their notions on history, not historical linguists (they are all dead). 2) The oldest; older; and current Indo-European languages all have a biological distinction ('gender' did not exist). 3) Male/female (not"masculine/feminine" which is a different thing) is sex; binary, not multiple as is 'gender' which did not exist. 4) Latin is not that silly (French is), again, todays imposition on past history is false; hysterical. There is far more to what sex a thing is. 5) Culture is language. – PerformanceDBA Sep 21 '21 at 00:57
  • @PerformanceDBA Historical linguists very much still exist today (historical linguists are people who study historical linguistics). To repeat myself a bit: the oldest attested Indo-European languages, Luvian and Hittite, do not have a masculine/feminine distinction; many modern Indo-European languages also lack this distinction (such as Armenian). And the Latin words for road (via) and year (annus) are feminine and masculine, respectively. If you have any other questions, I recommend asking them separately rather than in the comments here. – Draconis Sep 21 '21 at 01:39
  • @Draconis  1) Ok fine, my point stands, splitting hairs does not do you any good.  Your modern historical linguists study historical linguistics and impose modern notions on historical languages that did not have the modern notions.  2) Thanks, but if ever I did have questions, I would seek an authority, not a populist answer in a forum that imposes modern notions on history. – PerformanceDBA Oct 07 '21 at 10:03

3 Answers3

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Short answer: the association between the grammatical genders and sociological genders happened very early in Indo-European, but it was an association rather than an equivalence and had many exceptions.

I read that greek/latin used words that translate to "kind" to describe the noun classes (as we use "gender" today), so maybe the speakers of those languages didn't have the association that one noun class was masculine and one was feminine?

That is indeed the origin of the word "gender" in the linguistic sense; it's cognate with "genre" and "genus".

However, from a very early point (thousands of years ago at the latest), two of the Indo-European genders were strongly associated with sociological gender in humans. In Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit, for example, names and words for individual people are almost always masculine or feminine based on the person's sociological gender.

(Exactly how early is still debated, because the oldest attested I-E languages, the Anatolian branch, only shows a two-way distinction between animate and inanimate. Some linguists believe Proto-Indo-European originally had this two-way distinction, and developed the masculine-feminine-neuter split later, after the Anatolian languages split off; other linguists believe Proto-Indo-European originally had the three-way distinction, and the masculine and feminine merged in Anatolian.)

It should still be noted, though, that this was more of an association than a strict rule. Grammatical gender was fundamentally a property of the word, rather than the person (or thing) it referred to, which could lead to "mismatches" that sound weird to English-speakers. In Ancient Greek, for example, diminutives tend to be neuter, so words like "child" (paidíon) were neuter regardless of whether the child was male or female (compare modern German Mädchen "girl", which is neuter for the same reason). And words that could refer to people of any sociological gender still often had a fixed grammatical gender: in Latin, "human" (homo) is always grammatically masculine, and "person" (persona) is always grammatically feminine.

Draconis
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    This is much wider than just 'Mädchen' - in Dutch at least, all diminutives are grammatically neuter. I don't know of any exceptions. – Drubbels May 04 '21 at 08:34
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    @Drubbels The rule I was taught as an English-speaker learning German is that the suffix on a noun generally determines its gender, regardless of the gender of the base noun. So all diminutives formed by adding "-chen" become neuter; I'm guessing the same logic can apply to the Dutch "-je". – IMSoP May 04 '21 at 11:17
  • Since they are looking at early branches for clues, how did Tocharian's gender system match up. Did it have one? – T.E.D. May 05 '21 at 20:53
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    @T.E.D. Good question! My knowledge of Tocharian is very weak, and it doesn't appear in my usual reference books, but I believe it completely overhauled the PIE nominal system and lost gender marking as a result. That would make a good question to ask here, though! – Draconis May 05 '21 at 21:09
  • Thanks! But I guess the question is, "overhauled" or "predated"? :-) – T.E.D. May 05 '21 at 21:11
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    "Sociological gender" is a really trashy way to put it. What is wrong with "sex"? – fdb May 07 '21 at 16:23
  • @fdb To contrast the different modern uses of the word "gender" (as a category of people or as a category of words), since that seems to be the core of the asker's question, and because even in ancient times sociological gender and biological sex weren't 1:1. – Draconis May 07 '21 at 17:09
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    To propose that the ancient Greeks; Romans; Indians had a "sociological gender" is a hilarious modern invention. Of course, they did have words for the concepts they did have: effeminate men; homosexuals; etc, but that did not suggest the modern concept of "sociological gender". You cannot impose modernism of past history. – PerformanceDBA Sep 23 '21 at 06:20
  • @CarstenS  You will have to explain the "logic" in that. – PerformanceDBA Oct 07 '21 at 09:53
  • @CarstenS  Take responsibility for what you do: you made the statement, it is your "logic". Hopefully you meant something. Attempting to twist your statement into someone else's logic is hysterical. If you make a poo, it belongs to you, not someone else. – PerformanceDBA Oct 07 '21 at 10:47
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The association was certainly firmly in place already during the time that ancient Greek and Latin grammarians were writing about grammatical gender, so the fact that genus can be translated as "kind" is probably not relevant in the way that you suggest.

Latin grammarians tended to lay significance on the fact that genus shares a root with the verb genero, "to beget, breed". This explanation is found in Priscian and Donatus (who quotes Varro), and Priscian concludes on this basis that masculine and feminine are the two primary genders (Vaahtera 237).

Another sign of the importance of semantics to the ancient conception of gender is that Latin grammarians often recognized four or five gender categories on the basis of the semantic reference of nouns: common nouns (nouns able to refer to male or female beings with no change in form) are often treated as a fourth gender, and epicene nouns (nouns able to refer to male or female beings, but with fixed grammatical gender for purposes of agreement) are sometimes treated as a fifth gender category. (These categories are also discussed in Greek precedents, such as Dionysus Thrax (Vaahtera 233)).

Souces:

brass tacks
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Some time after the middle of the 4th millenium BC. As discussed in this article by Luraghi, IE did not develop sex-based gender distinctions until the Anatolian branch split off, which is typically said to be in the mid 4000's BC. §5.2-3 of the article on the development of the differentiation of the feminine in later PIE. This is well before classical development of grammatical terminology where "gender" is related to "kind", and really is a consequence of how Aristotle set forth his epistemological framework (a matter better addressed on Philosophy SE).

user6726
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  • That's surprisingly ancient. So 4th millennium Europeans already drew feminine connotations from nouns that had the feminine grammatical gender? – minseong May 02 '21 at 17:13
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    I've also seen it suggested that the m/f/n system predated Anatolian, and m/f collapsed in Anatolian due to sound changes (in particular o>a, which makes the nominal paradigms extremely similar). Luraghi specifically dismisses this theory, but it seems worth a comment at least. – Draconis May 02 '21 at 18:34
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    @theonlygusti The fact that a noun has a feminine/masculine/neutral grammatical gender does not necessarily give it female/male/inanimate connotations. It isn't the case in French or German, for example. I'm not aware of any Indo-European language where this is the case other than English's vestigal traces of grammatical gender. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' May 03 '21 at 11:33
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    And the same word doesn't even generally have the same gender in different languages. Think of Moon (male in German, female in French) vs Sun (female in German, male in French). – Guntram Blohm May 03 '21 at 11:45
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    @Gilles'SO-stopbeingevil', I don’t know how sound that research is, but I know of research that indicates that French associate more masculine attributes with bridges than Germans. – Carsten S May 03 '21 at 16:45
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    @CarstenS I'm a native French speaker from France and I don't see why bridges would be masculine. Maybe in reaction to water being more often associated feminine attributes? That's cultural, not linguistic: it's independent of whether it's une rivière or un fleuve, une mer or un océan. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' May 03 '21 at 17:56
  • @Gilles'SO-stopbeingevil', I am sorry that I did not make it clearer. The thesis is that the fact that it is le pont, but die Brücke shapes the perception of native speakers of those objects. – Carsten S May 03 '21 at 18:02
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    @CarstenS Sorry, I think I was the one who was unclear: I refute that thesis, (a) because I (a native speaker) have no such (conscious) association, and (b) because it doesn't account for (near-)synonyms of different genders. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' May 03 '21 at 18:05
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    @Gilles'SO-stopbeingevil', this is probably the study of which I had heard: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01068252 I have not read it, I cannot say anything about it’s quality. – Carsten S May 03 '21 at 23:34
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    @CarstenS In Italian (my native language) there are plenty of words where the grammatical gender does not match the "natural" gender. Examples are spia and guardia ("spy" and "guard") which are feminine gender nouns while being associated to traditional male occupations. In the sentence James Bond è una spia ("James Bond is a spy") no feminine characteristics are associated to the (hyper masculine to the point of stereotype) James Bond. – Denis Nardin May 04 '21 at 05:58
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    @Gilles'SO-stopbeingevil' you as a native speaker can't unbiasedly assess your own perception of something. Where's your point of contrast for control? It's also your own perception. – minseong May 04 '21 at 21:27
  • @theonlygusti Indeed, that's why I wrote that I have no such conscious connotation. This is still evidence against your broad claim that the presence of a feminine grammatical gender implies that its speakers “drew feminine connotations from nouns that had the feminine grammatical gender“. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' May 04 '21 at 22:26