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[Awaclus]

Is it common for languages to have no gendered pronouns whatsoever, like in Finnish?

I don't know, but I'd note that Finnish is a very, very weird language. UNlike the overwhelming majority of European langauages, it is not in the Indo-European family (basically the only other European language that isn't is magyar/hungarian). So it could be an outlier. As far as I know, all latin and anglo-saxon languages have gendered pronouns.

There's also Estonian, and a lot of minor languages that are about to disappear. I'm not an expert, but I know that at least Estonian and Karelian have gender-less pronouns.

[AJD]

Chinese uses a bit of a hack -- it has gendered pronouns but they are homonyms (or more technically, maybe polysemes).  So although the problem is present in writing (where it uses the chauvinistic solution), it is not an issue in speech.  And even in writing, the new Internet trend is just to use the phoneticization as the gender-neutral pronoun.

To put it another way, Chinese doesn't have gendered pronouns, but the writing system allows you to distinguish gender on pronouns where the language itself doesn't.

Huh. I remember that you're a linguist. Are you saying that writing systems are not considered by linguists to be part of the language. I never realized that.

Pretty much, yeah. The writing system is a technology for recording the language. It can certainly be an interesting object of study in its own right, and in languages with long-standing literate cultures the writing system can have a profound effect on the language, but the properties of the writing system itself aren't considered to be a direct expression of people's knowledge of their language.

[AJD]

Is it common for languages to have no gendered pronouns whatsoever, like in Finnish?

In this sample of 378 of the world's languages, 254 of them (i.e., about two thirds) have no gendered pronouns.

Gendered pronouns appear most concentrated in Europe and Africa, and to a lesser extent in the Amazon. It looks like most sub-Saharan African languages that have a gender system have one that's not (or not primarily) sex-based, so presumably the gendered pronouns in sub-Saharan Africa are mostly not sex-based either.

[AJD]

Is it common for languages to have no gendered pronouns whatsoever, like in Finnish?

I don't know, but I'd note that Finnish is a very, very weird language. UNlike the overwhelming majority of European langauages, it is not in the Indo-European family (basically the only other European language that isn't is magyar/hungarian). So it could be an outlier. As far as I know, all latin and anglo-saxon languages have gendered pronouns.

There's also Estonian, and a lot of minor languages that are about to disappear.

Basque is also a European language that's not in the Indo-European family. (It doesn't have gender either.)

[AJD]

As far as I know, all latin and anglo-saxon languages have gendered pronouns.

(The only "Anglo-Saxon" language is English. Well, unless you consider Scots a separate language, which there's room for debate on. I conjecture what you mean is "Germanic" languages, that being the smallest well-known category that includes Anglo-Saxon?)

[Teproc]

I knew I was forgetting something, the Basques ! How could I forget them, they have a sweet flag and a cool sport !

I did mean germanic languages. I've heard both terms used for the same entity (which makes sense since Saxons are from Germany originally), but it's of course possible that this is an incorrect use of "anglo-saxon".

Was I correct in that all of those do have gendered pronouns ? I don't know much about romanian for example.

[AJD]

I did mean germanic languages. I've heard both terms used for the same entity (which makes sense since Saxons are from Germany originally), but it's of course possible that this is an incorrect use of "anglo-saxon".

Yeah, Anglo-Saxon specifically refers to the Germanic tribes who migrated to Britain in the 5th century, whose language was Old English.

The modern Germanic languages are divisible into two main categories: West Germanic (including English, Scots, Dutch, Frisian, Afrikaans, German, Yiddish) and North Germanic or Nordic (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Faroese, Icelandic). West Germanic can be subdivided in a bunch of ways, and there was also an East Germanic family, but it's been extinct for at least 200 years.

Was I correct in that all of those do have gendered pronouns ? I don't know much about romanian for example.

As far as I know all the Germanic and Romance languages have gendered pronouns, but I couldn't swear to it. For all I know maybe the North Germanic languages don't. (Looked it up on Wikipedia; they do.)

[soulnet]

I love all these excerpts of language history and demographics. +1s.

[GeoLib]

As far as I know, all latin and anglo-saxon languages have gendered pronouns.

(The only "Anglo-Saxon" language is English. Well, unless you consider Scots a separate language, which there's room for debate on. I conjecture what you mean is "Germanic" languages, that being the smallest well-known category that includes Anglo-Saxon?)

Is English considered a strictly Germanic language? I always thought that since we'd borrowed so much from Latin and other Romance languages that at this point we were some sort of weird hybrid thing.

[soulnet]

Is English considered a strictly Germanic language? I always thought that since we'd borrowed so much from Latin and other Romance languages that at this point we were some sort of weird hybrid thing.

You are definitely weird. You play football with your hands and a non-round ball!

[Ozle]

Is English considered a strictly Germanic language? I always thought that since we'd borrowed so much from Latin and other Romance languages that at this point we were some sort of weird hybrid thing.

You are definitely weird. You play football with your hands and a non-round ball!

Coming from an Argentinian....



(not still bitter about the '86 world cup...honest)

[GeoLib]

Is English considered a strictly Germanic language? I always thought that since we'd borrowed so much from Latin and other Romance languages that at this point we were some sort of weird hybrid thing.

You are definitely weird. You play football with your hands and a non-round ball!

Well, only Americans. The British still play the same football as the rest of the world.

[AJD]

Is English considered a strictly Germanic language?

Yes.

I always thought that since we'd borrowed so much from Latin and other Romance languages that at this point we were some sort of weird hybrid thing.

Borrowing doesn't change the genetic affiliation of a language. There exist "weird hybrid things"—i.e., contact languages such as creoles and the extremely rare "mixed languages" (e.g., Michif, which has, no kidding, French nouns and noun phrase grammar and Cree verbs and verb phrase grammar). But they don't come about through mere borrowing of features of one language by another.

[GeoLib]

Is English considered a strictly Germanic language?

Yes.

I always thought that since we'd borrowed so much from Latin and other Romance languages that at this point we were some sort of weird hybrid thing.

Borrowing doesn't change the genetic affiliation of a language. There exist "weird hybrid things"—i.e., contact languages such as creoles and the extremely rare "mixed languages" (e.g., Michif, which has, no kidding, French nouns and noun phrase grammar and Cree verbs and verb phrase grammar). But they don't come about through mere borrowing of features of one language by another.

Cool. So is this distinction based on chronology to some extent? Like English emerged as a Germanic language and then we were like "hey, these romance languages have got these cool things, let's steal them," and therefore we're really a Germanic language? Or is it more that although we've stolen some romance language things, it's still much more Germanic? (Or something else, and I have no idea what I'm talking about?)

[Teproc]

Not a linguist, but I think you're overestimating the influence of latin languages on English, as compared to German for example. You'll find more latin words in English than German because of the Normand (French) invasion of England in the 11th century, but it's still very much germanic.

As a French guy who speaks English and German, I can tell you German and English are a lot closer to each other than to French. And while I don't speak Italian or Spanish, I could give a pretty good guess of the meaning of a random italian sentence because of how close the languages are. That's not something you could from English to French, or vice versa.

[AJD]

Is English considered a strictly Germanic language?

Yes.

I always thought that since we'd borrowed so much from Latin and other Romance languages that at this point we were some sort of weird hybrid thing.

Borrowing doesn't change the genetic affiliation of a language. There exist "weird hybrid things"—i.e., contact languages such as creoles and the extremely rare "mixed languages" (e.g., Michif, which has, no kidding, French nouns and noun phrase grammar and Cree verbs and verb phrase grammar). But they don't come about through mere borrowing of features of one language by another.

Cool. So is this distinction based on chronology to some extent? Like English emerged as a Germanic language and then we were like "hey, these romance languages have got these cool things, let's steal them," and therefore we're really a Germanic language? Or is it more that although we've stolen some romance language things, it's still much more Germanic? (Or something else, and I have no idea what I'm talking about?)

Well, the first one is more or less right, but I wouldn't call it based on "chronology" per se—more like, hm, genetics. (Not the biological genetics of the speakers of the language, but the, uh, metaphorical genetics of the language itself.) In ordinary circumstances, children learn a language from the community they grow up in—their parents, other adults in the community, and most of all their own peers. So, a child in an English-speaking community will grow up speaking English. Children in general don't learn the language the exact way adults in the same community speak it; over long periods of time, this non-exact learning is what leads to changes in the language. But it all takes place by the conventional process of language learning. English is descended from Old English in exactly this way: today's English-speaking children, in general, are growing up in communities containing older speakers of English; at least some of those older speakers themselves grew up in communities containing still older speakers of English, and so on, in principle, back all the way to Old English and beyond—indeed, back to the Proto-Germanic language that was spoken in northern Europe 2500 years ago.

That's what makes English a Germanic language: it's descended from Proto-Germanic via a continuous chain of child acquisition. English doesn't have that relationship with any Romance language.

[GeoLib]

Is English considered a strictly Germanic language?

Yes.

I always thought that since we'd borrowed so much from Latin and other Romance languages that at this point we were some sort of weird hybrid thing.

Borrowing doesn't change the genetic affiliation of a language. There exist "weird hybrid things"—i.e., contact languages such as creoles and the extremely rare "mixed languages" (e.g., Michif, which has, no kidding, French nouns and noun phrase grammar and Cree verbs and verb phrase grammar). But they don't come about through mere borrowing of features of one language by another.

Cool. So is this distinction based on chronology to some extent? Like English emerged as a Germanic language and then we were like "hey, these romance languages have got these cool things, let's steal them," and therefore we're really a Germanic language? Or is it more that although we've stolen some romance language things, it's still much more Germanic? (Or something else, and I have no idea what I'm talking about?)

Well, the first one is more or less right, but I wouldn't call it based on "chronology" per se—more like, hm, genetics. (Not the biological genetics of the speakers of the language, but the, uh, metaphorical genetics of the language itself.) In ordinary circumstances, children learn a language from the community they grow up in—their parents, other adults in the community, and most of all their own peers. So, a child in an English-speaking community will grow up speaking English. Children in general don't learn the language the exact way adults in the same community speak it; over long periods of time, this non-exact learning is what leads to changes in the language. But it all takes place by the conventional process of language learning. English is descended from Old English in exactly this way: today's English-speaking children, in general, are growing up in communities containing older speakers of English; at least some of those older speakers themselves grew up in communities containing still older speakers of English, and so on, in principle, back all the way to Old English and beyond—indeed, back to the Proto-Germanic language that was spoken in northern Europe 2500 years ago.

That's what makes English a Germanic language: it's descended from Proto-Germanic via a continuous chain of child acquisition. English doesn't have that relationship with any Romance language.

That makes sense. Thanks for answering these questions!

[soulnet]

That's what makes English a Germanic language: it's descended from Proto-Germanic via a continuous chain of child acquisition. English doesn't have that relationship with any Romance language.

It does not? Not even in way longer timeframes? I always thought all modern languages using latin letters would have one common ancestor. Even more, I always thought all modern languages would have some common ancestor, some ancient language with probably different properties that we assign to languages now (i.e., something we may not call language today, but a form of communication).

Then again, I have also always thought that all humans had one common primate ancestor, and for what I hear, the likelihood of that is decreasing.

[soulnet]

As a French guy who speaks English and German, I can tell you German and English are a lot closer to each other than to French. And while I don't speak Italian or Spanish, I could give a pretty good guess of the meaning of a random italian sentence because of how close the languages are. That's not something you could from English to French, or vice versa.

I speak Spanish natively and English as a second language and have successfully read math articles and books in Portuguese, French and Italian (way easier than literature, because of the highly structured speech and the guiding equations) but failed to read an article in German, even having good previous knowledge of the topics, the results being presented and the idea behind the proofs.

[Kirian]

That's what makes English a Germanic language: it's descended from Proto-Germanic via a continuous chain of child acquisition. English doesn't have that relationship with any Romance language.

It does not? Not even in way longer timeframes? I always thought all modern languages using latin letters would have one common ancestor.

[/quote]

I think he meant a more recent relationship.  All of the Indo-European languages (which are not all written with the Latin alphabet) eventually derive from a common ancestral language.  Certainly French and English are closer than, say, Chinese and English, but they're not much closer than Hebrew and English.

Then again, I have also always thought that all humans had one common primate ancestor, and for what I hear, the likelihood of that is decreasing.

Well, "one" ancestor is unlikely in any sense, since a (reproducing) species by definition requires a significant population.  But I think there's pretty good evidence for a "Mitochondrial Eve" anyway.

[AJD]

That's what makes English a Germanic language: it's descended from Proto-Germanic via a continuous chain of child acquisition. English doesn't have that relationship with any Romance language.

It does not? Not even in way longer timeframes?

Sorry, to clarify: English isn't descended from any Romance language, any more than the Romance languages are descended from English. It does have a common ancestor with the Romance languages, however: Proto–Indo-European, probably spoken some 7000 years ago in the vicinity of the Black Sea.

I always thought all modern languages using latin letters would have one common ancestor.

Hang on there: as noted above, writing systems are totally unrelated to linguistic descent. English has a fairly close common ancestor (less than 2000 years ago) with Yiddish, which is written in the Hebrew alphabet. It shares the more distant Indo-European ancestor with, for example, Russian (Cyrillic alphabet) and Persian (Arabic alphabet)—of course, that ancestor existed millennia before the Latin, Cyrillic, or Arabic alphabets were invented.

Meanwhile, another modern language using the Latin alphabet is Vietnamese, which is related to Cambodian and a bunch of other Southeast Asian languages I've never heard of.

Even more, I always thought all modern languages would have some common ancestor, some ancient language with probably different properties that we assign to languages now (i.e., something we may not call language today, but a form of communication).

This is highly controversial, and from the standpoint of linguistic data there's no good evidence for or against it.

[AJD]

All of the Indo-European languages (which are not all written with the Latin alphabet) eventually derive from a common ancestral language.  Certainly French and English are closer than, say, Chinese and English, but they're not much closer than Hebrew and English.

I'm not quite sure what you're saying here, but I want to clarify for anyone who may be confused that Hebrew is not an Indo-European language and is not, to the best of anyone's knowledge, related to English.

[Kirian]

All of the Indo-European languages (which are not all written with the Latin alphabet) eventually derive from a common ancestral language.  Certainly French and English are closer than, say, Chinese and English, but they're not much closer than Hebrew and English.

I'm not quite sure what you're saying here, but I want to clarify for anyone who may be confused that Hebrew is not an Indo-European language and is not, to the best of anyone's knowledge, related to English.

You're totally right, why the heck was I thinking the Semitic languages were IE?  Dumb.

Replace Hebrew with Farsi, then.

[AJD]

All of the Indo-European languages (which are not all written with the Latin alphabet) eventually derive from a common ancestral language.  Certainly French and English are closer than, say, Chinese and English, but they're not much closer than Hebrew and English.

I'm not quite sure what you're saying here, but I want to clarify for anyone who may be confused that Hebrew is not an Indo-European language and is not, to the best of anyone's knowledge, related to English.

You're totally right, why the heck was I thinking the Semitic languages were IE?  Dumb.

Replace Hebrew with Farsi, then.

Indeed, if Ringe, Warnow, & Taylor's computational model for the relationships between the Indo-European languages is correct, English is more closely related to Farsi than to French.

[GeoLib]

All of the Indo-European languages (which are not all written with the Latin alphabet) eventually derive from a common ancestral language.  Certainly French and English are closer than, say, Chinese and English, but they're not much closer than Hebrew and English.

I'm not quite sure what you're saying here, but I want to clarify for anyone who may be confused that Hebrew is not an Indo-European language and is not, to the best of anyone's knowledge, related to English.

You're totally right, why the heck was I thinking the Semitic languages were IE?  Dumb.

Replace Hebrew with Farsi, then.

Indeed, if Ringe, Warnow, & Taylor's computational model for the relationships between the Indo-European languages is correct, English is more closely related to Farsi than to French.

Computational Linguistics looks so cool. I started reading this and then I realized it was 71 pages, and I have way too many other things I'm supposed to be doing.