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Why do some languages use gendered nouns?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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It's a thing that can happen as more complex case ending systems like Latin lose audible distinctions over time.
You might think that'd just result in linguistic gender being skipped in favor of no case endings altogether like English, but that's not why English is theorized to have nixed gender.
Linguists have started to theorize that the Danelaw is what killed english grammatical gender, as old English and Old Norse were similar-ish languages at the time with a decent level of mutual intelligibility, but the big sticking point would have been disagreements on grammatical gender between the two languages. So the theory goes that inhabitants of the Danelaw just kinda stopped using it to facilitate less confusing mutual conversation when interacting with a speaker of the other language, and eventually that innovation spread south with the unification of the seven kingdoms into England.
What this tells us is that given a language with grammatical gender, it takes a very narrow set of circumstances to facilitate the conditions where a group might naturally innovate genderless communication.
What's actually kinda interesting is that Esperanto is having a moment like this, while technically you are to use the pronouns Li and Sxi, for he and her, Duolingo has a lot of the use of Si, which is a singular they, and since a lot of esperanto's modern speakers are duolingo users, a lot of folks are just using si.
I speak Esperanto for 14 years now. And no, "si" is not a singular "they". That's a self-referencing pronoun. And if that usage is used for genderless addressing a person then this is simply incorrect usage, because people don't know how actually the language works. It's used in sentences like "li lavis sin" vs. "Li lavis lin". The first one says "he washes himself" and the second says "he washes him", the first references the person who executes the action to reference and the second says that the action is done on a different person.
If it comes to Esperanto and genderless usage then there ĝi (it) or ri (they). The first one would be more in accordance with the fundament of the language and the second is a new pronoun which is around since at least the 70s.
No need to misuse si.