Re: Feminization of plurals?

2009/2/11 Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets <tsela.cg@...>:

> Gender distinctions can change around quite quickly, especially
> when they are mostly arbitrary, and the surface forms are not
> distinctive. Witness Dutch, which is in the process of completely
> losing its masculine/feminine/neuter tripartite gender system for
> a common/neuter system, due to the fact that except for personal
> pronouns (and their possessive forms) in the singular, masculine
> and feminine forms have become identical (same article "de", same
> adjectival agreement, nouns that don't have distinctive forms for the
> masculine and the feminine gender). Other evidence of this phenomenon
> is the use of gendered personal pronouns on a purely semantic basis
> (so for instance masculine and feminine pronouns are only used with
> people or animals whose gender is known. syntactic agreement doesn't
> play a role anymore, so "het meisje": "the girl" will be referred to
> as "zij": "she", despite the noun "meisje" being neuter. Contrast
> that with Modern Greek, where the noun "t? ????ts?": "the girl" is
> also neuter, as in Dutch, but governs the use of the neuter personal
> pronoun "a?t?, t?"), and the rise of "die": "that" as a 3rd person
> singular pronoun for non-neuter words whose actual gender is unknown
> (so we don't have a full loss of syntactic gender as in English,
> otherwise people would just use "het": "it").
Further loss of the Dutch gender system is going on in the relative
pronouns:

the originally correct form:
het meisje dat ik zag
the.NEUTER girl that.NEUTER I saw

is being replaced by:
het meisje die ik zag
the.NEUTER girl that.COMMON I saw

and "die" is used especially with the indefinite article:
een meisje die ik zag
a girl that.COMMON I saw

probably influenced by the fact that the indefinite article "een" is
identical for all genders.

But also for inanimate nouns:

een plan die we hebben gemaakt
a plan that.COMMON we made

can be heard more and more, even though "plan" is neuter (het plan).

René

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