[The Birds and the Bees of Gender]

Michael Mouatt <arcangel@...> wrote:
> Could someone please explain gender to me (as it relates to language). =
I
> just can't seem to understand the necessity of verb - noun agreement.
> Doesn't it just add a whole stratum of complexity? Why must there reall=
y
> be a 'le' and a 'la' in French? English is an asexual language, isn't
> it? Why is this so if it is a Germanic language with influences from
> French?
> =
> Please help,
> Michael the Gender Confused
Gender agreement dds redundancy.  Human communication often suffers from
noise; gender agreement is an extra bit of informational glue with which =
to
stick pieces of a sentence together.  If you mis-hear a sentence and your=

mis-hearing it makes the genders wrong, you know that you probably lost
something important (assuming a competent speaker) and you'd better ask t=
hem
to re-state what they said.

That's one reason. :)

Genders are (as someone else explained well) one subtype of noun classifi=
er
system.  Many languages (e.g. Japanese, Dyirbal) have classifier systems,=
 and
as George Lakoff demonstrated in his _Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things_,=

classifiers tend to denote what he calls "radial categories" -- categorie=
s
with prototypical central members and extensions from that center in
unpredictable directions.

Proto-Indo-European had a very small classifier system, with three catego=
ries,
Masc., Fem., and Neuter (perhaps originally only two, Animate and Neuter)=
,
whose prototypical subcategories were men, women, and inanimate objects
respectively.

Ed


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