A student of primitive languages is often baffled when he or she is confronted with the phenomenon of grammatical gender . Why did the ancients ascribe sex to inanimate objects? What made the Anglo-Saxons consider stone as masculine and gift (giefu) as feminine? The purpose of this post is to demystify as far as possible grammatical gender and clarify matters for the benefit of students of primitive and ancient languages .
The practice of using labels like masculine and feminine to designate classes of nouns was started by Panini who wrote Ashtadhyayi 2500 years ago . Grammarians since Panini have followed his example, and this has caused a lot of confusion to students . Panini could have used labels like Class A Nouns and Class B nouns nstead of masculine and feminine . He used the labels masculine and feminine most probably because . the two lists of nouns were dominated by nouns with identifiable natural gender Besides, masculine and feminine are the universal criteria of classification . The basis for classification was , of course, their identical grammatical behaviour ( which may not be noticeable to modern students ) . You may not fault the ancients with bungling sex anymore! The fault lies in later grammarians and not the founding fathers of the ancient languages !
How did these nouns which fall under two separate heads behave in an identical manner ? If you look at the list of Old English masculine nouns . you won't see anything common which should make them members of a class . Then how come these disparate nouns behaved in an identical fashion ? We should credit the ancients with some reason ! They could not have done anything without valid reason . , particularly because they were free from the compulsion of prescriptive grammar . and prescriptive phonetics . The only compulsion they worked under must have been clarity and ease of pronunciation .
Why did the primitive people find it expedient to make their nouns terminate in easily articulated vowel sounds like a: , i: and o? Rhyme and rhythm must have fascinated these men in the infancy of their languages . A clue is provided by modern languages like Spanish ( which descended from Latin) and Hindi which descended from Sanskrit, a member of the Indo- European family of languages .
Look at the following Spanish sentences
La puerta está cerrada
Las puertas están cerradas
Nobody can read these sentences without being struck by their internal rhyme . This internal rhyme must have ensured greater ease of articulation and better clarity in communication of thoughts . Even a casual listener could get the message right thanks to the internal rhyme . As man's cognitive powers increased his language no longer needed internal rhyme and so it became more and more restricted to the language of poetry .
That grammatical gender makes for better clarity goes without saying . .As for the ease of pronunciation there is nothing in the modern survivals of these nouns to suggest that the nouns belonging to one class made for greater ease of pronunciation than the other These words have changed so muh from their original forms In some languages like Spanish , Sanskrit and its descendants the change is not so drastic as in the case of English and French . . Besides, Old English and its parent Indo-European had some phonetic feature or features like voicing, nasalization, aspiration stress etc , which are now lost to us . In short, we do not know for sure how the ancients actually pronounced the words . So we cannot say with any certainty how ease of pronunciation and clarity of expression were achieved in connected speech except in terms of internal rhyme . . We cannot reconstruct the pronunciation of Old English or its ancestor Proto- Germanic with as much certainty as we reconstructed the pronunciation of Elizabethan English . We can only grope in the dark and make intelligent and informed guesses !
Thank you for visiting
Prof V.P.Rajappan
i
The practice of using labels like masculine and feminine to designate classes of nouns was started by Panini who wrote Ashtadhyayi 2500 years ago . Grammarians since Panini have followed his example, and this has caused a lot of confusion to students . Panini could have used labels like Class A Nouns and Class B nouns nstead of masculine and feminine . He used the labels masculine and feminine most probably because . the two lists of nouns were dominated by nouns with identifiable natural gender Besides, masculine and feminine are the universal criteria of classification . The basis for classification was , of course, their identical grammatical behaviour ( which may not be noticeable to modern students ) . You may not fault the ancients with bungling sex anymore! The fault lies in later grammarians and not the founding fathers of the ancient languages !
How did these nouns which fall under two separate heads behave in an identical manner ? If you look at the list of Old English masculine nouns . you won't see anything common which should make them members of a class . Then how come these disparate nouns behaved in an identical fashion ? We should credit the ancients with some reason ! They could not have done anything without valid reason . , particularly because they were free from the compulsion of prescriptive grammar . and prescriptive phonetics . The only compulsion they worked under must have been clarity and ease of pronunciation .
Why did the primitive people find it expedient to make their nouns terminate in easily articulated vowel sounds like a: , i: and o? Rhyme and rhythm must have fascinated these men in the infancy of their languages . A clue is provided by modern languages like Spanish ( which descended from Latin) and Hindi which descended from Sanskrit, a member of the Indo- European family of languages .
Look at the following Spanish sentences
La puerta está cerrada
Las puertas están cerradas
Nobody can read these sentences without being struck by their internal rhyme . This internal rhyme must have ensured greater ease of articulation and better clarity in communication of thoughts . Even a casual listener could get the message right thanks to the internal rhyme . As man's cognitive powers increased his language no longer needed internal rhyme and so it became more and more restricted to the language of poetry .
That grammatical gender makes for better clarity goes without saying . .As for the ease of pronunciation there is nothing in the modern survivals of these nouns to suggest that the nouns belonging to one class made for greater ease of pronunciation than the other These words have changed so muh from their original forms In some languages like Spanish , Sanskrit and its descendants the change is not so drastic as in the case of English and French . . Besides, Old English and its parent Indo-European had some phonetic feature or features like voicing, nasalization, aspiration stress etc , which are now lost to us . In short, we do not know for sure how the ancients actually pronounced the words . So we cannot say with any certainty how ease of pronunciation and clarity of expression were achieved in connected speech except in terms of internal rhyme . . We cannot reconstruct the pronunciation of Old English or its ancestor Proto- Germanic with as much certainty as we reconstructed the pronunciation of Elizabethan English . We can only grope in the dark and make intelligent and informed guesses !
Thank you for visiting
Prof V.P.Rajappan
i
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