Why does a word have a ‘gender’?

Answer

Gender or genus is a grammatical concept that is present in all languages. It can differ in composition: for example, there are languages ​​that have only two genders, such as the Romance languages, others have three (such as the Germanic languages), etc.

Genus occurs with nouns, but can also occur with adjectives and other word classes.

Genus largely has two functions in a language.

(a) it serves to refer to the sex of the object to which the word refers. In that sense, gender is absolutely necessary: ​​it makes it possible to distinguish a male person/animal from a female person/animal. eg. friend friend; bull / cow, etc. Neuter then serves to refer to things (without sex). We notice this function in English, where neuter refers to things and masculine/feminine to persons or possibly animals.

(b) it serves to make explicit the relationships between “words” in a sentence or in a text. This function is not absolutely necessary for communication, but can contribute to greater clarity. This function explains why adjectives also have gender differences in certain languages.

Point (b) deserves clarification.

Sentences, when we form them, are linear. But every sentence has a hierarchical structure (a tree structure): within the sentence there are word groups that are related to each other. In a sentence like “my best friend lives in an elegant white house,” “my best friend” and “‘an elegant white house” form phrases, with the adjectives “completing” the nouns. These are called determinations or complements. A language can indicate the relationship between these words, eg by assigning them the same gender. In this way one recognizes the words that belong together, the word groups. This is what the Romance languages ​​do, much more than the Germanic languages.

The same also applies to the relationships within a text. So you can clarify relationships by means of gender. When I speak of the house and the garden, I can then refer to either of them by means of a gendered pronoun: it then refers to the house, he to the garden.

Why do words have a specific gender?

From the foregoing it appears that the genus or grammatical gender may depend on the sex (or non-sex) of the object (the referent) being referred to. Masculine are words referring to persons of masculine sex, etc.

On the other hand, all nouns have a genus. That genus can therefore be “arbitrary”, ie not motivated by the sex of the object to which it refers. Then there are all kinds of possibilities. The genus may be inherited from an earlier stage of the language or borrowed from another language, such as that Adresse (German) is borrowed from the French une adresse (vr.). In Dutch, on the other hand, this word has been made neuter, probably because it refers to a thing (ie has no gender). Sometimes the form can be decisive: all French words with the suffix -age are masculine and those with the suffix –

Words can also take the gender of the generic term (the hyperonym). For example, in French all words of trees are masculine, because the hyperonym “arbre” is also masculine. Compare with the names of days of the week, names of cars, etc.

As soon as the gender is no longer motivated by the sex, it can therefore go in all directions. But the function of the genus as an element to relate words remains. The pursuit of rules in a language also remains: the choice of gender usually has a rationale.