Gender of loanwords

[Ser]

/flaʃ/ [flaʃ].

lol you guys are too finos.

I don't know why, but people in San Salvador, even those who know completely zero English, don't seem to have any problem pronouncing a word-medial or word-final /ʃ/ [ʃ]. Not many, especially older people, can do a word-initial [ʃ] though, so things like show often get pronounced [tʃow].

Also relevant: not many can do a word-final [tʃ] either, so things like el huracán Mitch (a 1998 hurricane that destroyed/flooded towns in the east of the country) get pronounced [miʃ] instead of [mitʃ].

Names that originally had [rd] (or so) are generally borrowed with a simple /ɾ/ too. Clifford [ˈklifoɾ]. I can't think of a borrowed noun with an original [rd]-like ending though (I've never heard anybody using flashcard, most probably pronounced [ˈflaʃkaɾ].)

[Thry]

/flaʃ/ [flaʃ].

lol you guys are too finos.

I don't know why, but people in San Salvador, even those who know completely zero English, don't seem to have any problem pronouncing a word-medial or word-final /ʃ/ [ʃ]. Not many, especially older people, can do a word-initial [ʃ] though, so things like show often get pronounced [tʃow].

Also relevant: not many can do a word-final [tʃ] either, so things like el huracán Mitch (a 1998 hurricane that destroyed/flooded towns in the east of the country) get pronounced [miʃ] instead of [mitʃ].

Names that originally had /rd/ (or so) are generally borrowed with a simple /ɾ/ too. Clifford [ˈklifoɾ]. I can't think of a borrowed noun with an original /rd/-like ending though (I've never heard anybody using flashcard, most probably pronounced [ˈflaʃkaɾ].)

I don't think this has anything to do with ability for /ʃ/, what's curious here is the distribution of the customs of keeping/replacing alien phonemes (- because I guess that is what produces the ability in the first place).
/tʃ-/ is def. the way word-initially. If there's a final /ʃ, tʃ/... or whatever, we can't know here, because all are [h] - except when the speaker is exaggerating by trying to be standard, but that would be hardly significative. I'm curious as for what happens to medial, I'm thinking about Fischer's projection in biology, I think it just goes to /'fi.tʃe4/ too (I use /'fi.ʃe4/). As for flash, as I said, I could have /flaʃ, flap, flat, flak, flad, flas/ or whatever, I'd still say [flah] on my most natural speech.

[Ser]

As an even more off-topic comment, I love the re-introduction of /ʃ/ in Spanish. It makes the phonemic inventory for my dialect look so symmetrical, with an obstruent pattern of voiceless plosive - voiced plosive/approximant - voiceless fricative:

/p b~β̞ f/
/t d~ð̞ s/
/tʃ dʒ~j ʃ/
/k g~ɣ̞ x~h/

Now, if only a phonemic distinction between [n ŋ] were introduced, maybe due to the English word-final /n ŋ/, another row of nasals could also pattern!

[Thry]

lol yea that's neat.

[Chuma]

2) No. Except in the rare cases where you have a neuter noun denoting a person, such as statsråd 'member of parliament', where using the grammatically appropriate neuter det would sound very stilted.

Altho, to argue against my own strange point, there are some more common examples, such as barn, "child".

3) Swedish has no verbal agreement, so I take it that must have been a typo for adjectival agreement.

Oh, right. I was distracted by an ongoing class.

Thanks! So this looks like Swedish has at minimum four genders (common-male, common-female, common non-male/female, and neuter), if one doesn't count, things like han / hon for neuter nouns, but sees them as the result of conflicting triggering rules, or six genders (common-male, common-female, common non-male/female, neuter-male, neuter-female, neuter non-male/female), with neuter-male & neuter-female forming a very small class.

Such an analysis would imply English has three genders.

Which is also what the writers at WALS conclude. See, confusing.

Don't some Swedes* exhibit masculine/feminine agreement in adjectives, e.g. store = m., stora = f./n., or is that mostly/entirely gone by now?

It's on its way out, sure, but far from gone. I definitely use -e in many situations, but I think it's nearing a point where it's used in fixed expressions.

Now, if only a phonemic distinction between [n ŋ] were introduced, maybe due to the English word-final /n ŋ/, another row of nasals could also pattern!

Yay for symmetric consonants! Lead the way by renaming yourself "Serafíng".

[Thry]

Yay for symmetric consonants! Lead the way by renaming yourself "Serafíng".

He is already xD. My dialect also has final -ng (bieng, pong, tieneng, carmeng,...), let's raise up against the dentals!

[hwhatting]

Such an analysis would imply English has three genders.

I prefer to see it as two genders with a natural sex-based pronoun distinction on top for animate referents. As evidenced by the fact that even neuter nouns can be replaced by han or hon if the semantics are right, the natural sex distinction is not a subclass of the common gender. Animals can be referred to by han/hon, as is usual for pets for example, or den/det (according to grammatical gender) if your personal connection to it is weak (much like in English). Adding to that the fact that all agreement and declension is determined by the common/neuter distinction and ignoring male/female, it seems bloated to posit your six-way gender mess when two will do.

Your "two genders with a natural sex-based pronoun distinction on top for animate referents" still gets you six distinctions, only in different areas (personal pronoun agreement vs. agreement everywhere else). As a learner, you still would have to know for every word how it agrees, even if the rules may be more intuitive for the prsonal pronouns. So I'd say that Swedish has six genders and English has three.

[Chuma]

The problem with that analysis is that the pronouns - in English, Swedish, etc. - appear not to agree with words, but with entities. The same word can be, in some sense, both masculine and feminine.

[Click]

In Croatian, gender of loanwords depends on the ending.
If the loanword ends with -a, the loanword is of feminine gender.
If the loanword doesn't end with -a, it is masculine, even if it ends with -o/-e that are the endings for neuters.

That is not valid for names. Masculine borrowed names are of masculine gender, regardless of the ending, while feminine borrowed names are of feminine gender.

The feminine borrowed names ending with -es are the only uninflected Croatian nouns I know of.

[Thry]

So neuter is no longer productive but feminine and masculine are? Very interesting.

[Click]

So neuter is no longer productive but feminine and masculine are? Very interesting.

Yes, the neuter is in the process of merging with masculine. The neuter and masculine declensions are often very similar.

[linguoboy]

The problem with that analysis is that the pronouns - in English, Swedish, etc. - appear not to agree with words, but with entities. The same word can be, in some sense, both masculine and feminine.

That's true regardless of language. Every gendered language I know has some cases where a word can be said to belong to more than one gender, e.g. Spanish mar can be masculine or feminine, as can German Butter.

[Chuma]

Sure, but that's just a few words being of ambiguous gender. What I mean applies to basically all words, at least insofar as they can represent anything which has a physical gender. I don't think it's the same phenomenon at all.

[Ser]

Yay for symmetric consonants! Lead the way by renaming yourself "Serafíng".

He is already xD. My dialect also has final -ng (bieng, pong, tieneng, carmeng,...), let's raise up against the dentals!

He was talking about actually spelling it <Serafíng>, recognizing it's distinct from <-n>. The problem here though is that TBH [n] and [ŋ] are in free variation for me, it's not like my dialect truly uses [ŋ] for /n#/. I pronounce the word [seɾaˈfiŋ] and also [seɾaˈfin].

I think I often drop the stop while nasalizing the vowel before a fricative too, e.g. Si Serafín supiera [siseɾaˈfĩ suˈpjeɾa] (though in free variation with [...iŋ s..] and [...in s...] too).

Sure, but that's just a few words being of ambiguous gender. What I mean applies to basically all words, at least insofar as they can represent anything which has a physical gender. I don't think it's the same phenomenon at all.

I think it's the same phenomenon in the sense that something agrees in gender in some way. Regardless if it's just the pronouns (English), or pronouns, adjectives and verbs (Arabic), or articles, pronouns and adjectives (Spanish/French), etc.; and regardless if the gender agreement is almost purely semantic (English —well you know, a ship can be a she), or if it's is decided from a complex interaction of lexical/semantic information (Arabic/Spanish/French).

I don't know any Swedish though. Another question: looking at what's on Wikipedia's "Swedish grammar" article, is björn 'bear' always common and is lodjur 'lynx' always neuter? If the answer is yes, then we're not dealing with purely semantic agreement anymore, but something closer to what you find in Arabic/Spanish/French.

Altho technically we should then (in German, Swedish etc.) consider plural to be a gender, as indeed they often do in Bantu languages.

They do that in Bantu linguistics just out of convenience, in order to compare languages more easily, since different languages have different syncretisms and mergers of the reconstructed 22/23 combinations of gender+number in Proto-Bantu. I don't think you can justify the same in Germanic though.

[Vuvuzela]

Are there any cases of Indo-European neuter merging with the feminine, rather than the masculine? Because I know of feminines merging with masculines (common gender), and masculines merging with neuters (Western Romance masculine) and all three merging (Persian everything gender), but I've never heard of a case where feminine became the default gender for neuters.

[Maulrus]

Are there any cases of Indo-European neuter merging with the feminine, rather than the masculine? Because I know of feminines merging with masculines (common gender), and masculines merging with neuters (Western Romance masculine) and all three merging (Persian everything gender), but I've never heard of a case where feminine became the default gender for neuters.

I'm sure someone will have something to add, but off the top of my head I can think of the Latin neuter plurals which were reanalyzed as feminine singulars thanks to their -a ending (cf. Lt. "gaudia" joys, neuter plural of "gaudium" > Fr. "joie" joy, feminine singular). Not sure how regular that was though.

[Ser]

In Spanish there's neuter nouns that split into two in modern Spanish, one from the singular and one from the plural: LIGNUM LIGNI 'piece of wood' split into the nouns leño 'log' and leña 'firewood', PIRUM PIRI 'pear' split into pero 'pear tree' and pera 'pear'. Sometimes just the plural survived... GRAMINA (plural of GRAMEN GRAMINIS 'grass; plant') becomes grama 'grass'. They didn't always end up as countable singulars with a plural ending in -s though (like pera(s)), sometimes they ended up as mass nouns, e.g. grama.

Romanian takes this to an extreme, where all "neuter" nouns take masculine morphology and agreement in the singular, but feminine morphology and agreement in the plural.

[Chuma]

Another question: looking at what's on Wikipedia's "Swedish grammar" article, is björn 'bear' always common and is lodjur 'lynx' always neuter? If the answer is yes, then we're not dealing with purely semantic agreement anymore, but something closer to what you find in Arabic/Spanish/French.

There are two separate types of gender here. Indefinite articles and definite suffixes agree with grammatical gender, which is largely arbitrary, albeit with some tendencies. Then there is physical gender, which is not arbitrary at all (although some queer theorists would disagree), just like in English. Third person pronouns follow the physical gender if there is one (i.e. he/she is used just like in English), and the grammatical gender otherwise (so there are two words for "it"). Adjectives are a bit of a mess, but can depend on both types of gender, as well as number, definiteness and predicative vs. attributive, altho the dependence on physical gender is slowly becoming dated.

Altho technically we should then (in German, Swedish etc.) consider plural to be a gender, as indeed they often do in Bantu languages.

They do that in Bantu linguistics just out of convenience, in order to compare languages more easily, since different languages have different syncretisms and mergers of the reconstructed 22/23 combinations of gender+number in Proto-Bantu. I don't think you can justify the same in Germanic though.

It would indeed be weird, which is why I'm saying that the definition "anything which adjectives agree with is gender" is problematic.

[Terra]

I don't know why, but people in San Salvador, even those who know completely zero English, don't seem to have any problem pronouncing a word-medial or word-final /ʃ/ [ʃ]. Not many, especially older people, can do a word-initial [ʃ] though, so things like show often get pronounced [tʃow].

Also relevant: not many can do a word-final [tʃ] either, so things like el huracán Mitch (a 1998 hurricane that destroyed/flooded towns in the east of the country) get pronounced [miʃ] instead of [mitʃ].

I can't tell, is this that the phoneme /tS/ is realized as /S/ when not word-initial, or that /tS/ and /S/ are separate phonemes, but /tS/ just happens to be restricted to being word-initial? Is there a minimal pair between them?

Names that originally had /rd/ (or so) are generally borrowed with a simple /ɾ/ too. Clifford [ˈklifoɾ]. I can't think of a borrowed noun with an original /rd/-like ending though (I've never heard anybody using flashcard, most probably pronounced [ˈflaʃkaɾ].)

What about /rt/, like in, say, "Colbert"? (Inspired by Esteban Colberto.)

[Thry]

What about /rt/, like in, say, "Colbert"? (Inspired by Esteban Colberto.)

Same as rd

[Ser]

Another question: looking at what's on Wikipedia's "Swedish grammar" article, is björn 'bear' always common and is lodjur 'lynx' always neuter? If the answer is yes, then we're not dealing with purely semantic agreement anymore, but something closer to what you find in Arabic/Spanish/French.

There are two separate types of gender here. Indefinite articles and definite suffixes agree with grammatical gender, which is largely arbitrary, albeit with some tendencies. Then there is physical gender, which is not arbitrary at all (although some queer theorists would disagree), just like in English. Third person pronouns follow the physical gender if there is one (i.e. he/she is used just like in English), and the grammatical gender otherwise (so there are two words for "it"). Adjectives are a bit of a mess, but can depend on both types of gender, as well as number, definiteness and predicative vs. attributive, altho the dependence on physical gender is slowly becoming dated.

Well... then you guys are in a situation between English and Spanish, using lexical gender sometimes and sometimes both that and semantics.

I don't know why, but people in San Salvador, even those who know completely zero English, don't seem to have any problem pronouncing a word-medial or word-final /ʃ/ [ʃ]. Not many, especially older people, can do a word-initial [ʃ] though, so things like show often get pronounced [tʃow].

Also relevant: not many can do a word-final [tʃ] either, so things like el huracán Mitch (a 1998 hurricane that destroyed/flooded towns in the east of the country) get pronounced [miʃ] instead of [mitʃ].

I can't tell, is this that the phoneme /tS/ is realized as /S/ when not word-initial, or that /tS/ and /S/ are separate phonemes, but /tS/ just happens to be restricted to being word-initial? Is there a minimal pair between them?

Well, if you're a speaker who can pronounce word-final [tʃ], then you probably have a minimal pair between mish 'kitten' and Mitch (the name of the above-mentioned hurricane). An intervocalic near-minimal pair can be found in brocha 'brush' and bruxa 'country-side shaman' (yes, we spell it with an <x> in this word!—though generally <sh> is used).

EDIT: And it's not like the /u/ is influencing anything here, since lucha 'struggle' can't be pronounced "[ˈluʃa]". Plus there's another near-minimal pair with mucha [ˈmutʃa] and mushá 'people (vocative)' [muˈʃa].

Names that originally had /rd/ (or so) are generally borrowed with a simple /ɾ/ too. Clifford [ˈklifoɾ]. I can't think of a borrowed noun with an original /rd/-like ending though (I've never heard anybody using flashcard, most probably pronounced [ˈflaʃkaɾ].)

What about /rt/, like in, say, "Colbert"? (Inspired by Esteban Colberto.)

It ends up as /ɾ/ too.