Anon's English topic - Grammatical Gender

[Anonimulo]

Hey, everybody. I have been looking into things like English, Middle English, Scots, and Old English. I figured instead of making a bunch of topics about where do I find Germanic cognates and what is most closely related to Old English and what is the origin of this word and this and that, I thought I'd make one topic and update it.

This is 'cuz, I'm trying to make a "new" English. It started out as just a respelling of English, but now I've moved in the direction of favoring native Anglo-Saxon vocab and am trying to bring back gender and case, but to a very limited extent, to keep it in line with English of today. Not a totally different mutually unintelligible language.

Anyway! Right now, I've been looking over the web for a sort of organized list of Modern Lowland Scots dia-phonemes, but haven't been able to find one. That is organized, anyway. Can anyone help me out here?

EDIT: OK, so, the new thing I'm wondering is about gender in English. Regular sound changes would have merged the masculine and feminine genders into a common gender, right? Since "se" and "seo" both end up being "se" via sound change, and "the" comes about through analogy. Just like "he" and "heo" merge into "he". So, this would have left "the" for common nouns and "that" for neuter nouns, no? Before "the" was just used for everything.

Anyway, regardless of that, is there anyway, like any site, that I can find out the grammatical gender of today's English words if they had any? Like, I know "sun" was feminine and "moon" was masculine and other random bits like "sorrow" being feminine and "steel" and "ship" being neuter. Would I just have to look into an Old English dictionary? Am I way off base on my assumption of gender and if I bring it back?

Like, we use "the" and "that" equally as articles and maybe "yon" as a demonstrative? Like Spanish "el sol", "la luna"; "the sun", "the moon", "that ship", "that steel", "the sorrow"?

[Åge Kruger]

I think you'll need to hit the books for this one. Try The Edinburgh Companion to Scots. As I recall, it has, at the very least, the modern phonemes of Scots as derived from Old English.

[AnTeallach]

Some useful looking material on http://www.dsl.ac.uk/dsl/SCOTSHIST/list.html

[marconatrix]

I'm sure there are more academically orientated resources out there, but for starters ...

http://www.scots-online.org/grammar/index.asp

IIRC Scots vowels in particular have gone through their own set of shifts, splits and mergers, so there's no easy one-to-one correspondence with RP, or indeed most southern English dialects.

[marconatrix]

Some useful looking material on http://www.dsl.ac.uk/dsl/SCOTSHIST/list.html

A very useful and informative site, thanks!

In section (2) "A History of Scots to 1700", the last couple of paras before the sec. 2.4 heading have distinct conlanging possibilities :

It is tempting to speculate what Scots might have been like had it developed from the speech of the Lothian Angles without this Anglo-Danish reinforcement. Quite possibly it would not have survived, or would have lingered into modern times only in some isolated enclave, as an archaic form of English did in Ireland ...
In its lesser degree of ON influence, the modern descendant of Anglian would have been more like Standard English, but would have been distinguished from the latter by a much greater degree of Gaelic influence, and perhaps even a substantial p-Celtic element.

[TaylorS]

Some useful looking material on http://www.dsl.ac.uk/dsl/SCOTSHIST/list.html

A bit OT, bit the language tree in the introduction is interesting because it splits Old English into "West Saxon" and "Anglian". This confirms my suspicion that the supposed rapid decay of inflections after the Norman Conquest is an illusion. IMO the "Anglian" dialects had shed a lot of their complex morphology under the Danelaw, the result of linguistic interference from Norse-speaking settlers. Evidence for this is that SW English dialects were often the last to lose Old English morphological features. One SW dialect retained grammatical gender as late as the 1800s.

[AnTeallach]

One SW dialect retained grammatical gender as late as the 1800s.

Do you have some details of this?

[Herra Ratatoskr]

I would think he's referring to the Dorset dialect. Check out this book, starting on page 17, where he talks about "the two classes of things." (the author was a native speaker, btw) It's limited to agreement with the personal and demonstrative pronouns, but is still quite cool. The whole thing is, actually, if you're a fan of English historical and/or dialectical grammar.

[TaylorS]

I would think he's referring to the Dorset dialect. Check out this book, starting on page 17, where he talks about "the two classes of things." (the author was a native speaker, btw) It's limited to agreement with the personal and demonstrative pronouns, but is still quite cool. The whole thing is, actually, if you're a fan of English historical and/or dialectical grammar.

Yes, thanks!

[Anonimulo]

BUMP?

Check out my edit regarding gender, please. Thanks!

[hwhatting]

Check out my edit regarding gender, please. Thanks!

In general I'd say, check an Old English or Middle English dictionary for gender and use that in your "new English". These things tend to be very conservative, so if your working principle is derivation from OE, the genders shouldn't change much. Sometimes gender does change, but mostly in limited cases. The only cases I know where large groups of words changed their gender is when a gender category is lost and the words of that gender are redistributed to other genders (like when the Romance languages lost the neuter gender) or when gender and morpholgy are re-aligned (it is assumed that a subclass of PIE neuter words became maculine in Proto-Slavic because their nom-acc endings became identical with the masculine endings).

[Count Iblis]

Google Books is a pretty good resource. You can download old books on Old English, which is your best bet for finding the gender of various nouns. Of course you could also figure out a way to innovate gender. In Modern English we often refer to inanimate nouns as "she", such as with ships and cars.

[Basilius]

Of course you could also figure out a way to innovate gender. In Modern English we often refer to inanimate nouns as "she", such as with ships and cars.

This won't be gender, in the more technical sense.

BTW, is the Dorset book (Herra, thank you!) downloadable for you guys?

[Herra Ratatoskr]

Yes it is, for me at least.

[Emma]

Nope. When did Google Books become only available in the US? I'm in Europe and I used to use that feature a fair bit when I was at uni.

[finlay]

Works for me. I think you're confusing "Not available in Malta" and "Only available in the US". Copyright law is fucking stupid, anyway.

Edit: that particular book isn't, and note that it is only restricting sale of books in the US (seems to be a new feature. I was able to get many, many preview versions of books at university on Google Books too, which would only skip the occasional page, which was only occasionally annoying...)

[Yng]

I don't seem to be able to download it either.

[Count Iblis]

Of course you could also figure out a way to innovate gender. In Modern English we often refer to inanimate nouns as "she", such as with ships and cars.

This won't be gender, in the more technical sense.

It could evolve into a full gender system. There's already gender agreement in pronouns. Feminine nouns are often formed with the suffixes -ess, -ix (e.g. executrix, dominatrix), and -ette. We've got actors and actresses, waiters and waitresses, stewards and stewardesses, princes and pricesses. Why not doctors and doctresses, teachers and teachresses (maybe teachettes)? Words like dress, stress, mess, matress, etc. could be reanalyzed as feminine nouns. Words like flower and power could be reanalyzed as masculines. If Spanish begins having more influence over English we could see nouns in -o being analyzed as masculines and nouns in -a as feminines. American English speakers are already becoming aware of gender distinctions in words like nin~o/nin~a and Latino/Latina. Some words have a clear masculine/feminine distinction without the need for suffixes, like mother and father, son and daughter, bull and cow.

[Yng]

It could evolve into a full gender system. There's already gender agreement in pronouns. Feminine nouns are often formed with the suffixes -ess, -ix (e.g. executrix, dominatrix), and -ette. We've got actors and actresses, waiters and waitresses, stewards and stewardesses, princes and pricesses. Why not doctors and doctresses, teachers and teachresses (maybe teachettes)? Words like dress, stress, mess, matress, etc. could be reanalyzed as feminine nouns. Words like flower and power could be reanalyzed as masculines. If Spanish begins having more influence over English we could see nouns in -o being analyzed as masculines and nouns in -a as feminines. American English speakers are already becoming aware of gender distinctions in words like nin~o/nin~a and Latino/Latina. Some words have a clear masculine/feminine distinction without the need for suffixes, like mother and father, son and daughter, bull and cow.

I don't know. The way English is going at the moment, the trend seems to be for feminine 'human' nouns to actually disappear in favour of their masculine equivalents under the influence, generally, of gender-neutral speech (I have no idea why it's considered less sexist to lump everyone under a masculine heading than for women to stand on their own two linguistic feet and I will continue to say 'actress' no matter what but there we go). Even with an expansion of the gender system within 'career' nouns and whatever, I think it would take a pretty massive shift for us to start referring to inanimates with 'he' and 'she'. You give the example of 'ship' and there's also countries, but these are the only things I would ever permit to be referred to with gendered pronouns, and even that is only in very restricted contexts - poetic, really. In normal speech countries and ships are both 'it' for me.

[Bedelato]

To me, "She's an actor" and "she's an actress" are both perfectly acceptable. A group of them are called "actors" regardless of composition, unless their genders are relevant to the discussion.
But *"He's an actress" is wrong, under normal circumstances.

[TaylorS]

It could evolve into a full gender system. There's already gender agreement in pronouns. Feminine nouns are often formed with the suffixes -ess, -ix (e.g. executrix, dominatrix), and -ette. We've got actors and actresses, waiters and waitresses, stewards and stewardesses, princes and pricesses. Why not doctors and doctresses, teachers and teachresses (maybe teachettes)? Words like dress, stress, mess, matress, etc. could be reanalyzed as feminine nouns. Words like flower and power could be reanalyzed as masculines. If Spanish begins having more influence over English we could see nouns in -o being analyzed as masculines and nouns in -a as feminines. American English speakers are already becoming aware of gender distinctions in words like nin~o/nin~a and Latino/Latina. Some words have a clear masculine/feminine distinction without the need for suffixes, like mother and father, son and daughter, bull and cow.

I don't know. The way English is going at the moment, the trend seems to be for feminine 'human' nouns to actually disappear in favour of their masculine equivalents under the influence, generally, of gender-neutral speech (I have no idea why it's considered less sexist to lump everyone under a masculine heading than for women to stand on their own two linguistic feet and I will continue to say 'actress' no matter what but there we go). Even with an expansion of the gender system within 'career' nouns and whatever, I think it would take a pretty massive shift for us to start referring to inanimates with 'he' and 'she'. You give the example of 'ship' and there's also countries, but these are the only things I would ever permit to be referred to with gendered pronouns, and even that is only in very restricted contexts - poetic, really. In normal speech countries and ships are both 'it' for me.

In my speech I have noticed that "guys" is usually gender-neutral.

[Travis B.]

It could evolve into a full gender system. There's already gender agreement in pronouns. Feminine nouns are often formed with the suffixes -ess, -ix (e.g. executrix, dominatrix), and -ette. We've got actors and actresses, waiters and waitresses, stewards and stewardesses, princes and pricesses. Why not doctors and doctresses, teachers and teachresses (maybe teachettes)? Words like dress, stress, mess, matress, etc. could be reanalyzed as feminine nouns. Words like flower and power could be reanalyzed as masculines. If Spanish begins having more influence over English we could see nouns in -o being analyzed as masculines and nouns in -a as feminines. American English speakers are already becoming aware of gender distinctions in words like nin~o/nin~a and Latino/Latina. Some words have a clear masculine/feminine distinction without the need for suffixes, like mother and father, son and daughter, bull and cow.

I don't know. The way English is going at the moment, the trend seems to be for feminine 'human' nouns to actually disappear in favour of their masculine equivalents under the influence, generally, of gender-neutral speech (I have no idea why it's considered less sexist to lump everyone under a masculine heading than for women to stand on their own two linguistic feet and I will continue to say 'actress' no matter what but there we go). Even with an expansion of the gender system within 'career' nouns and whatever, I think it would take a pretty massive shift for us to start referring to inanimates with 'he' and 'she'. You give the example of 'ship' and there's also countries, but these are the only things I would ever permit to be referred to with gendered pronouns, and even that is only in very restricted contexts - poetic, really. In normal speech countries and ships are both 'it' for me.

In my speech I have noticed that "guys" is usually gender-neutral.

Same here.

[Yng]

It is for me, but only in the context of 'are you guys coming?' 'Guy' is actually not really a part of my idiolect/dialect, though. I've met Irish people who treated 'lads' as gender-neutral though which was really weird.

[finlay]

It could evolve into a full gender system. There's already gender agreement in pronouns. Feminine nouns are often formed with the suffixes -ess, -ix (e.g. executrix, dominatrix), and -ette. We've got actors and actresses, waiters and waitresses, stewards and stewardesses, princes and pricesses. Why not doctors and doctresses, teachers and teachresses (maybe teachettes)? Words like dress, stress, mess, matress, etc. could be reanalyzed as feminine nouns. Words like flower and power could be reanalyzed as masculines. If Spanish begins having more influence over English we could see nouns in -o being analyzed as masculines and nouns in -a as feminines. American English speakers are already becoming aware of gender distinctions in words like nin~o/nin~a and Latino/Latina. Some words have a clear masculine/feminine distinction without the need for suffixes, like mother and father, son and daughter, bull and cow.

I don't know. The way English is going at the moment, the trend seems to be for feminine 'human' nouns to actually disappear in favour of their masculine equivalents under the influence, generally, of gender-neutral speech (I have no idea why it's considered less sexist to lump everyone under a masculine heading than for women to stand on their own two linguistic feet and I will continue to say 'actress' no matter what but there we go).

Because most of us see it as a feminine heading versus a unisex heading (because there's no actual masculine suffix), rather than a feminine versus a masculine heading.

Actor is a funny one, though... I used to have a friend who insisted she wasn't an 'actress' because she didn't like the connotations or something (but I think she was also laughing at herself when saying this)... I mean I still know her but I don't think she's acting anymore. And yeah, it's probably a bad one to give an example of because the gender distinction is stronger... maybe.

[candrodor]

I was in a meeting with someone the other day, a woman, who was talking about when she was "chairman" of an organisation, and it just struck out at me as strange. But I think people have talked about 'chairman/woman/person' as the prime example of gender-neutral language that any use of it seems like it's somehow the 'wrong' one unless it's a male chairman. Equally, I was writing an email to two f. friends the other day, started it with 'hi guys', and it felt wrong. Saying 'you guys' in a sentence is far less wrong though, even with a f. only group.