That's silly. Gendered nouns seem difficult to you, as an English speaker, because you speak a language that doesn't have them, and not because they're inherently harder than any other language feature.
No, that's silly. Gendered nouns are no hassle whatsoever in your native language, but a major stumbling block in one you wish to learn later on, believe me.
Danish is my primary language. We are blessed with only two genders, not three as in German. As closely related as the two languages are, I really cannot make a useful gender mapping from one to the other. That's one - not the only, but definitely one - reason I shall never speak German with anything like the ease with which I've mastered English, even though being exposed to the former at a much younger age.
As an ignorant English speaker who has learned enough German to get by, I wonder:
- what utility do you think a language gains from gendered nouns?
- (more immediate to my experience) how do you know what gender a noun is? I assume there are "themes" that might inform you. But if you're unclear, how do you do find out? Is there a social cost to getting it wrong?
- how are new genders decided? I'm struggling to think of an example as "laptop" presumably has the same gender as "computer", but it must come up sometimes.
"el ordenador" vs. "la computadora" (both computers) would be a spanish example of a gender change for the same concept (former is more Spaniard, latter more Latin-American).
I would say that (at least in Spanish) gendered nouns mainly provide some redundancy that helps error-correct sentences, but apart from that and the occasional meaning subtleties that can carry, they are not very useful.
Many new nouns are nouned forms of verbs. In German there are a bunch of fixed suffixes for turning verbs into nouns, and they have their own fixed genders: "-er" (masculine), "-ion", "-ung", "-age" (feminine), "-en" (neutral).
For other words, speakers, over time, sort of converge on a consensus, which may only be regional. For example, in some regions "Cola" (the drink) is "die Cola" (female), in others it's "das Cola" (neutral).
Others... not sure. "Mobile phone" is "das Handy" (neutral), I guess from "das Telefon". I'm fairly sure "das Internet" came by analogy from "das Netz", which is the German word for "net".
I also speak English as a native language, but allow me to try to answer your questions:
> - what utility do you think a language gains from gendered nouns?
Not a whole lot, but a language doesn't gain much utility from English features like mandatory plural agreement or a/an distinction either. Even something like "his/her" and "he/she" distinction isn't necessarily and a lot of non-native speakers of English struggle with it. You can dream up some sentences that are clarified by the distinction, but in a different language you obviously just express the same idea differently.
Ultimately a committee sitting around asking if a feature has utility and should be added is not very close to the way languages actually form.
> how do you know what gender a noun is? I assume there are "themes" that might inform you. But if you're unclear, how do you do find out? Is there a social cost to getting it wrong?
Sure. If a Spanish word ends in a it's probably feminine unless it's of Greek origin. But there is also memorization involved. Getting the wrong gender on an inanimate object is a lot like any other non-native mistake; it's likely someone who is talking to you can figure out what you meant.
Again, having to just memorize some cases is common in languages. How do you know what preposition goes with which verb? It probably seems very natural to you, but there isn't much logical basis for a lot of them. In Spanish you dream "with" someone rather than "of" them. Someone who wants to speak native-sounding English has to spend a lot of time learning the right pairings (as well as stuff like which compound expressions should have the infinitive versus the gerund).
> - how are new genders decided? I'm struggling to think of an example as "laptop" presumably has the same gender as "computer", but it must come up sometimes.
It's not really like a group sits around deciding, but of course there's a lot of precedent with existing words that could inform you which answer is likely. Synonymous words can have different genders, so it's not really like, for instance, computing words are all masculine. In general if a totally new word is borrowed into Spanish it's more likely to be masculine (so, like, el kabuki, el ánime, etc.).
I speak Russian, which is gendered (masculine/feminine/neuter) as my native language.
> what utility do you think a language gains from gendered nouns?
None whatsoever. When speaking of things that don't have any meaningful gender, it makes things unnecessarily complicated. When speaking of things that do have physical gender, it often forces you to make assumptions about it even when it's completely irrelevant.
> ow do you know what gender a noun is? I assume there are "themes" that might inform you. But if you're unclear, how do you do find out?
In Russian, it mostly follows the spelling of the words - i.e. if a word ends with a certain vowel, it's feminine, except if ... etc.
Sometimes it doesn't work that way, mostly with loanwords. Some loanwords so obviously don't match any "genderizing" pattern, that they basically end up with neuter by default.
In other cases the historical form of the word did match a pattern, and was assigned a gender accordingly - and then changed (e.g. by re-loaning it in a more accurate spelling), and no longer fits. When that happens, people will use the more "appropriate" rather than the "right" gender in colloquial speech, and eventually it becomes the new standard, collecting the mismatch.
A good example of this is the Russian word "coffee". When it was first loaned back in 18th century, it was "kofiy" - and in Russian, that is definitely masculine. Eventually it got re-loaned as "kofe", which would normally be neuter; but the masculine gender assignment stayed from past spelling. In the dictionaries, that is - in practice treating the word as neuter became one of the common incorrect colloquialisms, just because it doesn't "look" masculine. Language purists fought this for several decades, and eventually lost: it's still nominally masculine, but neuter is considered an "accepted variant" in modern dictionaries.
> how are new genders decided? I'm struggling to think of an example as "laptop" presumably has the same gender as "computer", but it must come up sometime
For new words, by their spelling, as described above. So "laptop" is masculine because it ends with a consonant, for example.
Personal names are an exception to this stuff. As in, when a foreign name is used in a context where gender cannot be guessed, people will often apply the usual rules (and then often get it wrong). But once context is established, it's properly accounted for.
On the other hand, for place names, gender is automatically assigned by the usual rules. So to a Russian speaker, New York and Texas are masculine, while California and Florida are feminine.
My understanding is that proto-IndioEuropean had two genders: animate and inanimate which would have served a purpose. Later animate split into masculine/feminine. Some languages preserved all three, others dropped the inanimate (or it morphed into "neuter").
Over the last 20 years or so, the consensus has grown in Indo-European linguistics that Proto-Indo-European had only the animate/inanimate distinction mentioned above. After the Anatolian branch and possibly Tocharian split off from the other Indo-European languages, the remaining core of IE languages developed the three genders masculine, feminine, and neuter.
The idea that Lithuanian is extremely conservative from a PIE perspective is rather outdated. Lithuanian does preserve a number of features of what might be termed “Proto-Nuclear-Indo-European” (to use the terminology of Lundvist & Yates), but the insights from the Anatolian languages show that not all of these features can be reconstructed back to Proto-Indo-European itself.
What is interesting, neither Lithuanian, nor Latvian has neuter gender. While slavic languages, like Russian or Polish, do have. To be fair, old Prussian seem to have had neuter gender. But given Germanic influence, they likely adapted in later days. It'd be weird if IE had developed 3rd gender, then Baltic languages dropped it while other languages around them did keep it.
Got any links or literature on how that evolved according to the new school?
It isn't at all strange that the East Baltic languages developed (along with other PNIE languages) the neuter and then dropped it later. The very same happened in Albanian, Irish, and the Romance languages (except for Balkan Romance).
Any recent introduction to IE linguistics starting from Beekes' Comparative Indo-European Linguistics will discuss the neuter being an innovation after the Anatolian languages broke off. However, I would especially recommend the Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics that will be published by Mouton de Gruyter this September, as it will contain a state-of-the-art survey of the field by a number of prominent scholars. See Lundvist & Yates' chapter on Morphology in it (you can also download a preprint PDF of this chapter from Yates' papers on Academia.edu if you have an account there).
If the neutral gender was dropped, I'd expect to be at least some leftovers... Anyway, I'll try to get hold of that book once it's out. Looks like it'd be interesting read.
Gendered nouns are difficult even for those who has them in their native language (articles in German behave very strangely for example). There's usually no direct mappings between languages, there are exceptions etc.
Gendered nouns are incredibly difficult for non-native speakers (even if their native language contains gendered nouns) as they are completely arbitrary, just like the words themselves. So instead of remembering (word) a non-native now has to learn (gender, word) for every noun.
It's not the concept that is difficult, it's the extra piece of information that makes it more difficult.
Difficulty aside, gendered nouns make gender-neutral communication awkward. If you want to refer to a group in a gender-neutral way you have to refer to both the feminine plural and the masculine one, or invent some silly new forms.
