Walter's Famous German Language Essentials Guide

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d]

On Mon, May 02, 2016 at 02:15:46AM +0200, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Apr 2016 08:43:52 +0200
> > Ha!  There is no logical at all behind whether a word is masculine,
> > feminine or neutral in German.
> 
> The same goes with French.
[...]

Actually, in just about every language that makes gender distinctions
the choice of gender for any given noun is basically arbitrary. Even
languages with a common ancestor may assign different genders to the
same ancestral noun (IIRC in Portuguese vs. Spanish, though I can't
recall the specific example off the top of my head).  And while one may
imagine that words of "obvious" gender like "man" or "woman" ought to
have the obvious gender, this is not always true (e.g., Russian мужчина
"man" is masculine in agreement with adjectives, but has the feminine -а
ending and declines like a feminine noun).

One linguistic theory about gender systems is that they arose as ancient
rhyming schemes, where, e.g., words ending in a particular vowel would
agree with adjectives ending in a similar vowel. Over time, of course,
due to sound change and language change these ancient rhymes are
forgotten, leaving behind a system of gender distinctions that
apparently are based on biological genders, but are actually relics of
long-forgotten, essentially arbitrary rhyming schemes. Arguably, noun
class systems such as in Swahili also arose from such ancient rhyming
schemes, but in Swahili noun class assignments don't even remotely
resemble biological gender in any way.

At the end of the day, such gender systems are essentially arbitrary and
you just have to memorize which words belong to which class.


T

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