Interactions between Norman pirates and Celtic Britons up through French words being fashionably borrowed by English nobles are evidence of geopolitical and international relations impacting the evolution of the English language. Old English is found to have more gendered articles and pronouns than other later evolutions of English. This study found that gender is altogether more present in Old English and Modern French.
The geopolitical influences on incorporating gender into language were also considered.
Two written texts in British English (one in Old English, one in Modern English) and one written text in French are analyzed for elements of grammatical gender embedded within articles, pronouns, and possessive adjectives. This study examines how recent this aspect of grammar is, and to what degree did cultural interaction with the French throughout history influence the use of gendered pronouns. Modern English also does not use gendered articles, which extends to not assigning an arbitrary gender to inanimate objects. (el programma, el dilema, el problema).Modern English only uses gender in personal, reflexive, and possessive third person singular pronouns. This is known as metaphorical gender (as opposed to natural or grammatical gender). Gendered pronouns are occasionally applied to sexless objects in English, such as ships, tools, or robots. Not always though - spanish borrowed many words ending in -ma that were masculine in greek and remained grammatically masculine in Spanish. These rules also apply to other triple-gender nouns, including ideas, inanimate objects, and words like infant and child. if an English noun ending in -a entered the spanish language, it would likely be grammaticalized as feminine. Grammatical gender assignment has almost entirely to do with morphophonological interfacing. Bantu languages (often ten or more of them)Ī spanish speaker doesn't really think of "la silla" (the seat) as possessing feminine qualities. Languages like english have natural gender but not grammatical, some have both like Spanish, some have only grammatical gender e.g. Maybe it was a completely random occurrence. Perhaps proto-languages where gender arose lacked extensive phonologies or grammar structures and this type of inflection became necessary. We could only speculate about the reason why. Grammatical gender (noun classes) happen to be conflated with natural gender noun/adjective endings since they're so ancient. In the context of language it really means "type" or "class." The word itself in modern english is synonymous with "sex" (technicalities aside).
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