tf, language, silly
So if, grammatically speaking, objects have an inherent gender in french, does this mean french object tf has an implied gender change?
Probably too serious for this post re: tf, language, silly
@Facet Funnily enough, no! Speakers of a language with grammatical gender have no trouble with the concept that someone might be an inanimate thing whose noun has a different gender
See for example: Beauty and the Beast. There is a boy (masculine) who is a teacup (feminine) and no one I know said anything about it
re: Probably too serious for this post re: tf, language, silly
@socks @Facet we've heard that gender as a linguistic concept is an entirely separate thing from gender as a.... uh, gender concept
it might be better to call it noun classes (which is already the term used for certain languages that have lots of them), to emphasize that there's not necessarily a correlation with the gender of the referent. Plenty of languages don't even have masculine and feminine gender; that seems to be mostly (but not exclusively) an Indo-European thing. Though it wasn't even originally! it's thought that proto-indo-european had an animate/inanimate gender system, and the animate gender later split into masculine and feminine in some intermediate descendant language (with inanimate being renamed neuter)
-F
