Question
Updated on
29 Nov 2022
- Simplified Chinese (China)
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Italian
-
Japanese
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English (UK)
Question about Italy
Why do languages like Italian have feminine and masculine words？
Why do languages like Italian have feminine and masculine words？
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29 Nov 2022
Featured answer
- Country or region Italy
because it comes from Latin.
Sometimes it's useful because it's more expressive; for example:
il gatto (male cat)
la gatta (female cat)
in other cases it is just a grammatical convention
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- Country or region Italy
because it comes from Latin.
Sometimes it's useful because it's more expressive; for example:
il gatto (male cat)
la gatta (female cat)
in other cases it is just a grammatical convention
- Country or region China
- Country or region Italy
It's a little bit complicated... It's a way to classify nouns. Italian has only 2, other languages has 3 or even, more rarely, 20.
I tell you what I learnt online about it. Languages weren't born with nouns classifications, but it is a result of evolution. In proto-indo-european language initially there was a distinction from animate and inanimate nouns where a suffix was added to create abstract nouns. With time, nouns with that suffix were grouped to form a class of nouns. In latin, the classification was made by gender. When most female names ended in -a and most male names ended in -o, the nouns and names were grouped together into two categories: feminine and masculine. So you can see that gender doesn't mean biological sex, if we call them "class 1" and "class 2", it wouldn't make a difference, it's just a way to classify nouns.
The advantage is that when we didn't hear well what the other person said, we can guess it more easily. For example, if we hear the article "il", our brain will only think of masculine words, so even if we didn't hear the whole sentence well, we can try to guess more easily.
Also we don't need to say "female cat" or "male cat" for example, but we can just change "gatto" to "gatta", "amico" to "amica" without the addition of other words.
- Country or region China
- Country or region Italy
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