Godless Dave

Excellent general science article at New York Times (registration required) on new* research into the origins of human language.

new since I graduated college 11 years ago, anyway

Rational BAC

I hope I am not too far off subject here, but it does pertain to the evolution of language.

I have always found it somewhat puzzling that so many languages today make things more difficult than necessary.

Gender and gender agreement for a prime example. I am sure there is a historical linguistic basis for it, but I cannot understand the rationale for it.-----------assuming there was a very long tradition for that which was necessarily adopted by the Romans and others.

Why would cavemen decide that objects have to be masculine or feminine (or neuter)? Why would they complicate their language in such a way? Seems inexplicable to me.

I would assume that cavemen had better things to worry about than whether a leaf was feminine and a tree was masculine. (like much more important how they were going to eat the next day)

Or maybe maybe most of their time in between hunts was devoted to abject boredom and they liked to play games with language just to pass the time?

Anyone have any ideas on this?

lpetrich

As to grammatical gender, the masculine-feminine distinction may originally be something like substantial-abstract.

Also, some languages also have a neuter gender, some have both sexes in a common gender, and some have no genders. A common-neuter gender system may additionally be interpreted as animate-inanimate or reasoning-nonreasoning or active-passive.

And some languages have a lot more than 3 genders. Bantu languages have typically 10 genders or noun classes, and some languages have a large number of classifiers that are used with number words. Something like "three round-object balls" rather than "three balls".

As to what such things can be useful for, they can be useful for disentangling references, like what pronoun is doing service for what noun or noun phrase.

Also, gender systems can change over time.

Early ancestral Indo-European likely had a simple common-neuter gender system, which was elaborated into a masculine-feminine-neuter one in the ancestors of most of the branches. This was either converted into natural genders, simplified into masculine-feminine or common-neuter, or abandoned altogether in some cases.