this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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Other than the gendered word usage in the original meme, I'm glad English doesn't have a huge amount of gendered words (glares in the direction of Spanish and French).
We unfortunately make up for this though with strict word ordering. Don't really have to conjugate and mess with gendered articles, but I can see why it's easy for non-native English learners to get confused. Especially when even adjective types have their own word order. To native English speakers, if the order of any of this is not correct it won't sound right, but may have a difficult time explaining to others why it doesn't sound right.
Adjective type order rules are the best-kept secret in English, I was literally never taught this and I've got a degree in technical communications. XD
Big bad wolf.
Ablaut reduplication trumps adjective order
I know some of those words
Overriden by ablaut reduplication.
"Big" being a size adjective and "bad" being its purpose in the fairy tale.
As opposed to "bad big wolf", which implies that there is more than one big wolf to be referred to and specifies that referral to the one I dislike. =D
I think it's because the thing is either too obvious (if you're native) or too specialized (if you're a linguist). E.g. Chinese seem to also have a strict adj. order, but we only got to study it by pure chance.
I would also guess that many languages that usually don't have a strict order will have parts that do, e.g. in Spanish it seems you may shuffle some words but not everything
The image above transcribed:
Opinion – limiter adjectives (e.g. a real hero, a perfect idiot) and adjectives of subjective measure (e.g. beautiful, interesting) or value (e.g. good, bad, costly)
Size – adjectives denoting physical size (e.g. tiny, big, extensive)
Shape or physical quality – adjectives describing more detailed physical attributes than overall size (e.g. round, sharp, swollen, thin)
Age – adjectives denoting age (e.g. young, old, new, ancient, six-year-old)
Colour – adjectives denoting colour or pattern (e.g. white, black, pale, spotted)
Origin – denominational adjectives denoting source (e.g. Japanese, volcanic, extraterrestrial)
Material – denominational adjectives denoting what something is made of (e.g. woollen, metallic, wooden)
Qualifier/purpose – final limiter, which sometimes forms part of the (compound) noun (e.g., rocking chair, hunting cabin, passenger car, book cover)
I hear the hare has hair here. Hahaha.
German also has adjective ordering, in fact I never learned English adjective ordering because the two are close enough.
Also it's called noun classes. "noun gender" is Indo-European-centric, it just happens to be the case that all languages of that family have three noun classes, and each of them put the words for "man", "woman", and "thing" in distinct ones. Otherwise noun classes have, linguistically speaking, absolutely nothing to do with gender. A woman is referred to as "she" not because she's female but because "woman" is in the same noun class as "ship", and men and women are in different classes because the function of classes is about short, unambiguous references and "She caressed him" would be rather ambiguous if it was "it caressed it". Also it's "who caressed whom", not "who caressed who", different topic but you can tell by the "him" instead of "he".
Words aren't gendered in Spanish/French/German/etc. It's called "grammatical gender" but it's just a way some languages differentiate words/word forms and do adjective/noun/verb agreement, it's only sometimes loosely correlated with actual gender and is often contradictory when it's used on living beings.
For example, many words which are used to describe women or female animals in such languages are masculine or neuter gender. Many times words for living things will have one class regardless of the actual gender.
Some grammatical gender types which might make more immediate sense are animacy (animate/inanimate, usually correlated with biotic/abiotic), human/animal/inhuman, countable vs uncountable (the difference between "a plant is here" vs "a water is here", the second one isn't grammatically correct in standard English because "water" is an uncountable noun, same with "furniture", "wind", "energy").
A word that a lot of people prefer to use rather than "grammatical gender" is "noun class", it more clearly conveys what the actual use of that sort of thing in language is. "Grammatical gender" is a pretty outdaded name for it, it was called that in a time where "gender" was more broadly used to mean any class/enumeration/kind/variants/etc. (it has the same root as the word "genre" if that helps it make sense). Only way after the term was coined did "gender" start to refer to what it does now.
And gendering those words in English is optional, unlike in other languages.