Gênero Gramatical | Alomorfe

Hello, greetings people, welcome to Alomorfe, we have just a warning: This channel is prejudice-free zone, that includes prejudice of skin colour, gender, sex, religion, dialect (topic for another video), nacionality, physical type, or any other thing, if some of you have any problem with these things, just get out, you probably don't know what is like to be under other people's skin. Anyway, today we shall talk about a very important topic among languages, mostly the indo-european ones: grammatical gender. As a science channel, I came here to show how does the morphology of genders in languages work, especially in portuguese.

The languages may have various possible genders, not only feminine and masculine, like portuguese does, actually, feminine and "masculine", we'll see why later. The gender is a purely arbitrary category, as all things are in the language, just watch this video here. It is an arbitrary category, it selects words with a similar behaviors and structures.

Think for example. . .

. . .

a cup of tea ("uma xícara" or "xávena" if thou art portuguese). What does a tea cup has that makes it be feminine? Stop a bit to think about it, it is a purely arbitrary thing, I mean, its an object, therefore linguistic gender is different from gender gender (reduplication), it is an arbitrary category, totally arbitrary.

See "uma criança" (a kid) is always "uma criança", even if it is a boy, or "uma pessoa" (a person), or "o cônjuge" (the spouse) is always masculine, so as I said many times: it's arbitrary. Now we shall talk about them: "eles" (them). Why do we say "eles" instead of "elas" when there are both men and women?

Why do we say "está frio aqui" (it is cold here) instead of "*está fria aqui"? Is it a reflex of our undeniably sexist society? No, it is not that simple, the language is natural and it is out of our control, there is no totally direct link between the society and the inner structure of the language.

Let's see now whence came the genders in portuguese, shall we? Let's talk about latin, latin had three genders: masculine, faminine, and neuter, well, through purely arbitrary sound changes, the neuter and the masculine merged; that's a fairly common process in many languages, for instance the danish language: there the feminine and the masculine merged, creating a common gender and a neutral gender. Se, for example, "meum" (masculine), "meam" (feminine) and "meum" (neuter), everything in the accusative, that's where words in portuguese came from, the two in the sides became "meu" (mine) and "meam" became "minha" (mine), which means that masculine and neuter merged because of their resemblance in the structure of the language.

Now take a look: the portuguese language kept two genders: a feminine and a generic non-feminine, which is not marked and traditionally called "masculine" as the opposite of "feminine", but technically it is feminine and non-feminine, the unmarked case, the feminine is the special one that we mark normally with the thematic vowel "-a" in the end, and it is basically it! We have a feminine and a non-feminine gender, therefore "ele" (he/it) is non-feminine, while "ela" (she) is the feminine one: two genders that aren't masculine and faminine, are feminine and non-feminine. Now let's see other examples in other languages: the romanian is a language that kept latin's neutral gender and turns out that Romania is not a less sexist country, for instance.

Karakalpak is a language from Uzbekistan that has a word for all genders un the third person singular (ol). And it doesn't make Uzbekistan less sexist too. In Iceland, a narrator is a "sögumaður", it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman, you're always a "story man", and well, Iceland is a country with lots of achievements on the feminist fight compearing with other countries, so notice how arbitrary it is.

Dyirbal is a language from Australia that has four genders: one for men and animated objects; one for feminine, water, fire, some hazard stuff and some animals; other for edible fruits and vegetables; and the last one for inanimate objects. So look how the inner structure of the language is not totally affected by society in such a direct and simple way as we are used to think it is. Now you can see how linguistic genders are completely arbitrary categories, are categories of words that behave in a similar way, and, in portuguese's case with the categories feminine and non-feminine, as they should be called, but classically we call them masculine and feminine, but the name is not important, what matters is what is happening in the language all the time, which is just a categorization, therefore, use "eles" (them) without any prejudice, it is not masculine, just a generic non-feminine, while feminine is the special one, the marked one, So, if you have no prejudices in your mind and can accept all genders with an open mind, like this video, share it on social media, follow us in all social media and subscribe, and as always.

. . farewell.