the gender of language

[erratio]

The other day I was wondering: The language reflects the culture of a people, right? Like the Japanese have a million and one honorifics because social status is extremely important to them. So, how does gendering of a language reflect culture/shape people's thoughts? By gendering I mean languages like Hebrew which not only require verbs to agree with gender when talking about people but assign gender to all nouns based mostly on the way they sound.

The distribution of gendered nouns isn't quite what you would expect it to be; not all objects stereotypically used by females are of the feminine gender and vice versa. And when coining neologisms, how much consideration does gender get?

Also, one might think that a non-gendered language would belong to a culture that doesn't have strong gender roles, except English shows this to be a lie straight away. It started losing its genders in the Middle English period, whihc doesn't correlate at all with feminism etc.

Comments

Re: Working and sinning

[erratio.livejournal.com]

Heh, I was tempted to go for the 'snow' analogy but I read somewhere that that story is largely apocryphal, or at least wrong in one or more important details. One would naturally assume the ancient Egyptians must have been a very god-fearing and pious people, which is suppose is on par for a culture where the afterlife gets so much detailing.
And that makes me wonder how many words for sin are possessed by the older versions of Italian, being home to the Catholic Church and all..