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

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, it probably is inaccurate, but then think of how many words we have for things like sin as well. Proof of that lies in the fact that there are so many differing words for the phenomenon used in the Hebrew Bible, and they each get different English words in standard translations.

I have to quote Douglas Adams here, whether or not it's relevant ("So Long and Thanks For All the Fish", chap. 2):

"He had read somewhere that the Eskimos had over two hundred different words for snow, without which their conversation would probably have got very monotonous. So they would distinguish between thin snow and thick snow, light snow and heavy snow, sludgy snow, brittle snow, snow that came in flurries, snow that came in drifts, snow that came in on the bottom of your neighbour's boots all over your nice clean igloo floor, the snows of winter, the snows of spring, the snows you remember from your childhood that were so much better than any of your modern snow, fine snow, feathery snow, hill snow, valley snow, snow that falls in the morning, snow that falls at night, snow that falls all of a sudden just when you were going out fishing, and snow that despite all your efforts to train them, the huskies have pissed on."