> The article notes that proto-indo-european only had animate and inanimate and that is not the same as gender
Grammatically, it is the same. Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex, but rather a categorization system of nouns and their associated inflection patterns.
> Animate here is "alive". A human and a tree are animate but a rock is inanimate.
Outside of words for humans (and even there there are exceptions), the application of these categories is pretty random. For example, the Latin word for rock, petra, is feminine, not neuter.
> Grammatically, it is the same. Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex, but rather a categorization system of nouns and their associated inflection patterns.
Funny story: I've always remembered my german teacher getting flaberghasted at our inability to gender a table (as english speakers).
She was all: "Come on! what kind of qualities do you think a table has!"
And us high-schooler english speakers were just sitting there all :|
Teaching a foreigner one's native language is one of those situations where completely arbitrary conventions (including, by the way, how to segment and classify phonemes!) can misleadingly seem like "obvious" facts, and like the foreigner is just being weirdly obtuse by not having a built-in intuition for those arbitrary conventions.
Funny, in German a "table" is masculine (der tisch) but in Romanian (romance language) is feminine (o masa), in Spanish is feminine (la mesa), Italian is masculine (il tavolo) unless you talk about having a supper (la tavola).
What I'm trying to say is that logic has nothing to do with it.
> Grammatically, it is the same. Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex, but rather a categorization system of nouns and their associated inflection patterns.
Yep, a chair is male in Slovenian, but tree is neuter. Cats are feminine, dogs are male.
Studying German and French I quickly learned that their categories are different. You have to memorize the gender together with noun. Often you can guess correctly based on the suffix.
Yeah, it's a common joke in German that you can't tell someone's gender by looking at their face:
the nose is female ("die Nase"), the mouth is male ("der Mund") and the eyes are neuter ("das Auge") :D
"Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex"
I'm quite aware of that, especially after an unfortunate encounter that never happened with a table. She claimed to be French but it turned out to be German.
That all sounds a bit crap in English. I don't really know how "gender" for nouns feels or works in languages that emphasise it. We do ascribe gender to some nouns in English, such as boats/ships: "she".
Why on earth is petra feminine? I've been to Petra (capital P) and it is an incredible place.
Grammatically, it is the same. Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex, but rather a categorization system of nouns and their associated inflection patterns.
> Animate here is "alive". A human and a tree are animate but a rock is inanimate.
Outside of words for humans (and even there there are exceptions), the application of these categories is pretty random. For example, the Latin word for rock, petra, is feminine, not neuter.