moon and thinks of it as something annoying about Spanish, but then will also encounter it in French, Russian, Greek, Albanian, Polish, Welsh even! It’s English that is odd in not having gender, 4 even among the Germanic languages.
Proto-Germanic had not one but three genders—masculine, feminine, and neuter—and in some cases modern Germanic languages retain all three, in such user-hostile cases as each piece of silverware in German having a different gender: spoons are boys, forks are girls, knives are hermaphrodites. Usually, just two genders remain—but remain they do, showing no signs of going anywhere. In Swedish, a big goose is masculine, en stor gås, but a big house is what is called common, and comes out e tt stor t hus , where ett is the common form for a and the adjective takes a common ending - t .
English is, as always, the odd one out on this. It is the only genderless Germanic language, except for one dialect of Swedish—but then there is another Swedish dialect, and others in Denmark, that retain all three of Proto-Germanics’ genders. No modern dialect of English retains gender—not marked on nouns like Spanish’s - o and - a endings, not in the form of distinct articles like Swedish’s en and ett , and certainly not with endings on adjectives. In fact, English is the only Indo-European language in all of Europe that has no gender—the only one. 5
Here is where we come back to the question as to whether we can usefully say that English’s loss of suffixes “just happened.” If that’s all there was to it, why did it happen only to a single Indo-European language in Britain and nowhere else in Europe?
“But Wait, There’s More!”: The Rest of the Iceberg
And in any case, the issue goes way beyond endings. There is a great deal more about English that is curiously “easy” as Germanic goes.
This occurred to me several years ago when I was spending a month in Germany, trying to bone up on my vocabulary by reading a German translation of one of my favorite books. I kept trying to maintain the fiction that the only significant difference between German and English is that German has der , die, das, and a bunch of endings while all English has is little old the and just a few endings. But it just isn’t true.
Beyond endings, German grammar is “busier” than English’s. You have to watch out for more things, split more hairs. And that’s also true of the Scandinavian languages, regardless of their scanty little old verb conjugations. It’s true of any Germanic language, from Proto-Germanic on down over these past three thousand years. Except English.
For example, I said that You mistake you for You’re mistaken from the wacky English example would be germane to the Viking issue. What I meant was that the misled Portuguese gentleman thought of you mistake you as normal because you mistake yourself is the way you put it in French ( Tu te trompes ) and Portuguese ( Tu te equivocas ) (both meaning “You ‘yourself’ mistake”).
This is a quirk common in European languages, that often you do things “to yourself” which in English you just do. It tends to be with verbs having to do with moving and feeling. So in English, I have to go, but in Spanish, Tengo que ir me (“I have to go ‘myself’ ”). With moving, this makes a kind of sense to an English speaker, although it seems a little redundant to us to have to specify that I am exerting the act of go -age upon myself . But the ones involving feelings are something else: I remember in English, Me acuerdo in Spanish (“I remember myself”), meaning not that you are idly recalling a past image of yourself, but that the remembering is something that happens to you, thus affecting not something or someone else, but you. While about the only Modern English versions of these are behave yourself , to perjure yourself , and to pride yourself ( upon ), many European languages mark hundreds of verbs in that way.
It’s a frill—a
Proto-Germanic had not one but three genders—masculine, feminine, and neuter—and in some cases modern Germanic languages retain all three, in such user-hostile cases as each piece of silverware in German having a different gender: spoons are boys, forks are girls, knives are hermaphrodites. Usually, just two genders remain—but remain they do, showing no signs of going anywhere. In Swedish, a big goose is masculine, en stor gås, but a big house is what is called common, and comes out e tt stor t hus , where ett is the common form for a and the adjective takes a common ending - t .
English is, as always, the odd one out on this. It is the only genderless Germanic language, except for one dialect of Swedish—but then there is another Swedish dialect, and others in Denmark, that retain all three of Proto-Germanics’ genders. No modern dialect of English retains gender—not marked on nouns like Spanish’s - o and - a endings, not in the form of distinct articles like Swedish’s en and ett , and certainly not with endings on adjectives. In fact, English is the only Indo-European language in all of Europe that has no gender—the only one. 5
Here is where we come back to the question as to whether we can usefully say that English’s loss of suffixes “just happened.” If that’s all there was to it, why did it happen only to a single Indo-European language in Britain and nowhere else in Europe?
“But Wait, There’s More!”: The Rest of the Iceberg
And in any case, the issue goes way beyond endings. There is a great deal more about English that is curiously “easy” as Germanic goes.
This occurred to me several years ago when I was spending a month in Germany, trying to bone up on my vocabulary by reading a German translation of one of my favorite books. I kept trying to maintain the fiction that the only significant difference between German and English is that German has der , die, das, and a bunch of endings while all English has is little old the and just a few endings. But it just isn’t true.
Beyond endings, German grammar is “busier” than English’s. You have to watch out for more things, split more hairs. And that’s also true of the Scandinavian languages, regardless of their scanty little old verb conjugations. It’s true of any Germanic language, from Proto-Germanic on down over these past three thousand years. Except English.
For example, I said that You mistake you for You’re mistaken from the wacky English example would be germane to the Viking issue. What I meant was that the misled Portuguese gentleman thought of you mistake you as normal because you mistake yourself is the way you put it in French ( Tu te trompes ) and Portuguese ( Tu te equivocas ) (both meaning “You ‘yourself’ mistake”).
This is a quirk common in European languages, that often you do things “to yourself” which in English you just do. It tends to be with verbs having to do with moving and feeling. So in English, I have to go, but in Spanish, Tengo que ir me (“I have to go ‘myself’ ”). With moving, this makes a kind of sense to an English speaker, although it seems a little redundant to us to have to specify that I am exerting the act of go -age upon myself . But the ones involving feelings are something else: I remember in English, Me acuerdo in Spanish (“I remember myself”), meaning not that you are idly recalling a past image of yourself, but that the remembering is something that happens to you, thus affecting not something or someone else, but you. While about the only Modern English versions of these are behave yourself , to perjure yourself , and to pride yourself ( upon ), many European languages mark hundreds of verbs in that way.
It’s a frill—a
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