To show how weird English is: English is the only proto indo european language that doesn’t think the moon is female (“la luna”) and spoons are male (“der Löffel”). I mean… maybe not those genders specifically in every language. But some gender in each language.
Persian is ungendered too. They don’t even have gendered pronouns.
Thank you for the correction! I didn’t realize Persian descended from PIE too. Looking at the likely root cause of my ignorance, I learned that Kurdish and Pashto are also PIE descended. Pashto appears to have noun gender, but I’m getting hints that at least one dialect of Kurdishalso might not?!
If Sorani doesn’t have gendered nouns then I’m going to predict (1) maybe Kurdish is really old and weird and interesting (like branching off way way long ago with more time to drift) and/or (2) there was some big trade/empire/mixing simplification that happened “more recently” with divergence later?
If neither of those are true, then my larger heuristic about “why English is weird” might have a deep abstract counter example, and deserve lower credence.
Persian is a language of empire and social mixing, so its “similar simplification” doesn’t actually function as a strong counter-example to the broader thesis, but it is still great to be surprised :-)
Persian is ungendered too. They don’t even have gendered pronouns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_grammar
Thank you for the correction! I didn’t realize Persian descended from PIE too. Looking at the likely root cause of my ignorance, I learned that Kurdish and Pashto are also PIE descended. Pashto appears to have noun gender, but I’m getting hints that at least one dialect of Kurdish also might not?!
If Sorani doesn’t have gendered nouns then I’m going to predict (1) maybe Kurdish is really old and weird and interesting (like branching off way way long ago with more time to drift) and/or (2) there was some big trade/empire/mixing simplification that happened “more recently” with divergence later?
If neither of those are true, then my larger heuristic about “why English is weird” might have a deep abstract counter example, and deserve lower credence.
Persian is a language of empire and social mixing, so its “similar simplification” doesn’t actually function as a strong counter-example to the broader thesis, but it is still great to be surprised :-)