Question

Aggiornato il 29 gen 2023

Alex2042

29 nov 2022

Cinese semplificato (Mandarino)

Italiano
Giapponese
Inglese (Regno Unito)

Domande Italia

Why do languages like Italian have feminine and masculine words？

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paoloM81

29 nov 2022

Domanda in primo piano

Paese o regione Italia

because it comes from Latin.
Sometimes it's useful because it's more expressive; for example:
il gatto (male cat)
la gatta (female cat)
in other cases it is just a grammatical convention

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paoloM81

29 nov 2022

Paese o regione Italia

because it comes from Latin.
Sometimes it's useful because it's more expressive; for example:
il gatto (male cat)
la gatta (female cat)
in other cases it is just a grammatical convention

Alex2042

29 nov 2022

Paese o regione Cina

Grazie!

Petricore

1 dic 2022

Paese o regione Italia

It's a little bit complicated... It's a way to classify nouns. Italian has only 2, other languages has 3 or even, more rarely, 20.
I tell you what I learnt online about it. Languages weren't born with nouns classifications, but it is a result of evolution. In proto-indo-european language initially there was a distinction from animate and inanimate nouns where a suffix was added to create abstract nouns. With time, nouns with that suffix were grouped to form a class of nouns. In latin, the classification was made by gender. When most female names ended in -a and most male names ended in -o, the nouns and names were grouped together into two categories: feminine and masculine. So you can see that gender doesn't mean biological sex, if we call them "class 1" and "class 2", it wouldn't make a difference, it's just a way to classify nouns.
The advantage is that when we didn't hear well what the other person said, we can guess it more easily. For example, if we hear the article "il", our brain will only think of masculine words, so even if we didn't hear the whole sentence well, we can try to guess more easily.
Also we don't need to say "female cat" or "male cat" for example, but we can just change "gatto" to "gatta", "amico" to "amica" without the addition of other words.

Alex2042

2 dic 2022

Paese o regione Cina

@Petricore Well, thank you for the detailed explanation. I've learned a lot.☺️

DelioSunti

29 gen

Paese o regione Italia

@Alex2042 perché ci sono maschi e femmine e dalla realtà derivano le parole

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Why do languages like Italian have feminine and masculine words？

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Why do languages like Italian have feminine and masculine words？ Vedi una traduzione

because it comes from Latin. Sometimes it's useful because it's more expressive; for example:il gatto (male cat)la gatta (female cat)in other cases it is just a grammatical convention

because it comes from Latin. Sometimes it's useful because it's more expressive; for example:il gatto (male cat)la gatta (female cat)in other cases it is just a grammatical convention

@Alex2042 perché ci sono maschi e femmine e dalla realtà derivano le parole

Why do languages like Italian have feminine and masculine words？

because it comes from Latin.
Sometimes it's useful because it's more expressive; for example:
il gatto (male cat)
la gatta (female cat)
in other cases it is just a grammatical convention

because it comes from Latin.
Sometimes it's useful because it's more expressive; for example:
il gatto (male cat)
la gatta (female cat)
in other cases it is just a grammatical convention