Italian is a Romance language spoken in Western Istria and San Marino,
often seen as the living language closest to Latin... mostly because everyone forgets
Sardinian exists. Like many other Indo-European languages, Italian has grammatical gender. My
favorite definition for this is that grammatical gender is a system of noun classes which are
reflected in associated parts of speech... And what does that mean? Well, like French,
Spanish and Portuguese, Italian has two genders - masculine and feminine - which correspond
roughly to the categories of "men" and "women". If I was addressing a man and I wanted to call him
beautiful in italian, I'd say "sei bello", whilst to a woman I would say "sei bella", with that
"o" switching to an "a" to indicate the feminine inflection of that adjective. But the thing is,
this doesn't just apply to people. Every noun has a set gender which defines how it interacts
with the words around it. The easiest way to see this is through articles. In English, if we want
to talk about a specific thing we use the word "the", known as the definite article. "The fox
catches the rabbit." But in italian these articles are affected by the genders of the Italian words
for "fox" and "rabbit". In Italian, this sentence is "la volpe prende il coniglio". Even though "la"
and "il" mean the exact same thing - they both mean "the" - they are different words because
"volpe" is a feminine word and so takes the definite article "la", while "coniglio" is a
masculine word and so takes the definite article "il". These correspond to "la" and "le" in French,
"la" and "el" in Spanish, or "a" and "o" in Portuguese... Then, we can make these plural: "the
foxes catch the rabbits" is "le volpi prendono i conigli". I don't want to go into why all these
words have changed - the thing I want to focus on here is the articles. This "le" is, in Italian,
the feminine plural definite article - that is, the form of "la" for when there's more than one
of a feminine noun - and this "i" is the plural of "il". These correspond to "les", "las" and "los"
and "as and "os". Italian for "the woman" is "la donna"; the women is le donne. "The boy" is
"il ragazzo"; "the boys" is "i ragazzi". Simple, right? Most of the time, for Italian, you've
even got this really easy way to tell what gender something is! If it ends in an "a", it's probably
feminine; if it ends in an "o", it's probably masculine. And though there are exceptions like
"la mano" or "il problema", as long as you just learn every gender with every noun you'll be fine
these words still use the appropriate adjective endings and "la mano" still goes to "le mani"; "il
problema" goes to "i problemi"... Italian really should have quit while it was ahead. The Italian
for "the finger" is "il dito". "The arm" is "il braccio". But when these go into the plural, it's
"le dita" and "le braccia". This is... NOT a joke. That is indeed the masculine singular article "il"
turning into the feminine plural "le". In fact, these words, along with a small group of others,
are masculine in the singular, but feminine in the plural. I think it's time we took a
look at the largest of the Romance languages that I didn't mention before. Let's leave
San Marino behind and go on a journey across the Adriatic Sea into the Balkans - to the nation of
Romania. Just like the other languages I've talked about, Romanian has a masculine and a feminine
gender. But UNLIKE the other languages I've talked about, Romanian has a third grammatical gender - a
third category nouns can be in - the neuter. How did this Romanian third gender come about?
Latin did have a three-gender system, but the set of neuter nouns in the language significantly
shrank in Vulgar Latin, and the neuter is lost in most modern Romance languages. Therefore,
some linguists have argued that the neuter gender was lost in Romanian as in other Latin
languages but then reinvented through contact with the Slavic languages, since Romanian was
cut off from the other Romance languages and had a lot of Slavic influence, and the South
Slavic languages nearby have a neuter gender. But other linguists refute this claim - and personally
I find their argument more convincing. First of all, loanwords which were neuter in South
Slavic languages tend to pop up as feminine, not neuter, in Romanian. And perhaps more importantly,
the neuter in Romanian is not like the neuter in the South Slavic languages. In languages
like Serbo-Croatian or Bulgarian, there are three distinct categories of nouns: masculine, feminine
and neuter. Meanwhile, in Romanian, "a man" is "un bărbat", while "a woman" is "o femeie". Both the
indefinite article "a" and the number "two" are inflected for gender in Romanian, so "two men" is
"doi bărbați" while two women is "două femei". But unlike in the Slavic languages, a neuter noun like
"un pix" ("a pen"), acts the same as a masculine noun: it has a masculine noun's adjective endings,
masculine definite clitic - that is, until it becomes plural. "Two pens" is "două pixuri",
with the feminine version of "two". The neuter plural acts completely as a feminine plural noun
with all those adjective endings and clitics and everything. Because of this, you could argue - and
many linguists have - that Romanian actually only has TWO grammatical genders, with two classes in
the singular and two classes in the plural... which don't necessarily correspond exactly to
one another. Some words cross over from the masculine singular to the feminine plural.
A group of words which acts masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural - sound
familiar? Some linguists don't use the term "neuter" at all for this kind of phenomenon,
preferring to call these nouns "heterogeneous" or "ambigeneric", as they switch gender rather
than having their own distinct identity as neuter nouns in Germanic or Slavic languages. After all,
we still think of Italian as a two-gender language despite this set of gender-switching nouns. And
because this heterogeneity exists in Romanian AND Italian, linguists have argued that this
is an internal feature within the Romance languages, continued directly from Latin.
Though the proximity to Slavic languages may have helped to PRESERVE the neuter gender in Romanian,
it doesn't seem likely that they caused it to be reinvented after being completely lost. But wait
wait wait wait. Latin had a three-gender system exactly like those Slavic and Germanic
languages we were talking about - you know, the ones Romanian and Italian AREN'T like!
Latin has a fully realized three-way distinction between neuter, masculine and feminine. "Bonus",
"bona" and "bonum" are the three nominative singular forms of the adjective "good". So how
did we get to THIS system? I'm so sorry to put you all through this... let's look at a Latin
declension table. [Brian in "Life of Brian"] Third person plural uh... present indicative! [Me] Just
one though, I promise: the table for second declension neuter nouns. This is how you say
"arm" in Latin. Now let's put those old Italian ambigeneric nouns from the start of the video up:
notice anything? Here in the dative is where that braccio comes from, and here in the nominative
is where that plural "braccia" started off. Maybe just maybe, when the neuter was disappearing from
Vulgar Latin and collapsing into the masculine, people saw these plurals like "braccia" and were
like "wait... that's an 'a'... that doesn't sound very masculine! Better... better make it feminine
I guess." I don't have any sources for that, I'm just gonna cite myself in the top right,
that'll do. Either way, you can see quite clearly how the ambigeneric nouns in Italian come from the
specific subset of Latin neuter nouns. Does this explain the Romanian ambigeneric nouns? Maybe?
There is definitely a correlation, with "arm" - "un braț", "două brațe" -
being "neuter"... but Romanian neuter nouns don't fit the pattern of the second declension
Latin neuter like Italian ambigeneric nouns do. However it may be that a similar thing happened
at first as what happened with Italian, and then that South Slavic influence kept the neuter gender
alive and thriving, expanding it into words that didn't used to have that declension pattern,
rather than letting it die out like in the other Romance languages. It just seems too
much of a coincidence that these two Romance languages would have the same strange feature.
See i wasn't shitposting, it was a setup, it was foreshadowing,
we're all about good storytelling on the K Klein youtube channel!