3min chapter

Long Now: Seminars About Long-term Thinking cover image

Lera Boroditsky: How Language Shapes Thought

Long Now: Seminars About Long-term Thinking

CHAPTER

The Arbitrariness of Gender in Languages

There seems to be a whole lot of arbitrariness in language, says Michael Lyons. He and his colleagues compared grammatical genders across European languages. They found correlation for animal genders but no correlation for artifacts. The same word adopted about the same time in two different languages is assigned gender based on principles of convenience.

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