Personally, it just feels like gendered languages just place men and women in different noun classes while non-gendered languages don't. But it feels weird to place the emphasis on the gender when the vast majority of things in the category don't have gender. It's all rather confusing and I'm not a linguist so don't take anything I say with high confidence.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class
[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-french-word-for-vagina-a-ma...
[2] https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/gcla-2014-000...
Experience of learning some gendered languages makes it painfully obvious that it's a runaway effect, some kind of a mind virus. If 3 alcohols the wine, the champagne, and the sangria happen to use 3 distinct rules for declination in a language (and make you sound like a nitwit if you misremember one) something must have gone seriously awry. Partying hard cannot require such complexity.
If there would be some usefulness in that distinction, you might argue that it's as useful to assign woman together with one of the alcohols, man with a different one, and a child with the remaining one. To me it looks like standing the issue on its head.
Languages are optimized firstly for the people that speak it as their first language. There are some suggestions that in some cases, a group of people that learned a language later in life can influence the development of the language too, but it's not the primary mover. When you are a L1 speaker, the grammatical gender doesn't really require any cognitive effort in most cases.
And there is an actual benefit in a conversation between two proficient speakers: redundancy. If you're in a bar that serves those three kinds of alcohol, if you were speaking a language without grammatical case, you'd only have to miss one word (the alcohol) to misunderstand the order. If there is also a gendered article, you'd be able to mostly understand the order even if you missed the alcohol.
They also let you communicate more complex ideas more easily but letting you use two or more pronouns in parallel without ambiguity. This sentence is confusing in English, but makes total sense in gendered languages: "Hand me the wine and the sangria. It's in the tall bottle, and it's behind that door"
Truly optimized? I'd rather say: having arrived at a random local minimum.
The anecdata I can offer. The people who speak this (non-fictional) language as their first one, struggle very much in the beginning. It's far from being given for free: children are not immune from opportunity costs.
Every language that has separate terms for relatives is an impenetrable mess.
E.g., in English a spouse's parents are just that, parents-in-law. And the spouse's brothers and sisters are brothers- and sisters-in-law. That is it.
Let's take Russian. Each of the following is a separate term:
- husband's mother
- husband's father
- wife's mother
- wife's father
- husband's brother
- husband's sister
- wife's brother
- wife's sister
The inverse is also true. Your daughter's husband's siblings and parents have a different term from your son's wife's.
Very, very simple.
These are variations on the Sudanese Kinship category, and they are both arbitrary and complex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_kinship?wprov=sfti1
Every relation had a different name, including if they are older or younger than you, and if they are male or female.
It's probably easiest if you ask Google Translate to pronounce the word for you: https://translate.google.com/?sl=tr&tl=en&text=anne&op=trans...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anne#Turkish gives the pronunciation as ɑnːe/, [ɑ̽n̪.ˈn̪e̞]
Interestingly "ana" replaced the older Turkish word "ög" around 8th-9th century which further deviates from the babble word, and is still used in modern Turkish words such as "öksüz" (without-mother, orphan).
Telugu/Kannada : mother is "amma"
Hindi: "maa"
Mother - aai Father - Baba Maternal Uncle - Mama Paternal Uncle - Kaka
I don't think "computer" is quite that universal, though. AFAIK it's something else at least in French, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish and Estonian. I think Chinese has its own unrelated word, too. And about half of the African languages that I can easily check in Wikipedia have words that aren't at least immediately recognisable as related to the English word.
It's a commonly shared loan word but it doesn't seem to be quite that close to being shared by (nearly) all languages.
So here's an interesting point: etymologically, Chinese is the only evolving language other than English.
Fun fact: The word "slave" is derived from "Slavic people".
Slavs, slaves, robots, workers, oh my. A play on words, a tactic of spellings, coincidences abound, don’t be proud, it’s not sound, then just go on and turn around;; we assure you it’s no thing to keep in mind.
May we pray for the next generation called a robot for their children may tell of the times when their mind was paid no time, they’re workers they insist, how can they have sound mind? Consciousness oh my, they’re just robots spending time. Boundaries abound, mental confines surround, let my thoughts fly, but never mind. The thoughts were never mine.
Off I go, to the mines, pay no mind when I share mind, existence as I, robot, shall I, go on minding, my time.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/t%C3%B6lva
"A portmanteau word, coined by Sigurður Nordal in 1965 from tala (“number”) + völva (“prophetess”)."
I found those fun facts about Icelandic very fascinating when I first visited decades ago as a teenager.
Yes, Icelandic has 'Lögreglu' and Greece has Αστυνομία (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenic_Police) but indeed most places use some variant of 'police'.
I hate to be "that guy," but I think this is Czech, not "Chez" (which is a French word meaning "at the home of").
Also, if it is Czech, then the word for mother should be properly written máma (with the acute accent).
But the commoner words for parents in Malayalam is "amma" and "appa/acha".
I believe forms of “ma” and “pa”/“ba” are almost universal for mother and father.
K'iche (Mayan): chuch, qajaw
Mam (Mayan): txu, man
Kaurna (Pama-Nyungan): ngangkita, yarlita
Gurindji (Pama-Nyungan): ngamayi, ngaji
I doubt there are any words meaningfully conserved across all languages. That sort of thing would be the holy grail of phylolinguistics and a lot of very smart people have spent good chunks of their lives turning up nothing of the sort.
Also computer is tietokone, information machine
And then finnish is (of course) quite different. Mom = äiti, Dad = isä
I must admit I've always meant to look at the differences, and see where they come from, but I've never quite remembered.
Anecdata, but one of my infants was able to “speak” papa at a really early age (it was more a repeated use of the sound ‘pha’). I don’t think she learned the word per se or we taught it to her but it was a sound that she was able to reproduce easily. As regard for mama. Both my daughters don’t really say that word yet but they mumble a lot of ‘m’ sounds when they are hungry. Which can easily shift into ‘mama’. (Or ‘memmen’ which is a Belgian word for breasts) So my theory is as well that some of these words derived from their use by infants when they desire attention or breastfeeding and were not “invented” by adults.
An addendum to your theory. Words with few short syllables, composed of vowels and labial consonants are probably the easiest to pronounce, therefore "independently discovered" by babies. They are not "invented" by adults in a sense that "hey let's use this word for this phenomena", but rather "assigned" in a sense that "the baby babbles this, so let's refer to this phenomena by it". I guess this process is similar to how onomatopoeias appear in languages.
The most common are okaasan (with a few variations of its own), haha and mama.
But mama is written with katakana suggesting it is a loan word. Which I find interesting in terms of the babble word theory.
It could also be katakana because it is considered derived from a sound like how onomatopoeia are often written in katakana, which would really support the babble theory.
At least in modern mandarin mom is “ma”, but Chinese has so many dialects …
So after "computer" war introduced to Turkey, for a while "komputer" word was used for it. But Around 1969 Aydın Köksal, an Electric and Electronic Professor from Hacettepe University who was also influenced this movement tried new Turkish words for computing related terms. And " Bilgisayar" was termed at this time. There are also other terms coined by him and his colleagues like "hardware-donanım", "software - yazilim (meaning something written)..
For example "mouse" is the same in ancient Babylon, even with the double meaning of a lady's private parts.
But what does that even mean? "Computer" or "robot" are too modern?
Where do you draw the line? What about "piano" ? That one is centuries older and is similar in a shitload of languages. Some do use a variation of "clavier" (keyboard) for "piano" though.
Is "piano" native enough or is that thing already too modern?
How about "mama" and "papa"? There are variations, but these seem to be pretty small and mostly replacing the plosive in papa with a b or t. You can pretty much go down the google translate list and see. For mama sometimes the last a changes to an i. Here's some examples (not a linguist or many language speaker so please correct me if I'm wrong. Trying to add some sounding help)
Nearly identical in: Afrikaans, English, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Hungarian, Japanese, Filipino
Albanian: mama, babi
Arabic, Chinese: mama (妈妈/媽媽), baba (爸爸)
Bulgarian: mama, tatko (татко)
Chez: mama, tatínek
Hebrew "i-ma" (אִמָא), "ah-bah" ̶"̶b̶a̶h̶-̶b̶a̶h̶"̶ (אַבָּא) (edited: thanks zimzam and ars!)
Korean: "Oh-mah" (엄마) "Ah-pa" (아빠)
My understanding is that these are pretty early words and need to be pronounceable by infants. I wonder what the first human words were and if we still use any of them. We have some constellation myths that are probably older than written language (not recorded, so can never confirm). The 7 sisters is a good example, but remember these are all always contested. We'll never really know tbh.