Linguistic what if: English retains its grammatical genders:

Cwenhild

By the 1200s grammatical genders had collapsed in all English dialects and all definite articles was just reduced to "the."

In Old English as in modern Germanic languages there were different versions of "the" depending on the gender and then there's gender neutral:
Example the masculine form is "Se." The Femine is "Seo" Gender neutral is "paet" (pronounced "thaet" in the old English alphabet ) and plural Pa (tha)
And things go on in the accusative, genitive and dative.
Anyway has anyone wondered what those would sound in modern English today if it had retained its grammatical genders. This is an interesting video of how English grammatical genders might have evolved had they survived through the centuries.

A hypothetical alternate modern English sentence today: "Tho folk are in thome housem." (The people are in the houses.)


 

Karmirdgul

The POV you're looking for is a simple one: butterfly all Norse invasions away. Norse influence (and bilingualism) was the key factor that led to the erosion of gender in the transition from Old to Middle English, since gender in English words doesn't always align with that of their cognates in Norse.
 

faddllz

Karmirdgul said:
The POV you're looking for is a simple one: butterfly all Norse invasions away. Norse influence (and bilingualism) was the key factor that led to the erosion of gender in the transition from Old to Middle English, since gender in English words doesn't always align with that of their cognates in Norse.
Click to expand...
from this, we can get an interesting tl : english still get it's french words and sway, but keep it's gender.
 

Ciryatur

You should use Thorn (Þ,þ) as opposed to P,p.

That aside, it depends on the following history. No or little Norse influence from the Vikings will butterfly the Normans. There would still be French influence but not to the amount we had OTL.

We probably see some words lose their genders as unstressed vowel reduction was already happening as of Norse invasions and final vowels would devoice and be lost.
 

funnyhat

Karmirdgul said:
The POV you're looking for is a simple one: butterfly all Norse invasions away. Norse influence (and bilingualism) was the key factor that led to the erosion of gender in the transition from Old to Middle English, since gender in English words doesn't always align with that of their cognates in Norse.
Click to expand...
I suspect the Norman conquest was a bigger factor still. Within the Indo-European branches (Romance, Germanic, Slavic...) there tends to be some consistency about gender but across branches there can be great variation : in French, the sun is masculine and the moon is feminine, while in German they are the opposite.

I'm not an expert on Old Norse but would guess that, being Germanic, it still was somewhat aligned in gender with the Anglo-Saxon language. Old French also had three genders, but these may not have aligned much at all, leading to confusion and simplification.

I would guess that, had the Norman conquest failed, English would still have grammatical gender. Not only would you not see the misalignment of gender with Old French, but English would have remained the literary language of the kingdom, and literary languages tend to become more conservative. IOTL, English was mostly an oral language for three centuries after the conquest, which facilitated rapid evolution.
 
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Gloss

Karmirdgul said:
The POV you're looking for is a simple one: butterfly all Norse invasions away. Norse influence (and bilingualism) was the key factor that led to the erosion of gender in the transition from Old to Middle English, since gender in English words doesn't always align with that of their cognates in Norse.
Click to expand...
We discussed this before but I think this theory is over-emphasized, it's during middle English that English lost its genders not the Norse period.
Contact with Norse and French were 2 factors but how much they were responsible is impossible to know and we shouldn't pretend we can tell.
 

Janprimus

Analytical Engine said:
Some variants of Dutch, Danish and Swedish had their masculine and feminine genders merge into a single "common" gender (something similar has happened in certain dialects of Norwegian). Assuming Alt-English does maintain grammatical gender, something like this could happen as well.

en.wikipedia.org

Gender in Danish and Swedish - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
Click to expand...
In Dutch we have 'de' (for male and female) and 'het' (it, our neuter). Often you don't notice it being male or female, but there are rules. Something abstract generally is female, but something concrete is male. There are historic notorious exceptions, like City Council being male (wonder for how long though). So for example, the City Council made his statement. Diminutives also become neuter, so it is 'het jongetje' (the little/young boy), but 'de jongen' (the boy)....
 
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