Articles such as ‘de’ and ‘het’ or, in German, ‘der’, ‘die’ and ‘das’ often make the information that comes after these words a bit more predictable. It makes communication between people faster and more pleasant.
But there is also a drawback to such a system of ‘grammatical gender’. It takes children or adults who are trying to master Dutch, a lot of time to learn which words get ‘de’ and which words go with ‘het’. The research carried out by linguist Dorothée Hoppe examines these advantages and disadvantages – or in other words: the usefulness – of grammatical gender. recently obtained his PhD from the University of Groningen.
Whether a word is a ‘the’ word or an ‘the’ word depends on many factors and is also partly arbitrary. There are regularities to be discovered – flowers, trees and fruits, for example, all get the definite article ‘the’ – but often you simply have to learn it word for word.
For those who speak their native language, this is no problem. As a baby and child, he had years to learn that. For an adult learning Dutch, it is more complicated. He will probably never fully master it. People who have only learned Dutch at a later age often use ‘de’ instead of ‘het’. Logical, because ‘de’ is much more common in Dutch than ‘het’ – so if you don’t know for a while, the chance of ‘de’ is greater than that of ‘het’. In her experiments, Hoppe compared the German system of three genders (‘der’, ‘die’ and ‘das’) with the English system. In English, all nouns get ‘the’. There, therefore, articles do not indicate grammatical gender.
Figures
Hoppe showed people four geometric figures. For example, a square, a triangle, a circle and an arrow. Each of those figures had its own color: blue, yellow, purple, orange… Then a red frame appeared around one of the four figures. The participant had to formulate a command sentence: “Click on…”. In English: “Please click on…” In German: “Bitte klicke auf…”
For example, if the subject had to point to a purple square, he or she had two options; with or without an adjective (in this case the color). In Dutch it would then become: “Click on THE SQUARE”, or “Click on THE PURPLE SQUARE”. In English, participants appeared to opt for the last option, ie with an adjective, significantly more often than in German. In doing so, they seemed to compensate for the grammatically neutral article use of English. The addition “purple” makes what follows predictable, because of the figures shown, only the square is purple.
In German, on the other hand, the choice of the feminine, masculine or neuter article already provides a certain predictability of what is to come. For example, it is “Bitte klicke auf DAS Viereck”, but “Bitte klicken auf DEN Ring”.
Thanks to the article you often already know what follows: should ‘the’ door close or ‘the’ window?
Translated into Dutch: if you have to choose between a square and a circle and you say: “click on the …”, then it is clear that the word “square” follows, because it is “THE circle” and “ The square”. Because English has only one article, speakers of that language tend to increase the predictability of the figure by naming its color.
Dorothée Hoppe saw something else happen in her experiment. If the figures that the test subject saw in German all had the same grammatical gender, an adjective was used more often there too. This indicates that in the brain the other words that are not spoken are made equally active, both in the person who produces the sentences and in the person who listens to them.
What does this mean for our communication? In many everyday situations and conversations, there are only a limited number of possibilities. As soon as the article falls, a number of possibilities are already dropped. In a classroom, just before class begins, a teacher says, “Can you please do it…” Once “it” has been dropped, it is clear that it is not about closing “the” door, but possibly about closing it from the window.
Irregularities
This communicative advantage of grammatical gender is offset by the disadvantage that learning such a system for the first time takes a lot of energy. All kinds of irregularities in a language, such as the arbitrariness of ‘de’ and ‘het’, are generally adopted enthusiastically and quite uncritically by new generations.
In this way, such a system can survive for thousands of years. Exactly what happened in the Indo-European language family, to which almost all European languages belong: grammatical gender has a long history there. It probably started (six thousand years or more ago) with a distinction between living beings on the one hand and the rest of reality (objects, substances, abstractions, et cetera) on the other.
Subsequently, a second distinction arose in living beings, between male and female beings. Subsequently, objects and the like were also sometimes seen as male or female. Thus, more than a thousand years ago, Dutch, like German, had a distinction between masculine, feminine and (which was originally nonliving) neuter. The corresponding articles were: ‘der’, ‘die’ and ‘that’.
Because the sound of those words became flatter, the distinction between masculine and feminine disappeared: ‘der’ and ‘die’ both became ‘the’. ‘That’ became ‘it’, or rather, as we pronounce it: ‘t’. As a result, Dutch only has a distinction between sided (‘de’) and neuter (‘het’).
If a language has many non-native speakers, such a system can erode further or even disappear. Then the disadvantage that it is difficult for you to learn the system as a non-native speaker becomes too great and it adapts. This happened in Afrikaans, which is descended from Dutch, but now, like English, has only one form: ‘die’. In English, the distinction between masculine, feminine and neuter disappeared around the year 1000, when there were many non-native speakers: people who originally spoke a Celtic language or French.