Japanese nouns have no gender or number. Please elaborate.

[lorraine]

Hi,

While reading some lessons about the Japanese language, I come across this phrase "Japanese nouns have no gender or number." (Quoting from Characteristics of Japanese Grammar - What are the characteristics of Japanese grammar ?) The first that came through my mind though, is "shonuen" and "shojou" which, if I'm not mistaken, one refers to a young boy, the other to a young girl. So, those words are definitely gender-specific, so how come the statement says Japanese nouns have no gender?

Thanks.

 

[Half-n-Half]

Spanish, for example, has gender-specific nouns. "El" refers to a masculine noun and "la" refers to a feminine noun. In that sense, Japanese has no gender-specific nouns. It does not mean they do not have words for gender.

 

[Guregori]

'Gender' in linguistics refers to nouns being masculine or feminine.
For example, most European languages have 'grammatical' gender in which all nouns (even objects) are masculine or feminine, often depending on their forms.

In Spanish, la mesa (the table) is a feminine noun (because it ends in an -a), and el suelo (the floor) is masculine (because it ends in -o). This affects the grammar, i.e. why it's la mesa and el suelo.

English (like Japanese) doesn't have gender, so the table and the floor are the same in grammatical terms.

However, of course, in all languages there are nouns that refer to things that are (biologically) male or female, like man, woman, boy, girl, but that's different from grammatical gender.

 

[lorraine]

I got it. Thanks for the clarification, guys.

 

[Zlarp]

Different languages sometimes have things that others can't say at all. For example there are languages that have a singular, a dual, and a plural, so you have a grammatical form to talk about things that two people do, with the verb conjugations to go along with it. Russian has cases which make it neccessary to say if a process has finished or not - you know, things that make translators tear their hair out (Did this stupid author talk about two people here or more? I can't write it in this language without that knowledge. Same for this action - I have to decide if it's finished or not and the text doesn't say which one is true)

Japanese gets away with leaving a surprising amount of stuff out. Who needs plural forms? Who needs gender? Who needs future tenses? Who needs subjects and objects to make a sentence? It's all silly because you can see it from context!

[edit: I guess there are kinds of plural forms, but I'm not sure if you'd call them grammatical?]