I’m a German in his early thirties and also
- a linguist: well, at least I have a master’s degree. While I have never done any serious research or fieldwork, I know enough about linguistics that I guess I still somehow deserve the title. My languages of interest lie primarily with the Balto-Finnic and Celtic languages; I speak Finnish and Irish in addition to my mother tongue, and, well, English. There’s also some Old Irish and Japanese left. Learning Italian at the moment, which is kind of underwhelming.
- a piper: I play the uilleann pipes, a type of bagpipe native to Ireland, and have been active in Irish traditional music for some years. You can find me in sessions in the Munich area, usually in a corner and with a scowl on my face because people are playing in a key my instrument can’t handle. Damn fiddles.
- a conculturer: I create languages, scripts and the associated cultures as a hobby, which somewhat relates to my linguistic background and will probably forever be the only thing where I actually apply the things I’ve learned. Got a blog about my conlanging efforts here on Quora: The Conblog. I set my works in the world of Final Fantasy VII, which brings us to the next item…
- a gamer: Really hesitate to call myself this. I play video games, infrequently these days, but still. I still own a Super Nintendo and a Nintendo 64 with most of the classic titles of a bygone age; on the PC, I’m all for Europa Universalis and Final Fantasy (VII, VIII, IX, X).
- a programmer: It’s my job. I do web development. Got a CS degree and everything, but really don’t ask me stuff about it. I can find my way in JS, Java and Scala - good enough for me.
- a writer: of fanfiction. Not comparing myself to Tolkien here, but I write for a similar reason that he did - to give life to my languages and cultures. It’s all in German and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
I seem to answer mostly questions about Germany, the German language as well as linguistics and language in general. Like many others, I forward the interested reader to Oscar Tay, who puts in way more effort in answering questions on the last topic than I ever could.
Oh, and that’s an otter over there. Found him on Google. Otters are awesome.
Thanks for the A2A. Martin Smith has the historical reasons - the genders were part of the older stages of all Indo-European languages, but many of them lost some distinctions later.
Romance and Celtic have for the most part lost the neuter, Continental North Germanic has folded masculine and feminine into a common gender, as has Dutch. English is one of the descendant languages that has lost gender distinctions entirely; others are Persian, Armenian and Bengali, but in Europe, English is the only Indo-European language with total loss.
German has kept all three, together with most (all?) Slavic languages, Albanian, Greek, and Icelandic. The Indo-European languages of India seem to either have three genders of lose the neuter, if they haven’t given up gender completely. Here’s a map for Europe:
Red - masculine/feminine
Yellow - common/neuter
Dark blue - masculine/feminine/neuter,
Light blue - no gender
Green - animate/inanimate (this is Basque, which isn’t Indo-European)
I’d also like to mention that one could analyse German as actually having four genders because the gender difference collapses in the plural - you’d effectively treat the plural as another class nouns can belong to. “Gender” is a rather shaky term anyway - it’s a largely arbitrary classification category for nouns and has little to nothing to do with biological gender. Girls are neuter in German and masculine in Irish, and in Sicilian, the penis is feminine, while the vagina is masculine (got no source for that, just read it somewhere - but Latin mentula “penis” is also feminine).
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