Lots of languages divide words into categories, like male and female. How does that happen?
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Episode Notes
English is something of an outlier among Proto-Indo-European languages, which tend to divide their nouns into at least two or three categories or “genders”—male humans, female humans, animals, flat things, long things, and fiery things, to name several. Some languages around the world have dozens of such categories, and they often seem maddeningly arbitrary. John McWhorter explains how these quirky systems evolve.
Podcast production by Mike Vuolo.