Why is "das Weib" grammatically neuter?

Question

The word das Weib, meaning woman, is grammatically neuter. While the gender of nouns is generally unpredictable from their meaning, it is unusual that a word with such an explicitly feminine meaning (can't get more feminine in meaning than "woman"!) would be grammatically neuter.

Is there a simple explanation for this, based on the history / etymology of the word?

I am expecting something comparable to the explanation of why Fräulein is also neuter: because the (diminutive) suffix -lein always creates neuter words, regardless of the root's meaning. I expect the explanation for Weib would need to go back much further in history though (the Old English cognate, wif, was also neuter).

Feel free to migrate to Linguistics.SE if it fits better there.

Answer 1

Since the etymology of Weib is unknown (1,2), there is also no way to explain its gender.

Answer 2

'Das Weib' and its cognates is or has been neuter in most Germanic languages. The word dates at least back to Proto-Germanic in the period before common era, and was already then neuter. There are conflicting information about the origin of the word. Wiktionary relates the word possibly to Proto-Indo-European *gʰwíh₂bʰ-, which had a different meaning.

One likely explanation, is actually that the word, be it *gʰwíh₂bʰ- or not, originally was of neuter gender, but had a different meaning and therefore did not deviate from the usual correlation. While the meaning changed to 'a female person', the neuter gender was kept.

Several comments and answers seem to implicate that grammatical gender and biological sex are two completely different things. This is simply wrong. There is a strong correlation between grammatical gender and biological sex in all Indo-European languages with a distinction between masculine and feminine genders. The split into masculine and feminine genders is also assumed to be rooted in the distinction between biological sexes and goes back to some time in the Proto-Indo-European period. It is assumed that the Proto-Indo-European language originally only had a distinction between animate and inanimate objects and that the animate 'gender' split into masculine and feminine, while the inanimate gender turned into neuter. In the North Germanic languages and some Slavic languages, there is still remains of a gender-like distinction between animate and inanimate things.

There are exeptions, e.g. the already mentioned German words 'Fräulein' and 'Mädchen', which are neuter because all diminutive forms are neuter, but in general, most words solely referring to male persons are of the masculine grammatical gender and most words solely referring to female persons are of the feminine grammatical gender. With a few more exceptions, but still in general, this also applies to words referring to animals. It is a very legit question to ask why 'das Weib' does not follow the general rule.

Edit: Based on user unknown's comment, it seems that I have to clarfiy, as he didn't understand what I wrote. I do not claim, that all words of masculine gender refer to objects of male biological sex, that all words of feminine gender refer to objects of female biological sex and that all words of neuter gender refer to things. I am saying that if a word refers solely to a male living object, the word has most likely masculine grammatical gender: der Mann, der Ochse, der Hengst. If a word refers solely to a female living object, the word has most likely feminine gender: die Frau, die Kuh, die Stute.

To quote from Wikipedia on the topic Grammatical vs. natural gender:

The natural gender of a noun, pronoun or noun phrase is a gender to which it would be expected to belong based on relevant attributes of its referent. This usually means masculine or feminine, depending on the referent's sex (or gender in the sociological sense). For example, in Spanish, mujer ("woman") is feminine whereas hombre ("man") is masculine; these attributions occur solely due to the semantically inherent gender character of each noun.

The grammatical gender of a noun does not always coincide with its natural gender. An example of this is the German word Mädchen ("girl"); this is derived from Maid "maiden", umlauted to "Mäd-" with the diminutive suffix -chen, and this suffix always makes the noun grammatically neuter. Hence the grammatical gender of Mädchen is neuter, although its natural gender is feminine (because it refers to a female person).

Normally, such exceptions are a small minority.

Answer 3

Certain things have already been established in other answers, and we have not got very far, so let us see what we have got and where we go next.

Firstly, Weib is of unknown origin. Although it has been traced back quite a few centuries in a "womanly" sense, we cannot rule out the possibly that it meant something else before that. But we have nothing to go on to come up with a definitive explanation. The best we can do is to consider what might cause this situation, and see which looks most plausible or has any evidence to support it.

The second thing is that whilst it is true that grammatical gender and biological sex are not the same thing, it is also true that the vast majority of words for females are feminine and the vast majority of words for males are masculine. Weib is therefore an exception that it is worth looking for an explanation for.

There are several things that I can think of that could in theory explain such an anomaly.

1. There could have been a semantic shift - that is, the word could originally have meant something else. We simply cannot tell as we do not know where the word came from. However, I can give an example of a word in another language. Boireannach /bɔrʲənəx/ is the Scots Gaelic for a woman but is masculine. The usual explanation for this is that it was the neuter form of an adjective meaning "female" and was used as a noun meaning "something female". There is a corresponding word fireannach /firʲənəx/ meaning "man". But then two things happened. Firstly we lost our neuter and almost all neuter nouns became masculine. This does not concern us here. The second is that society changed and a new, general-purpose word for a woman was needed, where before there had been maidens and wives, regarded as separate categories, and with no over-arching term. Thus, at its simplest, this anomaly was caused by a change in the meaning of a word.

2. Changing view of what female means. We have a fairly biological definition of female, but in the past, would someone who was not married or ready for marriage, who had not had sex and who had not developed adult female characteristics be regarded as female? Before you were old enough for marriage you were a Mädchen, essentially asexual and thus neuter, and then, when you were only just reaching physical maturity (with younger marriage and older puberty than today), you would marry, become a Frau and thus be regarded as a functional female. It is noticeable that several of the examples quoted in other answers are for females or people of unspecified gender that would not have reached sexual maturity: das Fräulein, das Kind, das Mädchen, das Baby (which is often "it" even in English). To add an example from another language, we have Greek τέκνον (teknon) which is a neuter word for a child. It is difficult to see how this could explain the gender of Weib but we cannot rule it out as we do not know the origin.

3. Origin in a genderless language. One possibility, since we do not know the origin of the three-gender system in Proto-Indo-European, is that all neuter words in PIE come from one language, and all masculine and feminine words come from another.

These are the possibilites as I see them. If anyone can add any others, or provide any arguments as to which might be relevant to Weib, please do.

Answer 4

From other answers, it is clear now that the true reason is lost in the mists of time. It is still interesting (and linguistically useful) to speculate about not completely implausible reasons, so we can get an idea of how this might happen at all. (David Robinson shows one not-so-obvious way how a similar gender-mismatch came about in Scottish Gaelic.)

I found a blog post by Anatoly Liberman, a linguist, on the very same topic:

Were ancient ‘wives’ women?

I will quote the relevant paragraph, while noting that the author himself makes it clear that this is mere speculation.

Among the Old Scandinavian goddesses, we find Sif. Her name, derived from Indo-European si-bh, is related to Engl. sib and Latin su-us “one’s own.” Sif must have been the patroness of family ties. The only recorded myth in which she plays a visible role, points to fertility, rather than affinity by marriage, but the concepts of family and fertility are close. I compared Sib and the personal pronoun we. The protoform of we was wis (with “long i, that is, wees, if spelled in today’s English); -s was an ending. I think that Old Germanic wibh, the protoform of wife, was wi-bh a formation parallel to sibh. If I am right, sibh meant “all the people related by marriage,” while wibh referred to a group tracing its origin to the same woman. It was a word like y’all. Wibh, as I see it, had to be neuter, because it was the name of a community whose members descended or believed that they had descended from the same woman. It included both males and females, and in Germanic, when a pronoun like they covered “mixed company,” the form was always neuter (John and Jack needed the masculine they, Betty and Mary would be covered by the feminine they, whereas Jack and Jill required the neuter they). As time went on, the word meaning “we, descendants of one woman” came to mean “woman.” Wife emerged as a term of social relations, but the old grammatical gender remained. The old Indo-European word for “woman” (preserved by Engl. quean) also survived, but it narrowed its sphere of application and came to denote “woman in her biological (child bearing) function.”

Answer 5

Note that there is a part of the German speaking area, where women have the neuter grammatical gender. This area stretches from the South-Western fringe (Switzerland, Alsace, Lorraine, Saarland, and then makes a turn towards the centre of today's Germany. Maybe the word Weib got its meaning and gender in a part of this area and spread out from there.

Answer 6

First of all you always should be aware of two facts:

1. Grammatical gender is a property of a noun (i.e. of a word). It is not a property of the thing that is named with this noun.
2. The biological sex of a person and the grammatical gender of a word that is used to name this person are different things.

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An example for #1:

The English word "car" can be translated in may ways into German. The possible translations are not perfect synonyms, but when we are are talking about a rusty old limousine you can translate »the car« (which has no gender at all in English) in these three ways into German:

• Das Auto

  This is a neuter noun and it is the standard translation for "car".

• Der Wagen

  This is a masculine noun and it means literal "the carriage" but is often used for bigger cars like limousines.

• Die Karre

  This is a feminine noun and it is used for shabby old cars.

So, while these nouns have three different grammatical genders, they still can be used as names for the very same car.

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Other examples for #2:

• Das Mädchen

  This is also a neuter noun, and it means girl. It is a diminutive, and in German all diminutives are neuter.

• Das Fräulein

  Again a diminutive that was used for young ladies. It is outdated and considered not to be politically correct anymore.

• Die Tunte

  This is a female noun used for some men (la-di-da gay man)

• Das Kind

  Meaning: Child. It is a neuter noun, but is used for persons who may be male or female.

• Das Baby

  Meaning: Baby, toddler. Same as before.