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Hebrew nouns are designated as either masculine or feminine. Is that part of the Halachah LeMoshe MiSinai, or it is an artificial construct that was added when scholars started creating grammar rules to facilitate studying the language?
It is very much part of Torah Mi’Sinai. You’ll see all over Torah Shebichsav uses of nouns in either masculine or feminine. Some nouns have dual forms, as Rashi al haTorah points out (is it in Chayei Soroh? Can’t remember).
It is Mesorah, whether it is a noun or verb! It says in Bereishis (2:23) – וַיֹּ֘אמֶר֘ הָֽאָדָם֒ (and Adam said). In Breishis (3:2) it says וַתֹּ֥אמֶר הָֽאִשָּׁ֖ה אֶל־הַנָּחָ֑שׁ (and the woman said to the snake).
Vayomer – M
Vatomer – FHashem created Loshon Kodesh.
There’s clear lashon zachar and nekeivah in Chumash.
DovidBT,
The facts that “eretz” is a feminine noun and “makom” is a masculine noun were told to Moses by Hashem. The gender labels are not just an arbitrary human-created convention to help remember the language structure.
I’m not sure why there has to be an either-or setup here. In the Chumash, we see some words treated as feminine (i.e., treated the same way grammatically as female people), and others as masculine. No convention has to be invented to see this.
Most languages have genders. It isn’t a strict correlation with “male” and “female”, but its an easy way to remember them. English lost most of its genders during the middle ages. Many Germanic languages have three genders. Some have more (i.e. more than three classes for words, and related grammatical forms).
While some secular (and I suspect, monolingual) feminists get crazy over this, its just a set of rules. Like computer programming. It isn’t worth philosophizing over.
It’s not just a feminist thing. It can get confusing keeping track of which grammatical gender to use for each object.
RebYidd: Be happy Hebrew has only two. Most Germanic languages, including Yiddish, have three. Some languages have more. English is actually one of few languages with very little gender (we still have it for third person pronouns, but not for common nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.. Being “spoiled” by English’s simplicity means that grammatical gender is a problem for Anglophones.
Someone might be able to convince me that when Chumash was given, “Hu” and “Hi” didn’t necessarily correlate to “he” and “she”, respectively. Or, at least, that it was possible for there to be exceptions that made them more or less interchangeable. But words in Chumash are absolutely gendered. Whether we solidified and/or altered the rules later is a separate discussion. But the concept exists from Sinai.
Sam, some words are ambiguous. There is a discussion about this at the beginning of Kiddushin.
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