[This entry is taken from a chapter of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]
[Go to Part 1 of Words about sex and gender]
Sp. género
As we saw, Spanish did not inherit Lat. gĕnus from Latin through
uninterrupted, oral, patrimonial
descent, but rather borrowed it from Latin, just like English did. According to
DCEH, it is first attested in writing in a document from the year 1440. Since
we know that French borrowed the word from Latin much earlier, it is quite
likely that Spanish copied French in borrowing this word, much like English
did, a very common pattern from the medieval period.
The meanings of Sp. género may have also been
influenced by those of the French word. When Fr. genre was first
attested in the early 12th century, it was with the meaning first ‘sort, type’,
a sense that is not shared with Modern Spanish género, a sense that usually
translates as tipo or especie (though it is found in some
expressions, such as sin ningún género de dudas ‘indisputably,
undoubtedly’, lit. ‘with no sort of doubt’). The ‘sex’ and ‘grammatical gender’
senses of Fr. gen(d)re are attested in the 13th century (in the years 1200
and 1245, respectively), and those are shared by Sp. género. The ‘genre’
and ‘genus’ senses Other senses were added in later centuries, which were also
copied from French by Spanish (see below).[i]
As for the form of the word, we saw that the Latin word was gĕnus in both the nominative
and accusative singular wordfoms, though all other forms of the word contained
the stem gĕner‑
to which the inflectional suffixes were added. Patrimonial Spanish words
typically descend from the accusative singular form and Latin loans typically
come from the nominative singular form, so how do we explain the form género,
which has the er sounds found in the original word’s regular root? DCEH
argues that this word was probably borrowed from the plural nominative form gĕnera, which was later
adapted to the normal language endings. Note that the French loanword, which in
Old French was spelled genre, gerre or gendre, also
contained the r of the regular root, so it might have been French which
borrowed the plural form gĕnera
of the Latin word first, later making it singular, and that Spanish just
followed suit when it borrowed the word.
Later on, Spanish developed other senses for género
that are not found in French (or English), in particular the ‘product’ sense,
which translates into French as article or merchandise, and the
‘fabric’ sense, which translates into French as tissu (cf. Eng. tissue).[ii]
We will look more closely at the meanings of Sp. género in a section
below.
[i] Source: https://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/genre
(2022.10.13)
[ii] Cf. Gran diccionario
Larousse. 2007.
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