Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take
antigonejournal.com
antigonejournal.com
It is one of those mysteries that several major language families all do it in a similar way. From Ancient Egyptian to Latin to small languages spoken in New Guinea, there is a common pattern of grammatical markings associated with indicating a person or animal's sex, ending up used to indicate noun classes and govern alignment/agreement patterns.
But why? Well, in languages like Latin with fairly free word order, noun classes and the associated agreement help indicate what goes with what. My take is that it's almost like a form of forwards error correction or type annotation. The way it arises like that doesn't seem too far-fetched.
The persistence is tricky though. Normally a feature in a language that isn't productive is going to get worn down by sound changes, etc. and eventually lost. But grammatical gender rarely gets lost. (English is a major exception as an Indo-European language here.) Even as Latin transformed over thousands of years into French, with grammar and phonology that are basically unrecognizable, a basic gender system persists in the language. I can only assume its error correcting/type annotating properties are still useful even in modern French?
In English, many animals are referred to with "he" or "she". Being a mammal, large, being domesticated, being familiar, are all more likely to be animate rather than inanimate. A pet mare is going to be "she". Insects are always "it". Livestock or a reptile might get either. Babies sometimes get treated as inanimate. ("Is it a boy or girl?")
I'm not quite sure how much credence to give his opinion considering that his expertise was in pain, misery, and shooting guns rather than linguistics and grammar, but he certainly had strong beliefs on the subject, and I wasn't going to try to convince him otherwise.
It's not a grammar rule, it's a social rule.
It's important to note that neuter is distinct from "gender"-less nouns
I guess that's because a child is not a fully developed man/woman, so it's assumed genderless.
For example (Luraghi 2018): "More than simply indicating referential sex, Luraghi (2009b: 127 and 2011) makes the argument, with which Melchert (2014: 264) agrees, that an involvement in procreation may have played a role in gender assignment in PIE. It may have been a key factor motivating the split between masculine and feminine. Nouns that referred to male or female humans/animals were, for the most part, assigned to masculine and feminine, respectively (Lundquist and Yates 2018: 2095). For example, there was the masculine noun ph2tḗr ‘father’ beside feminine méh2tēr ‘mother’ and wĺ̥kwos ‘(he-)wolf’ beside wl̥kwíhxs ‘she-wolf’ (Lundquist and Yates 2018: 2095). However, words that indicated children and young animals were often neuter in the IE languages (Melchert 2014: 264), e.g. Gk. téknon, OHG kind, and OCS dětę (Lundquist and Yates 2018: 2095). The humans/animals to which those nouns refer are too young to procreate, so, despite being physically animate, they are grammatically neuter.
A questionnaire experiment determined that feminine anaphors were used more if Mädchen referred to, for example, an eighteen-year-old girl “as opposed to a two- or [twelve]-year-old one, where neuter pronouns were more frequent. These results show that speakers perceive biological sex as more important for adults than for children” (Corbett and Fedden 2016: 522). This supports Luraghi’s theory that involvement in procreation was a factor—alongside individuation—in gender assignment in PIE"
Words that refer to children and which aren't of neuter gender today may simply be of later origin, when the system stopped being productive. For example, the Russian word for "child" is rebenok, which today has masculine gender, but stems from earlier "rebia" which was neuter (a synonym of another word, "ditia", also neuter).
Just adding some info maybe others can comment.
Same for Russian "rebia" (rare declension) which became rebenok (common declension) by assigning -ok suffix which happens to be masculine. Or in Greek, masculine "pais" had unproductive declension (gen. paidos) so it was assigned diminutive suffux -ion which happens to be neuter, hence modern Greek "paidi" is neuter.
There are thousands of languages. They have all kinds of different noun class systems including none at all. By “most languages” you probably mean “most of the widely-known Indo-European languages”.
I kid. Of course it was the purges leading up to WW2. I think they would have eventually developed as robust a concept of gender as we have today. It wasn't that long ago that we only had a concept in English of two binary sexes with gender being bound to secondary sexual characteristics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen...
It's also worth noting that grammatical gender evolves over time. Originally, most Indo-European languages had the three classes of feminine, masculine, and neuter. But, for example, French's loss of the neuter class is pretty recent. We're also seeing modern efforts to drive these processes with, for example, the usage of the gender-neutral term "Latine" instead of "Latino" or "Latina".
Early Proto-Indoeuropean is theorized to have 2 genders - animate/inanimate, but by the late PIE period it evolved to the classic three.
Of course, this is largely theoretical like you said, and I'm sure you could dig up some dissenting papers if you wanted to.
For example, there are some adjectives in Latin and Ancient Greek, which only have two declensions instead of three: one common declension for masculine/feminine, and one for neuter.
For example: naturalis (masc), naturalis (fem), naturale (neut), as opposed to novus (masc), nova (fem), novum (neut).
Edit: Oh, I translated this as alive/not alive. Guess, this was originally down to soul. Not advocating to go down that path again…
Typically in comparing Latin with modern Romance, the merger of neuter into masculine is one of the loss of distinguishing suffices. You can't distinguish between bonus and bonum if the final constant is lost and they are both bonu (or bueno in Spanish).
But some words didn't distinguish masculine from neuter by just a consonant. Take iste (m) and istud (n). Remove final consonants and you have iste and istu. So in Spanish there's este and esto. The different vowel gets preserved, so you can distinguish between masculine and neuter still, where with most words you cannot.
"Champagne", "Vitrine" as exemple.
The ""new"" gender neutral a woke fashion that has disregard for people with dyslexia or people who needs software to read (blind).
I think you have it backwards. The term “gender” meant grammatical gender, i.e. noun classes, before being extended by analogy to the current meaning.
[0]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gender&year_st...
You realize that the use of gender for grammatical noun class is the original meaning of the word, correct? Gender comes from the Latin genus, generis (via Old French), which means type, kind, sort. The genders in Latin were called masculine, feminine, and neuter because one of the noun classes contained most, but not all of the nouns that refer to males, one of them contain the nouns that refer to females, and the last one, neuter, literally means neither.
If anything, it's English that is to blame here for taking the original meaning and corrupting it. I believe most non-english languages, when they want to use the modern English sense of gender, either borrow the word directly from English or just use a translation of sex role.
Are you talking about grammar here? Because in many (most?) languages gender is not binary.
When the Romans started to get interested in grammar, genus came to mean “kind” of noun or “gender”, but because genus could also refer to biological sex, male and female, these concepts were occasionally conflated.
It's the same for Greek γένος, e.g. in Plato's Symposium:
> πρῶτον μὲν γὰρ τρία ἦν τὰ γένη τὰ τῶν ἀνθρώπων, οὐχ ὥσπερ νῦν δύο, ἄρρεν καὶ θῆλυ --189d
It's fair to translate that into modern English as "Originally there were three genders [or sexes] of human being, not two like now, male and female", but the specific meaning of sex or gender isn't there, just kind. It's a general word being used in a general way (literally, in fact: genus -> general).
Genere in Italian comes from the Latin word genus and means biological sex for people and animals but also kind.
Translate genere to English
noun
1. gender
2. kind
What kind of beast is that? -> Che genere di bestia è?
What's that book genre? -> Di che genere è quel libro?
How to write gender questions -> come scrivere domande sul genere
The other way round, that this loss of word separators and punctuations had been possible at all illustrates rather well the amount of redundancy and robustness this system introduces in a language.
I just looked up Danish - it used to have masculine, feminine and neuter, but masculine disappeared into feminine. The theory given here is that it was a consequence of bilinguals simplifying things:
https://dialekt.ku.dk/dialekter/dialekttraek/navneordenes_ko...
It wouldn't surprise me if modern English is a result of the same kind of multilingual simplification.
Everything is classified into one of a bunch of classifiers, where a bunch might be a few dozen? Maybe hundreds, I'm not sure.
Some really common ones:
Rational beings like people, God, angles, etc. = "gha" (but not spirits, demons, ghosts, etc.; they are animals)
Flat things like the earth, plates, leaves, fields, the sky, etc. = "bae" (but modern Karens sometimes use "round" for the earth and moon instead)
Round things like balls, houses, rocks, a person or animals head, eyes, etc. = "pler"
Long skinny things like a stick, snake, road, etc = "bo"
Most kinds of animals = "doo" (but fish and birds are flat, and insects are round)
These words show up all over the place in basic grammar. Like "5 cows" would be "cows 5 doo". Sometimes they stand in for the actual name of what you're talking about, for example you might say "this cow" as "ta doo ee" and drop the word for cow entirely.
Sort of like you can say "a sheet of paper" or "5 sheets of paper" in English to count papers, but imagine you could also say "typing on a sheet", or "your sheet is full of typos", or "could you hand me a sheet", where "sheet" is a broad category and that you mean a sheet of paper comes from the context in which the sentence is spoken.
Edit: Another interesting use for them is disambiguation. Super useful if, like me, you're just learning and don't always nail the tones or pronunciation. For example, I might throw in the animal classifier in "ga cha ta doo" just to make sure no-one misunderstands my poor pronunciation of "elephant" as "mountain". That's a crude example, but native speakers benefit from the disambiguation too in colloquial speech.
[0] Aikhenvald 2003, chapeter 3: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/classifiers-97801992...
1. Isn't the full moon visibly a circle? What made it flat?
2. There are many concepts for "earth". Are you referring to soil, the ground, the landscape, or the entire world?
Thanks for the list of classes, it was interesting to read
Edit 2: Now that I think about it, I should have used "spherical" to describe that category rather than "round."
No, not quite, classifiers do not introduce a notion of the noun class/gender, and the East/South East Asian languages that make an extensive use them (notably, Sino-Burmese and Tai-Kradai languages) remain being fully analytical languages.
A more apt comparison for classifiers would be collective nouns, of which English (and other Indo-European languages) has plenty, e.g.
– a pandemonium of enterprise architects;
– a tuxedo of Linux kernel developers;
– a dazzle of birds of paradise;
– a shiver of IT consultants;
– etc.
where the implicitly associated noun class/gender of the noun that is the focal point of the expression is «debased» into a collective one and can be applied across the noun class/gender boundaries. Pandemonium, dazzle, tuxedo and shiver are, effectively, classifiers.
This gets the causation backwards. People started to accept non-binary identities, which led them to invent new pronouns as a solution to the problem of "what should I call this person?"
> Typically, these are people who are biologically male or female and have not undergone any gender reassignment surgery or hormonal treatment
I'm not sure what this has to do with the point being made, or why the author felt it was so important as to mention it twice, but for accuracy's sake, I'll point out that about half (49%) of non-binary people in the U.S. want hormone treatment. As of 2015, most of those who want it lack access to it, but it seems kind of unfair to characterize non-binary people's transitions as typically non-medical when that's only (sort-of) true because our medical system makes it difficult for them to get transition-related care.
https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/usts/USTS... pg. 99
I am curious if the language of the culture has anything to do with this, since English doesn't use gendered nouns so maybe we have less deeply entrenched ideas about gender and what is masculine or what is feminine and are more likely to explore that space.
(I strongly disagree with Sapir-Whorf)
It's unlikely that this statement was informed on any sort of linguistic basis, as he's not the kind of person who would read such things (he's more of the artsy type, not the "hacker" type), it was just intuitive to him. I think it is for many people, including me, but the human sense of "intuition" on these things is not always equally accurate.
This is kind of similar to how many people have an intuitive sense of dualism, that the mind and body are two separate things. This concept is highly unlikely, but for almost everyone – myself included – it's very natural, hence the gazillion stories about people swapping bodies and whatnot.
Also, English is not the language of gender progressives. Many cultures had different conceptions of gender, including additional gender categories or even a total lack of concern for categorization. All of this was stamped out by English colonizers, who had extremely rigid ideas about gender (that they apparently still haven't gotten over in 2021 tbh).
Citation needed - this sounds like pop linguistics without a scientific basis, to be honest.
English has plenty of “features”; what it lacks in morphology it makes up for in very complicated syntax. And it lost those morphological features well before the British colonial period, so it’s not really true that more people spoke it than, say, the Slavic languages which haven’t lost them.
I thought it probably had more to do with the influence of Norman French. The Germanic gender and declension system couldn't survive the influx of French lexicon, as the two languages with completely incompatible grammar and genders coexisted and eventually merged into a new frankenlanguage.
There was a recent article I can't locate right now claiming that for some period of time, English scribes writing late middle English (?) used to add an extra 'e' (and maybe more endings) to various words following old grammatical rules that involve knowing the gender and case, but began to forget the rules and eventually it decayed into randomly adding 'e' to sound smart, which is the basis of modern joke forms like 'ye olde shoppe'.
As an English speaker it's interesting to compare with some of our closest cousins that have also lost a grammatical gender or two:
I don't know too much about Dutch, but as far as I can tell they went from the 3-gender German system to the 2-gender common/neuter system (like Scandinavia, yellow in the diagram) in the last few hundreds years, but their language is still full of frozen phases from the 3-gender system. I wonder, can a modern Dutch speaker actually create new phases using the words 'ten', 'ter' (= German zum, zur, "to the"), 'des', 'der' and maybe more? You'd have to know if a common gender noun was masculine or feminine, but I guess, unless you also know German, you won't be able to do it.
I believe the Afrikaans language of South Africa, a dialect of Dutch, is down to just one gender. IIUC they had to give up using Dutch school books some time in the past century, because (vast over simplification, I'm sure) they couldn't remember if nouns were common or neuter. I wonder if they also have frozen phrases that reflect the 2-gender, and perhaps even 3-gender grammar of the ancestral language.
The Scandinavians have a few pockets of dialects that still use 3 genders. I'm not sure how they maintain that, given that, as far as I know, the prestige forms and most literature are down to 2!
AFAIK the last people to speak a cousin language with more than one gender in the British Isles were the Norn speakers, who maintained a 3-gendered Norse dialect up until the mid 19th century.
The grammatical effect was stronger than the Norman influence because the Norse lived among the English unlike the Normans who were a ruling class.
The Norman influence was more in the vocabulary and spelling. Normans were the scribes, lawyers, etc. They introduced large numbers of Norman French words that trickled out into English. Their scribes used French spelling even when writing English words. That is part of why English spelling is so complex now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_English#Decline_of_g...
The (Classical) Arabic language is fairly unique in the Muslim world in expressing gender grammatically in several ways. For instance, in addition to a he/she distinction, there are separate second-person pronouns ("you") for use when addressing men and women, as well as matching, gendered forms of the verb. That is, you can't speak to someone without encoding their gender grammatically, sometimes even several times in the sentence.
Compare this to Turkish and Persian, where gender is not expressed at all except for some words. There are separate words for man and woman, and male and female family relations but that's about it. There's one third person pronoun, so you can write love poems that are completely gender-ambiguous (indeed, much classic Persian poetry can be read as being either about love of another person or about devotion to God). As far as I understand, Turkish even has many names that are gender-neutral. Bahasa Indonesian and its related languages are also free from grammaticalized gender.
And while there are many differences between all aspects of society in the Islamic world, including gender relations, if gendered language was an important factor, I would expect them to be much more aligned with linguistic boundaries, and I have never seen even the tiniest shred of evidence for that.
Bahasa Indonesian is quite interesting, by the way, in that it and languages of that family (that Austronesian languages) have interesting ways of encoding social information grammatically. You might have more than one first person pronoun ("I") that are appropriate in different contexts, and the relative social status between the speaker, the addressee, and the subject are encoded in various ways. I can only assume that Indonesian letters to the editor about the lack of respect that young people have for their elders are full of just-so linguistic argumentation, and that the inevitable clashes between generations have elements of linguistic reform. But at least when trans people gain recognition there, they won't have to argue about pronouns.
For example, in Romanian (a Romance language), the scientific words for 'penis' and 'vagina' are both neuter (which in Romanian means that they use masculine form for the singular, and feminine form for the plural). Conversely, the vulgar words for these are both feminine. The word for 'breast/breasts' is masculine.
Basically only words that specifically refer to people and mammals&birds are guaranteed to have a meaningful relationship between grammatical gender and male/female sex. Even here it is not entirely guaranteed, as the words for 'child' and 'baby' are both masculine, even though they are used for both male and female (or intersex) babies and children - though there are of course specific words for 'boy' and 'girl' and those do have the expected gender.
On the other hand, what is clear is that gendered languages with two genders have a huge problem with the idea of gender-neutral language, as it is simply impossible to refer to someone without implying a gender. For example, if I had a non-binary colleague and I wanted to say that they are smart, I have to choose between calling them 'deștept' (masculine) or 'deșteaptă' (feminine) - there is simply no other form of the word to use. Even if I were to artificially introduce a plural like with 'they/them' in English, I would have to choose between 'deștepți' (masculine) or 'deștepte' (feminine) - there is no getting away from this.
Not really. “Latinx/Latin(x)/LatinX”, in both English and Spanish (though it seems to be used less in Spanish, even by people who use it in English [0]) is usually, perhaps exclusively, used as an adjective, not a noun.
[0] e.g., I’ve see groups use things like “Soy Yo Latino / I Am LatinX”.
If it is indeed used only as an adjective, it would make sense to see it very rarely in Spanish, as Spanish already dictates which gender to use for an adjective - if you want to say 'a latinx movie' in English to avoid using Latino/Latina, that makes some sense; but in Spanish, 'una pelicula latino' would never make sense, so why use 'latinx' instead of the normal agreement 'latina'?
Not quite on the level of an American college newspaper I saw in the 1990s that identified Winnie Mandela as an African-American speaker when she was making an appearance, but the same kind of process.
It’s was a Chinese activist or historian. And she was basically saying that many Asian societies had queer people long before the westerners came. And while it wasn’t really out in the open as such, everyone lived how they liked and it was ok.
The problems started when the westerners came and started having to label everything.
I’m not going to try and mangle the reasons she gave why labels caused problems.
A far more fundamental correlation than the genderedness of language is, I think, abstraction. The classic baizuo type is terminally online, and sees words as defining the world. If you can make a sentence and replace one word with another of the same class, you should just treat them as equal because you grammatically can. Whether the real-world things the words point at are remotely similar enough is irrelevant, since to the woke, the real world isn't primary. They live in the world of words.
Most people in the world, of course, inhabit a precisely opposite situation: Physical reality is primary, and words are first and foremost pointers to things in that physical world. To people more bound in reality, woke fashions are by and large absurd. You can see it within the States too.
For example, the word for "doctor" is, well, "doktor". But the word is masculine. There's a feminine derivation, "doctorsha" - "female doctor" -- but it sounds somewhat condenscending to me, like you doubt her competence. "Oh this doktorsha prescribed me wrong pills again".
So the neutral, respectful way to refer to a female doctor is to refer to her using the "neutral" masculine form "doktor". And it doesn't sound odd to me at all. But here's where the fun starts: adjectives need to agree in gender with their noun. And the correct grammar is "good (masc.) doctor (masc)". However, there's a recent trend to have it like "good (fem.) doctor (masc)". I.e. the grammar is completely bonkers but somehow it sounds acceptable to my ear.
For instance you talked about female doctors using "la médico". It's perfectly natural to change that to "la médica", yet you referred to the guard as "el/la guardia" and we still do, we don't talk about a masculine "el guardio".
Here's the funny thing: we had/have "juez" for judge, and albeit is was ordinarily masculine it's not an obvious masculine form according to phonological conventions, so "el/la juez" was common and sounded very right. Then female judges started to prefer the new form "jueza" that sounded awful (it still does), but we ended up adopting it because it's their prerogative anyway, who can argue about that?
It's interesting to compare this with the deprecation in English of the term actress. Well, in Spanish the non-sexist attitude is to preserve the feminine forms (actriz for actress) and to come up with new explicit ones, exactly the opposite that is. So nope, there isn't a universal sociolinguistics that you can extract from the use of contemporary English and I don't understand how come anybody might expect such a thing.
Exactly. Now that I think about it more, it's not so black-and-white in Russian. As I said above, the female form of "doctor" doesn't sound acceptable/neutral, but the female form of "football player" sounds completely neutral. So go figure.
It's actually pretty straightforward. Generally, nouns ending with an "a" are feminine, with an "o" are neuter, the rest are masculine.
>Generally, nouns ending with an "a" are feminine, with an "o" are neuter, the rest are masculine.
It's a rule of thumb, but it's incomplete.
"Starosta" & Co. are masculine, neuter nouns also end in -e (except for "kofe"); nouns which end in a palatalized consonant can be either feminine or masculine; there are words like "sudia" or "umnica" which can be masc. or fem.; some words like "nozhnicy" only have plural form and don't have gender.
As someone who speaks a Slavic language with masculine, feminine and neuter genders (Croatian), I've never heard of anyone identifying as non-binary in my language. It'd be extremely difficult because all adjectives and verbs in some tenses change based on the gender of the person in question. Singular they wouldn't work because it's already used to formally refer to someone (similar to German Sie). You'd have to rethink half of the language to not gender someone, which no one is going to do for such a niche problem.
One thing I see Anglophones do when talking about other languages is confuse neuter gender for gender neutral, which equates to calling someone an "it".
>...English doesn't use gendered nouns so maybe we have less deeply entrenched ideas about gender and what is masculine or what is feminine...
That's another thing Anglophones get wrong. At least in my language, when not talking about people, 99% of the time the gender is determined by the ending (suffix?) of the word it's referring to, not some mystical gender role we imbue that object with. When using the word human, the rest of the sentence refers to them as male, whereas if you're using the word person, it'd be female even if you're using them to talk about the same guy.
One other thing is, when referring to a mixed group of people, you use a masculine form of plural, same as "latinos". It REALLY doesn't matter and it only bothers people who don't speak gendered languages.
May depend on place and culture. I recall my French teacher in 4th grade got snide about this while explaining that even a single man in a group will turn the group masculine. She was francophone.
This certainly bothers anglos much much more though.
But if you take sciences, for example, it's plural feminine in French and Italian.
If you put a masculine discipline in the group, for example "law" which is masculine in Italian (il diritto), the group of disciplines is still referred to as feminine "le scienze"
It's a matter of gender of the plural word, it has nothing to do with biological sex.
"Société générale des étudiantes et étudiants du Collège de Maisonneuve"
Yet we have imported the whole gender neutral language agenda. I find it interesting, because the changes to the language would be way more drastic.
This is the traditional rule in Hebrew as well and it most certainly bothers people. Lately I've seen a lot of writing and occasionally even speech that attempts to be gender neutral by using the Hebrew equivalent of "he/she" or "he or she" and sometimes "she or he". Hebrew has a lot more gender than English, so it's pervasive.
For example, at work I might get an email that starts: Dear employees (female suffix) and employees (male suffix)...
P.S. This trend is often associated with a certain popular feminist politician and has been the subject of jokes in political comedy, eg: https://youtu.be/cu3E9Nf_Z6w
This sort of thing is also very common in Spanish, French, and German (at least).
I believe this might be a mistake, as "the day" in Spanish and Portuguese are masculine, and come from diem: "el día" and "o dia"
This usage seems to be in decline, though, and is sometimes seen as sexist. But it's still used, e.g., by the National Parks Service:
> Construction began in 1794 and [the USS] Constitution launched on October 21, 1797. She went on her first cruise the next year as the Quasi-War with France emerged. Later she served in engagements with pirates off the Barbary coast in the Mediterranean. [...] She earned the nickname "Old Ironsides" because the cannon fire from enemy ships seemed as if they couldn't penetrate her strong oak hull.
Source: https://www.nps.gov/bost/learn/historyculture/ussconst.htm
(Edit: clarified)
[EDIT] notably, I think it occurs pretty often in recent movies, mostly referring to cars, ships, and space-ships. Not just period pieces, either.
As a native English speaker, I've never understood why it was invented in the first place.
Because this distinction between masculine and feminine nouns is quite rare among the known language families, it is possible that the appearance of masculine and feminine genders in the Indo-European languages was influenced by the contact with the speakers of Semitic languages (e.g. Akkadian).
It is known that such an ancient linguistic contact has existed, because there are a number of very old reciprocal loanwords between the Indo-European languages and the Semitic languages, dating to about the same time.
And it gets continued usefulness as an error detection and correction mechanism.
Instead of Latin, can I please have a logical language intended for thinking about scientific and engineering processes invented that's similar to the idea of the Ancients in Star Gate (the TV series)?
Latin's a dead language; we can't submit pull-requests.
English (etc.) are living languages; people are committing changes to them all the time, with no maintainer to oversee the project.
Sure, I'd be happy not having had to spend schooldays learning French and Latin irregular verbs. But these languages weren't developed for dealing with science and engineering.
We sort of can: https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/57/what-is-the-pro...
Does Lojban fit the bill?
nobody owns a language
>can I please have
Take your pick. There is Esperanto, Loglan, Lojban, Ithkuil etc. The rabbit hole goes as deep as you want
I have read that affix discriminators (e.g. declining a noun) started off as standalone words. Could be true; the distinction of “word” feels to me like an artifact of writing.
The first is that by having different pronouns for each gender, when you must use more pronouns in the same sentence, there are good chances that you will be able to use different pronouns so there will be no ambiguity about what the pronouns are referring to.
The grammatical gender is a hashing function, with 2 or 3 buckets in the Indo-European languages but with many more buckets in some languages.
When you are lucky and there are no hash collisions, you use only different pronouns in a sentence, when you are unlucky and there are hash collisions, i.e. nouns with the same gender, you use the same pronoun twice, or even more times, and the sentence becomes ambiguous.
Because this role of the genders is hard to replace, even English has retained the gender for pronouns.
The second role for the genders was for adjectives. By making the adjectives repeat the gender of the noun to which they applied, when there are no hash collisions it is clear to which nouns the adjectives are connected, otherwise, like for pronouns, the sentences remain ambiguous.
This was important in the old languages, with free word order, where the adjectives were not necessarily placed besides their nouns.
English has lost the agreement in adjectives, but this simplification has been paid by the loss of flexibility in word order. English has a much more rigid word order than most other languages.
Only vestigially. He is a single human man/boy (or maybe a pet), she is a single human woman/girl (or maybe a pet or a boat), everything else is it/they. This is very different from what I would consider truly gendered languages, where every single noun is independently gendered (like the knife, fork, spoon example in the article: das Messer, die Gabel, der Löffel)
> The second role for the genders was for adjectives. By making the adjectives repeat the gender of the noun to which they applied, when there are no hash collisions it is clear to which nouns the adjectives are connected, otherwise, like for pronouns, the sentences remain ambiguous.
> This was important in the old languages, with free word order, where the adjectives were not necessarily placed besides their nouns.
Is this really the case? I don't know Latin, but AFAIU, adjectives have to go right next to their nouns. In any case it only helps by 'luck'. If you happen to have multiple nouns with the same gender in your sentence, you get no power to disambiguate. My understanding had always been that it's declension based on case that allows Latin to have a free word order. I can see the value of declension, it's harder for me to understand the value of gender.
I don't know about Latin, but here's examples from Russian (also true for Acient Greek) where adjectives can be found far away from their nouns (word-by-word translations in their original order, just found on Lenta.ru):
"Lost his family in fire Russian critizes verdict" ("lost" refers to "Russian")
"Found in car minister's corpse moose's seized investigators" ("found" refers to "corpse")
"Recreated existing inside planet giants dark ice" ("existing" refer to "ice")
Gender and declension help tell what refers to what.
In Classical Latin, e.g. in Caesar or Pliny the Elder, the adjectives may be located either before or after the nouns and frequently with several other words interposed.
In poetry, having adjacent nouns and adjectives is more an exception than the norm.
In ancient languages, poetry was highly valued, being important both for entertainment and as a mnemonic aid for utilitarian texts.
Unrestricted word order was most useful for poetry, allowing any rearrangements of a sentence that were needed to match a desired rhythm.
The transition to a constrained word order, accompanied by the loss of many of the grammatical means used to mark the roles of the words, which became redundant with a fixed word order, went in parallel with the diminished importance of poetry.
For example, the famous Jespersen's cycle[0]: in many languages, "I not know" eventually becomes "I not know a thing" (like in French "je ne sais pas"). "A thing" is completely redundant here, but it helps better understand that it's a negation, in case the first "not" was not heard.
See <https://www.belleslettres.eu/content/deklination/genus-gende...> around the 40 to 60% content region.
tl;dr Originally Proto-Indo-European had no genders. The concept was added piecemeal. Subjects were marked with ·s. Results of an action or grammatical objects were marked with ·m, this was generalised and transferred onto actual objects/things. This was the birth of the first gender distinction, neutrum, and the ·s words assumed the role of the default gender. Collective words (before the invention of plural) and abstract words ended in ·a. The animate/inanimate distinction mentioned by thread neighbours is a red herring, disregard that theory.
The conflation of genus and sexus and hence the unfortunate misnaming of default gender as masculine and abstract gender as feminine which is still in use today is due to bad Roman grammarians; the HN submission article mentions that in contrast Varro understood it better.
What about "un día" or "el día" in Spanish?
Of course in English we have a tiny bit of gendered nouns where we append "man" or "woman" to some job titles based on the gender of the person holding the title (policeman, congressman, etc). This has become problematic when we use the plural.
Also in English we have gendered pronouns which has become a hot topic in the last couple of years. I wonder what people who speak languages without gendered pronouns think of the current kerfuffle.
Grammatically, it's not problematic at all. Some people with new ideas completely out of line with the culture at large make a big deal of it.
The freedom to define yourself is a good thing, but most people neither need nor want it, and for many who want it undertaking the excercise is a mistake, because it's more flippant wishy-washyness or deliberate, willful ignorance than self-building, per se. Consider the classic case of the Starbucks barista with a degree in postmodern dance theory.
I went to an all girl college prep high school in the early 1970s. All the girls on college track took an aptitude test. We were told to take both the boys and girls test. There were two tests back then. I scored very high in engineering and math on the boys test, but those options did not even exist on the girls test. I found the girls test ridiculous.
This will sound silly but I didn't even consider engineering until after I read The Menace from Earth by Heinlein. I thought engineering meant I wouldn't have a husband and family. I didn't even consider math until after I took this test. I ended up double majoring in Math and Computer Science.
This was in the early days before Comp Sci was gendered. 30% of my Comp Sci class was female. Compare that to my daughter's experience. Her Comp Sci classes were about 15% female until she took a Human Factors class which was 50% female. Sometime in the 1980s women enrolling in Comp Sci dramatically declined.
A non-gendered example of this would be something like xerox vs photocopier. There was a time when all photocopiers were xeroxes, but now odds are very low that your xerox machine is a xerox branded photocopier. There are still a few people out there who haven’t bothered to update their language, but largely that shift happened over the past 30 years - and because it’s not very political it was largely a silent shift. “Firemen” is, unfortunately, wrapped up in people’s beliefs about what gender roles SHOULD be - so it’s not going so quietly
Historically, the masculine noun class has been used in gender-indeterminate places, but about 100 years ago that usage stared to disappear from the language, or at least become argot. The phrase "I am no man" in the Lord or the Rings is a play on this disappearance.
In English, this disappearance happened alongside a similar change in gender roles; however, in a lot of European languages the social changes occurred, but the linguistic changes did not (and non-European languages often have quite different kinds of noun classes).
It would be interesting to hear how women who speak other European languages that didn't make those changes feel about it - they seem so inherently linked to my ear.
It has always seemed to me that a far easier and less painful process would have been to simply accept "men" as gender-neutral, but it seems that ship has sailed *shrug*. I don't think that "Firemen is wrapped up in people’s beliefs about what gender roles SHOULD be" – or at least not necessarily – as many people still just see it as gender neutral.
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html
25 years old, and probably the most striking thing from this distance is the implicit assumption that all the readers would believe in racism, but not sexism.
Sex and race are not two equivalent classes. There are material differences between the sexes. These are obvious differences in even my one year old noticed. On the other hand, it is unclear if there are any differences in ability by race, and it looks like if there are, they're mainly not material to success.
But I mean, I do wonder what percentage of income white people in the south and southwest spend on sunblock and sunscreen. Seems like a lot. (this is a joke, for those wanting to downvote me)
My friend who worked in elementary schools (I think they were a substitute teacher, but maybe they were an assistant for after-school) would be asked "are you a boy or a girl?" in practically every new group they watched. What differences should the K-3 kids have picked up on to sex them? Why would it have been important to sex them?
There definitely are, and there probably are depending on what traits are in question. But the difference is still not at all of a similar sort.
The crucial difference between men and women is one of two completely different mechanisms. Within each mechanism, there is variation of course, like the length of the... thing and other variables like that.
Insofar as there are differences in race, they are much more like height or eye color: Same system, different historically separated populations just have different distributions along the variation of that trait. Asian people are generally shorter than white or black people, for example: This doesn't mean you won't find a short white or black man, for example, or a tall East Asian one. The Asian man being really tall is just less common. Insofar as these things exist, they are a matter of count in a pile of people, and a difference in degree.
Men and women are truly a difference in kind, the same way goats and weasels have different digestive systems. It's not a matter of more or less of this or that between the two.
After a while I concluded it must be a defensive mechanism designed to detect and repel foreigners. As evidence I adduce the fact that some words change genders between regions. Well-known example: die Butter and der Butter depending on where you are from. [0]
It's not uncommon for a noun to change their gender at some point in history. As far as I know, it's often analogical changes. For example, feminine noun X describes an item of a larger class Y, and it just happens that most items of class Y are masculine. So the noun X, being feminine, is an exception, which is "fixed", and it becomes masculine.
An example from Russian language: most words denoting shoes and related items were masculine: boot, shoe, sock etc. Then there was the word for "slippers", feminine. I and my family still use the word in the feminine form, because the change is very recent. Today most speakers (especially younger ones) use the masculine form.
It's expectable that a change can happen in some dialects, but not in others.
Upper class wokelets are being silly as usual. In part they're seeking identity, to belong. In another, they're terminally online and live in a world of words where speech defines the world. If you can make a sentence and replace one word with another of the same class, you should just treat them as equal because you grammatically can. Whether the real-world things the words point at are remotely similar enough is irrelevant, since to the woke, the real world isn't primary.
You could go to forums about unscientific personality typologies and see the exact behaviors of the gender-nonconformists on display in a completely different medium, and before they escaped tumblr into the world at large. It's just people grabbing self-definitions to build an identity - a special one - in a way that's cheap and doesn't require the real work that living an actually interesting life or even reading widely.
Why do you think there's stuff like genderqueer etc.? It's low-cost, you don't have to change anything about yourself, just make the claim. And it's high status, unlike being normal and heterosexual. If high status things are cheap to do, people will do them.
> Of course in English we have a tiny bit of gendered nouns where we append "man" or "woman" to some job titles based on the gender of the person holding the title (policeman, congressman, etc). This has become problematic when we use the plural.
This is a 'problem' in my native language as well. Otherwise, we're civilized and just call everyone 'it'.
The modern use of "gender" to mean social aspects of sex (or sex) and the historical use of "gender" to mean sex are still actively used. In a very real sense, these are exclusive and oppositional categories, so any ambiguous use of "gender" in contemporary English should be interpreted as auto-antonymal use. That is, depending on what the speaker means, their meaning could be interpreted in exactly the opposite way.
Auto-antonyms are rare in English, but the obvious ones (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym#Examples) do not cause confusion. I would suggest that outside of specific professional settings—philosophy, biology, medicine, linguistics—"gender" is almost exclusively an auto-antonym. Perhaps this contributes to the nearly impossible discourse on the subject.
From the Oxford English Dictionary:
†2. a. A class of things or beings distinguished by having certain characteristics in common; (as a mass noun) these regarded collectively; kind, sort. Obsolete. In earliest use: genus, as opposed to species (see note at genus n. 1).
OED has it being used equivalent to “sex” (in the sense of male v. female categories) back to 1474, which is not all that recent. It’s only recently that models splitting “sex” (physical traits), “ascribed gender” or just “gender” (socially recognized role), and “gender identity” (self-identified social role) as distinct things with distinct names have come into use, but “gender” wasn’t plucked out of linguistics alone for its use in regard to such models, but from its longstanding use as another label for “sex” as a categorization axis. (That it was also used in linguistics, which might be viewed as social, may be why it got picked for the social aspects and “sex” for the physical, I suppose.)
But I still think there is more going on. The subject in question is gender and gender identity. To begin with, even educated folks operating in good faith do not have a particularly coherent account of either. As I suggest, part of this could be due to the particulars of the English language—the auto-antonymity of "gender"—but mainly I think it's conceptual confusion.
The concept of sex as a social category should be replaced by gender. An individual’s gender arrises from a strong innate subjective feeling, and is presented by a socially recognised performance of masculinity or femininity.
Contrast with:
The concept of sex is a biological category linked to bodily role in the reproductive process. An individual’s gender is just what sex they are.
I think there is a common, clear, useful model of both what descriptively exists and what the two main factions prefer normatively:
Given: that there exist actual physical differences between people, and
Given: that these differences are the basis for different descriptive labels on several orthogonal axes,
Given: that there are categories i to which people are assigned by society, and
Given: those categories are on a number of orthogonal axes, and
Given: that people have idea of which of those categories they should be assigned by society.
There is one of axes of physical trait based differentiation called “sex”.
There is one axis of social differentiation called “gender”, for which the corresponding self-understood correct category is “gender identity”.
The two major conflicting normative camps are: one that holds that sex determines correct socially ascribed gender (of which there are two possible categorizations of each) and correct gender identity (the same as correct ascribed gender), and one that holds that gender identity defines correct socially ascribed gender and that sex is largely beside the point (even if it statistically correlates with gender identity.)
Ultimately I agree that we are making decisions about language. I might break it down differently, as follows.
1. Language about how we identify differences should be useful and effective communicate public facts that are socially salient. Sex is public information and highly salient for courting and reproduction, the basis for most human societies' social organization and primary motivators of behavior.
2. Language about how we identify differences should be self-determined, not based on external facts about the world, and should primarily serve the dignity of the individual. An individual's gender is not society's business, unless they say it is.
If someone has a better formulation of 2, I'd be open. I admit it feels a bit strawman-ish.
They define the word using the word itself; recursion is divine, but it's an impentrable tangle because they're defining that word recursively, while saying it means the opposite of itself. It's like self-modifying code.
M-W is [EDIT: or would be, see below], in that case, simply in error. The OED gets the colloquial use right: “Used to indicate that some (frequently conventional) metaphorical or hyperbolical expression is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense: ‘virtually, as good as’; (also) ‘completely, utterly, absolutely’.”
It also traces it back to at least 1769, which should shut up those people treating it as some new corruption.
https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/109061
EDIT: On actually reading the M-W link, the characterization upthread is false: it doesn't say it means “not literally” but that it is “used in an exaggerated way to emphasize a statement or description that is not literally true or possible”. This seems to just be a poorer wording of the OED take, especially in light of the extended discussion of that usage that is presented below thr definition proper.
I mean, that's the core business.
I don't think mine was a false characterisation, but see for yourself. I think M-W are descriptivist zealots, who will never accept that there is an incorrect usage. Therefore they contradict themselves in their own definition of this word. I don't think it's just a poorer wording; there's an ideological difference, one so important that it's defence requires this lexicographer, whose business is publishing definitions, to make a definition incomprehensible.
This isn't the only example - M-W seems to be Google's preferred dictionary lookup for search terms (after some nasty spammy searches). I've seen a lot of M-W definitions that are contradictory, because of the ideology.
</rant-mode>
Wasn't Ayer an atheist, anyway? I think you might be misrepresenting him.
Edit: Well, there's a subtlety here. The set of beliefs that concern god is an incoherent category (for the sake of argument), but the set of beliefs which concern 'god' is not. (I also think that theism is a fairly coherent category, one which describes people more than beliefs, but that's a different argument.)
EDIT: As you’ve seen fit to edit your comment while I was replying to it, I’m done.
Edit: This is not a chat application. I had no way of knowing if and when you were replying. I don't see how I broke a norm, unless the norm here is "never use the edit mechanism".
Sure, we can’t make sense of how reality exists, or find evidence that a god is responsible - but is that sufficient to assert incoherence? Is it less incoherent to believe that reality has a property of self-creation, as many physicists do?
No, they aren't. They are distinct axes of variation, but not opposed. (There are factions which are opposed on normative relations between the two categories, with one holding that the physical category should definitely determine the social one and one not holding to that view, but that doesn't make them antonyms; it does make them potentially confusing if care is not taken to assure what sense “gender” is being used in in a particular context.)
I'm only talking about the usage of "gender." This an empirical linguistic question. Some people literally mean sex, others literally mean everything but. As a native English speaker, I see both frequently. Hop on Twitter and you can see both within 30 seconds. This doesn't preclude additional usages among laymen and academic disciplines.
In the sense that nature is the opposite of nurture, "gender" used in the "everything but" way is completely at odds with sex. Likewise when a male identifies their gender as "female" or as a "woman," we get a different understanding of their gender depending on the meaning of "gender" used. At best we might say that male isn't quite the opposite of female, but in terms of reproduction, those are the exclusive roles.
I feel satisfied enough to call these meanings opposites, and "gender" looks similar enough to other auto-antonyms. We have two very different evaluations of "gender" that can shift the meaning of an entire sentence to mean the opposite thing.
This can be just as easily reversed. Imagine if instead we would use feminine gender for a mixed group and masculine gender only when the group is composed of men. Someone then might complain that this is sexist because men have special treatment - a group consisting of only men has a separate word to highlight the fact that no women are present.
Same with claims that the word "woman" in English is sexist because it is derived from a word "man". If it were reverse (men were called "women") the same people would complain about sexism because the female version of the word is shorter - as if something was subtracted from the masculine version of the word, suggesting that women are lesser than men.
So in summary - my impression is that the complains have nothing to do with the material, but are just the product of current cultural zeitgeist.
Personally, I am not sure how these linguistic details evolved, but I wouldn't be surprised that the original intention was to place a special emphasis on women. Because the word for a mixed group should have been "invented" first, and then a separate word for women added on top.
But don't quote me on that.
But there is an interesting precedent about dual-words (in the languages that have them), where you use a special form of a word to denote groups of two people. And according to research I've seen those words were added after a word for a group of any size was available - to place a special emphasis on a group of two.
You're just making up hypothetical reactions by a group of people you clearly have some preconceived notions about...
The fact that the word "woman" is etymologically derived from the root word "man" can be, and has been, scientifically validated.
But this doesn't disagree with anything I've said.