[HN Gopher] Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist's Take
___________________________________________________________________
Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist's Take
Author : unpredict
Score : 59 points
Date : 2021-10-29 16:51 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (antigonejournal.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (antigonejournal.com)
| vehemenz wrote:
| This was such a great read. I am not a linguist, let alone a
| philologist, but I had this thought.
|
| 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.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Auto-antonyms: "literally", meaning literally "not literally"
| (i.e. meaning figuratively). See M-W on "literally". If you
| don't already know what the word means, you won't find out from
| M-W.
|
| 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.
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally
| umanwizard wrote:
| The colloquial meaning of "literally" isn't quite "not
| literally"; it's more of a generic intensifier.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| That's not what M-W says. They've gone the whole hog, and
| said that one meaning of "literally" is "not literally".
| umanwizard wrote:
| Dictionaries are trailing a moving target and are not
| always perfectly accurate.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > That's not what M-W says.
|
| 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.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| It also says "a story that is basically true even if not
| literally true".
|
| 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>
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Yeah, I'm good with that OED explanation. It's hard to
| get the nuance, but that's not bad. M-W is just
| incomprehensible - it's hard to understand how a
| lexicographer can make such a mess of defining a word.
|
| I mean, that's the core business.
| dllthomas wrote:
| My go-to on this is that if someone says "you left me
| waiting for days" we don't say "sometimes 'days' means 'a
| few minutes'" and wring our hands about how anyone will
| communicate time. We say that people exaggerate.
| kgeist wrote:
| Here in Russian, the word for gender literally means "kind" or
| "genus", it's not related to gender/sex.
| vehemenz wrote:
| We do have the same meaning in English, but it's been
| obsolete for a while.
|
| 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).
| Tagbert wrote:
| That is the origin of the word gender. It only relatively
| recently came to be applied to sexual roles and identity.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It only relatively recently came to be applied to sexual
| roles and identity.
|
| OED has it being used equivalent to "sex" (in the sense of
| male v. female categories) in that regard 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.)
|
| [0] https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/77468
| leephillips wrote:
| The use of "gender" to mean anything aside from the grammatical
| category is similar to the use of "god", as analysed by AJ Ayer
| in _Language, Truth, and Logic_. Ayer points out that when
| people talk about "god" they have no coherent idea in mind, but
| are simply making a noise with their mouths. Therefore, he
| concludes, no statement that refers to "god" can have meaning,
| including describing oneself as an atheist. When I hear people
| making the "gender" noise I know that they, too, are babbling.
| thewakalix wrote:
| This is insufferable. Your sentence contains the word "god"
| -- does that make it meaningless? No, because of the use-
| mention distinction.
| leephillips wrote:
| Your point is not intended to be serious is it? My comment
| also includes the word "gender". As we both understand the
| use-mention distinction, what, exactly, is insufferable?
| thewakalix wrote:
| Atheism is the negative space defined by 'belief in a
| god'. The position that 'god' is incoherent is in that
| negative space. Atheism is no more incoherent than your
| own comment, just for including the quoted word 'god' in
| its description.
|
| 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.)
| alexfrydl wrote:
| I think bad faith misrepresentations like this are the primary
| source of the supposed "impossible discourse" on the "subject."
| What "subject" by the way? Who are the specific people who use
| this supposedly confusing, brand-new meaning of the word
| "gender," who are so impossible to talk to?
| vehemenz wrote:
| Bad faith might be part of it. I think bad faith is more
| conducive when neither side of an argument are able to
| communicate clearly enough for the other. If that's the case,
| then a better understanding of English is the remedy, not
| formulating needlessly metaphysical conceptions of gender.
|
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.)
| alexfrydl wrote:
| Okay, gotcha. So who are the two sides of this argument,
| and what are they arguing about exactly? I'm just trying to
| get clarification on who it is in particular that needs to
| stop "formulating needlessly metaphysical conceptions of
| gender" (i.e. making things up) and accept your
| biologically-grounded definition instead. Who are these
| strange, confusing people who even "educated" people can't
| understand?
| [deleted]
| animal_spirits wrote:
| This brings up a slightly tangential thought I occasionally have.
| Is there as much of a gender "confusion" (for lack of a better
| word) in parts of the world that use languages that have gendered
| nouns? Over the past 40 years at least it seems that in the USA
| all of these new labels and identifiers have evolved for people
| who perceived their gender as not "masculine" or "feminine" but
| are something different altogether.
|
| 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.
| AutumnCurtain wrote:
| This would be an interesting exploration of a sort of Sapir-
| Whorf type question.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Why is Sapir-Whorf so appealing? No one has been able to show
| more than a trivial effect on cognition from the language
| influences that that paper was promoting. Human thought is
| not rigidly channeled by vocabulary in the way that they
| described.
| AutumnCurtain wrote:
| Appealing in what way? A "strong" Sapir-Whorf is rejected
| completely by mainstream linguists, to my knowledge.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| I'm really struggling to find the interview on YouTube. I don't
| remember the interviewees name.
|
| 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.
| alexfrydl wrote:
| Old English has the same gender system as German. The reason
| English doesn't have gendered nouns now isn't because we are so
| progressive, but because language tends to lose all its excess
| features as it gets spoken and a LOT of people speak English.
| Basically, people can't be bothered to do grammar properly so
| eventually it just goes away (see: "whom").
|
| 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).
| macdice wrote:
| Edited: I guessed wrong, see Tagbert's answer. It was Norse
| contact (erm, the ones in the north, not the Normans who were
| French-speaking ethnic Norse people in the south).
|
| 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.
| Tagbert wrote:
| English lost it's gender and most of it's verb declensions as
| a result of the Norse occupation. The Norse occupied around
| half of Britain for several hundreds of years. Both Norse and
| English had these linguistic forms, but the specifics did not
| match and were confusing to the adult Norse trying to learn
| English. They adopted a simplified version and that spread
| among the population.
|
| 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.
| macdice wrote:
| I incorrectly assumed Norse and old English genders and
| cases ought to line up neatly and wouldn't have caused the
| whole system to be thrown out the window on contact. I
| stand corrected. Thanks!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_English#Decline_of_
| g...
| imbnwa wrote:
| The amount of common, everyday, practical vocabulary that
| descends from Old Norse that you use all the time on a
| daily basis is impressive.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > but because language tends to lose all its excess features
| as it gets spoken and a LOT of people speak English.
|
| 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.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| I'm saying I think it might be the other way around. I'm
| thinking that maybe _because_ English lost it's gender system
| (due to the reasons you listed above) is why we see this
| "gender progressiveness" in our society. But I can only speak
| for the USA. I don't know if this same kind of gender
| progressiveness exists in other societies
| frenchyatwork wrote:
| I doubt it, except perhaps as some sort of re-analysis. See
| "The Awful German Language"
| (https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html)
| starting from "To continue with the German genders:"
| rvense wrote:
| I am a fairly militant, pronouns-in-my-bio (he/him, cishet)
| post-colonial feminazi and I think so-called politically
| correct language is generally a good thing. But I also have a
| degree in linguistics, and I have to say I don't think gendered
| grammatical categories (that is distinctions in pronouns, noun
| classes, verbal conjugations, etc. that align with cultural
| concepts of binary gender) have any effect on gender relations
| in a culture at all.
|
| 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.
| kgeist wrote:
| In Russian, gender confusion is mostly about professions (the
| rest of the gender system makes no sense, like a car is "she"
| but the plane is "he" -- so no one bothers with it).
|
| 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.
| mnl wrote:
| In Spain's Spanish we ended up with "new" feminine forms for
| professionals. Now it's commonplace but some of them sounded
| pretty strange back then.
|
| For instance you talked about female doctors using " _la
| medico_ ". It's perfectly natural to change that to _" la
| medica"_, 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.
| kgeist wrote:
| >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.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| While I'd also be curious of the same, I'd like to also point
| out that the relationship between grammatical gender and
| biological sex is often strenuous, even in languages where
| these exist and are nominally tied.
|
| 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 'destept' (masculine) or
| 'desteapta' (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 'destepti' (masculine) or 'destepte' (feminine) - there
| is no getting away from this.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| This comes into the forced language changes like "LatinX". On
| paper, changes like this are fine, but in use they only wok
| on paper. In use they still have to be identified as "Soy un
| LatinX" or "Soy una LatinX" (sorry if my Spanish is a little
| rusty), but the definitive article is still male or female.
| While in your example above, Americans (as I am) seem eager
| to change individual words in a language and culture to bend
| it to our will and white wash it (and no, I'm not on board
| with this. Deleting a cultural language won't fix a problem
| of oppression, which are not limited to cultures with
| gendered languages), it still does not remove the "gendered"
| aspects of the language in many cases.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > This comes into the forced language changes like
| "LatinX". On paper, changes like this are fine, but in use
| they only wok on paper. In use they still have to be
| identified as "Soy un LatinX" or "Soy una LatinX" (sorry if
| my Spanish is a little rusty)
|
| 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".
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > "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.
|
| 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'?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Even in English, the use of it as an adjective for
| anything except _personal identity_ (specifically, a way
| to identify personal ethnic identity in a way which was
| inclusive of non-binary gender identity) seems to be a
| step detached from its original origin taken by media
| adopters who just do a global find and replace to swap it
| for Latino and /or Latina without considering context.
|
| 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.
| soundnote wrote:
| The language being gendered doesn't really matter: Wokeness is
| primarily a cultural fashion of American baizuo, and as such
| woke ideas are prevalent in places where people try to fashion
| themselves as baizuo. Even inside America, it's the domain of
| terminally online upper-class whites and little else.
|
| 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.
| filiphorvat wrote:
| >Is there as much of a gender "confusion" (for lack of a better
| word) in parts of the world that use languages that have
| gendered nouns?
|
| 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.
| graeme wrote:
| > 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.
| not2b wrote:
| At least in Quebec, objection to the use of the masculine
| form of the plural at some universities led to renaming
| organizations, to say for example students (female) and
| students (male). For an example see
|
| https://sogeecom.org/
|
| "Societe generale des etudiantes et etudiants du College de
| Maisonneuve"
| jasonhansel wrote:
| One really interesting case is the use of the English pronoun
| "she" to refer to ships (and sometimes countries). This is a rare
| situation in which English nouns for inanimate objects can still
| have gender.
|
| 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)
| blhack wrote:
| Is this rare?
| ttmb wrote:
| I think it's common in colloquial speech but rarely used in
| formal speech these days.
| handrous wrote:
| I'd not have called the usage rare, just situations that call
| for it. Maybe it is and I've just not noticed, though?
|
| [EDIT] notably, I think it occurs pretty often in recent
| movies, mostly referring to cars, ships, and space-ships. Not
| just period pieces, either.
| umanwizard wrote:
| My impression is that the majority of people no longer use
| it, but you see it often enough that I wouldn't call it
| "rare".
| bluedino wrote:
| automobiles as well
| allturtles wrote:
| I didn't read the whole article but skimmed through it and didn't
| see a clear answer to the question "why does grammatical gender
| exist"?
|
| As a native English speaker, I've never understood why it was
| invented in the first place.
| AverilS wrote:
| It is hard to give a general answer. It wasn't invented, as
| such, but in the Indo-European linguistic family, a distinction
| was drawn in the mists of time between an 'animate' and an
| 'inanimate' class (which is perhaps the most important category
| distinction that there was to be drawn), and it is from that
| binary division that a three-fold gender system evolved.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The Afroasiatic languages (including the Semitic languages)
| already had a grammatical distinction between masculine and
| feminine nouns many thousands of years before the animate
| gender has split into masculine and feminine genders in most
| Indo-European languages.
|
| 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.
| seszett wrote:
| My guess would be animism giving genders to objects along with
| spirits, and from there on the newer, more abstract nouns
| either developed from older gendered nouns or got a default
| gender.
|
| And it gets continued usefulness as an error detection and
| correction mechanism.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Multiple genders have 2 advantages.
|
| 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.
| allturtles wrote:
| > Because this role of the genders is hard to replace, even
| English has retained the gender for pronouns.
|
| 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 Loffel)
|
| > 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.
| kgeist wrote:
| >Is this really the case? I don't know Latin, but AFAIU,
| adjectives have to go right next to their nouns.
|
| 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.
| kgeist wrote:
| I think a better analogy is error correction code. Some
| redundancy in a language can be a good thing. Gender
| information may be redundant, but the fact that adjectives
| agree in gender with their nouns, helps better distinguish
| what adjective refers to what noun. Same with pronouns.
|
| 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.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jespersen%27s_Cycle
| bmn__ wrote:
| > why does grammatical gender exist
|
| 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.
| gumby wrote:
| Gender is a specific case of the more general structure of
| classifiers. I think this is mentioned in the article but so
| far I have only skimmed it. For example Arabic has "sun" and
| "moon" words. Japanese has a rich set. I have always thought of
| them as a kind of disambiguator to reduce semantic errors in
| listening. But really the question of "why" makes as little
| sense in linguistics as it does in evolution, as any structure
| is a combination of happenstance, just so, environment, and
| such.
|
| 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.
| mjevans wrote:
| More importantly; why hasn't it been removed?
|
| 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)?
| secondcoming wrote:
| Have you tried Rust?
| demetrius wrote:
| > can I please have a logical language
|
| Does Lojban fit the bill?
| umanwizard wrote:
| Language is a human social phenomenon, so it's unlikely that
| it will or even can ever be perfectly logical and free of
| redundancy.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Why "instead of Latin"? Your requirement seems to be
| orthogonal to the existence of Latin.
|
| 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.
| apocolyps6 wrote:
| > why hasn't it been removed?
|
| 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
| canjobear wrote:
| It's easy to look at these various grammatical gender systems and
| to think it's a bit of weird useless complexity. But systems like
| this are useful: you can see them as providing error-correcting
| parity bits on nouns which make information more robustly
| distributed through a sentence.
| retrac wrote:
| Same thing with verb agreement. While noun classes/gender are
| relatively rare and many language families do not have them,
| verbal agreement is much more common. Most though not all
| languages have verbs that agree with the subject, and quite a
| few with the object, too. Even English (which lost its Latin-
| style morphology long ago) retains a trace of this with its
| single verb inflection: "I run." vs "He runs." So in a
| partially heard phrase like "I would like to meet the ... who
| run the company", you know that the grammatical number of the
| noun you missed must be plural. Grammatical gender for nouns is
| doing something similar.
| umanwizard wrote:
| For what it's worth, English still has some remnants of a
| case system, too. We still distinguish the genitive case of
| nouns (with a case ending usually written "'s"), and personal
| pronouns have four cases (I, me, my, mine).
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| > Since my schooldays I have been listening patiently to claims
| that Latin and the Romance languages are inherently sexist
| because if you have a group of men and women, the adjectives will
| be masculine.
|
| 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.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| I don't think it is fair to think up hypothetical situations
| like these and use that as a basis for an ideology about sexism
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| It's just a simple test - if all permutations of some
| situation lead to the same outcome, then the outcome cannot
| be said to be caused by the situation.
| alexfrydl wrote:
| If these "permutations" only exist inside of your own
| brain, that only proves something about you, not reality.
|
| Really, none of the permutations exist. Very few women
| unironically care that the word "woman" has the word "man"
| inside it. You're making up things to be mad about.
| jedi_stannis wrote:
| What if there was a word for a group of men, a word for a
| group of woman and a non-gendered word for a mixed group?
| animal_spirits wrote:
| Yeah but, how would you even test this realistically? its
| just a hypothetical situation. You can't change the
| etymology of a word and test the outcome
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| All I am saying is that it's just a matter of
| perspective. If we have a separate word for a group of
| women that can be seen in both ways: either as a special
| treatment for women (the group of women stands out when
| no men are present) or as a special treatment for men
| (the mixed groups is referred to in masculine terms).
|
| 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.
| culi wrote:
| > If it were reverse (men were called "women") the same people
| would complain about sexism because the female version of the
| word is shorter
|
| 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.
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| > 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.
| masswerk wrote:
| There are two aspects to this: On the one hand, you could say
| that the feminine designation has higher specificity, since
| there's always also the generic masculinum. On the other hand,
| the latter also expresses or implies a general expectation. (So
| what aspect you focus on is probably some marker for the
| current discourse.)
| retrac wrote:
| I dislike the term "gender" in linguistics. Many languages have
| grammatical gender that has nothing to do with
| masculine/feminine. "Noun class" gives the idea better. Noun
| classes in Indo-European and a couple other major language
| families happen to somewhat align with grammatical markers
| indicating animal/human sex. But it doesn't have to. Many
| languages make an animate/inanimate distinction.
|
| 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?
| culi wrote:
| It's worth pointing out that, in linguistics, grammatical
| gender can be seen as a specific type of noun class system. The
| term is mostly useful when talking about Indo-European
| languages where the feminine-masculine distinction is most
| prevalent
|
| 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".
| asveikau wrote:
| One of my favorite stories about a neutral gender being
| preserved is in words like Spanish _esto_.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| kgeist wrote:
| >Originally, most Indo-European languages had the three
| classes of feminine, masculine, and neuter.
|
| Early Proto-Indoeuropean is theorized to have 2 genders -
| animate/inanimate, but by the late PIE period it evolved to
| the classic three.
| fourtrees wrote:
| Having missed your comment, I was about to post about this.
| One interesting fact I can add is that Hittite, the oldest
| written IE language, has the animate/inanimate gender
| system rather than the 3-way system. You can also see
| remnants of the old system here and there in Latin, Greek,
| Sanskrit, Russian, ect.
|
| Of course, this is largely theoretical like you said, and
| I'm sure you could dig up some dissenting papers if you
| wanted to.
| kgeist wrote:
| >You can also see remnants of the old system here and
| there in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, ect.
|
| 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).
| superflit2 wrote:
| On Romantic languages "latinE" a noun ending in "e" or "ne"
| would express a word from French/Galic.
|
| "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).
| asveikau wrote:
| In both your examples (cf. _Campania_ , _vitrina_ ), the
| pattern is that French makes an -a suffix in Latin into a
| silent -e. I believe there were earlier parts of the
| history of french phonetics where it was pronounced as a
| schwa, so you can kind of imagine it as "softening" over
| time, starting out as a proper A sound and eventually
| disappearing over the centuries.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > I dislike the term "gender" in linguistics.
|
| 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.
| masswerk wrote:
| Yet another aspect: In Latin, after the Republic, there's an
| increasing loss of punctuations and word separators in the
| written language, and with varying writing directions, as in
| verses, a distinctive word ending becomes really important.
| (Which may be a cause for the simplification mentioned in the
| article.) Now also take the rather free word order into account
| and it may become quite clear, why forming a relational web
| using types and repeating the respective word endings is really
| helpful.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Kye wrote:
| I wonder if there are any examples of this in languages from
| the many cultures past and present that always recognized more
| than two sex-derived genders.
| bregma wrote:
| English, for example, has two pronoun genders: animate and
| inanimate. The animate gender is further subdivided into two
| subgenders: masculine and feminine. Of course, none of this
| has anything to do with sex, unless you prefer to attempt
| reproduction with inanimate objects as many have instructed
| me to do using the imperative mood (literally "fuck it").
| kgeist wrote:
| Slavic languages have both 3 classic genders and
| grammatical animacy for masculine. I.e. if you view an
| object as an inanimate object, it will have a slightly
| different declension in accusative compared to animate
| objects. But it only works for words of masculine gender.
| tazjin wrote:
| Russian also has this for feminine plural accusative.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Doesn't 'it' refer to both inanimate objects and animate
| objects (animals)? Or is 'inanimate' a kind of term of art
| here refering to humans and human-like beings (instead of
| the more common meaning of 'non-living')?
| retrac wrote:
| Yes, it's a linguistics term. Animate things are
| perceived as having human-like agency. Many languages
| have a grammatical category clustering things like large
| non-human animals, the weather, or fire, or trees,
| together with humans. Animate. Everything else is
| inanimate and presumably less alive.
|
| 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?")
| occamrazor wrote:
| When I first learned English in school (almost 40 years
| ago) I was told that very young babies were grammatically
| neuter. Now I never hear anyone using "it" for a baby.
| Has English changed in the last decades, or was my
| teacher wrong?
| omegaham wrote:
| I was loudly corrected on this subject (that is, I had
| used "it," and he asserted that I was wrong) by a drill
| instructor in Marine Corps basic training a little more
| than a decade ago.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| culi wrote:
| Most languages with grammatical gender have a distinct third
| class which linguists usually call "neuter". Languages like
| French are somewhat unique in having lost that third gender
|
| It's important to note that neuter is distinct from
| "gender"-less nouns
| kgeist wrote:
| I like the fact that in most languages with 3 genders, the
| word kid is neuter: German "das Kind", Slavic "ditia",
| Greek "teknon".
|
| I guess that's because a child is not a fully developed
| man/woman, so it's assumed genderless.
| apocolyps6 wrote:
| This feels like cherry-picking. There are non-neuter ways
| to refer to kids, including in those languages. Also, the
| diminutive (at least in German) is neuter, and is often
| used with children. Some of these terms are specifically
| neutral (i.e. not "boy" or "girl"). So the reasons are
| much more likely linguistic than ..sociological.
| cge wrote:
| Kgeist gives citations to the more general trend here,
| but in Modern Greek, terms for children of particular
| genders often _also_ don 't have matching grammatical
| genders. Thus, to paidi and to tekno (child, nonspecific)
| are both neuter. But to koritsi (girl) and to agori (boy)
| are _also_ neuter.
| kgeist wrote:
| It's not cherry-picking, it's a well-known fact in
| Indoeuropean studies, and this interpretation is
| supported by some linguists.
|
| 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 _ph2ter
| 'father' beside feminine_ meh2ter 'mother' and _wlkwos
| '(he-)wolf' beside_ wlkwihxs '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. teknon, OHG kind, and OCS
| dete (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 Madchen 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).
| apocolyps6 wrote:
| Thanks for the citations. I'm always wary of this sort of
| reasoning since people often arrive at it via folk
| etymology, but this was very informative
| umanwizard wrote:
| > Most languages with grammatical gender have a distinct
| third class
|
| 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".
| culi wrote:
| No I said and I meant "most languages with grammatical
| gender". Other languages have different noun class
| systems, but these are not generally called "grammatical
| gender" if they're not tied to feminine, masculine, etc.
| chewxy wrote:
| "Gender" as a concept came in linguistics first[0]. Social
| sciences co-opted the word later in the 1950s (Simone de
| Beauvoir comes to mind as one of the first people to use
| "gender" in its modern sense). The linguistics notion of gender
| is not tied to masculine or feminine (though they are taught
| thus). We now associate the word "gender" with its modern
| political meaning but in the past, the word "gender" was
| treated the way you'd use "noun class"
|
| [0]:
| https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gender&year_st...
| telotortium wrote:
| > I dislike the term "gender" in linguistics. Many languages
| have grammatical gender that has nothing to do with
| masculine/feminine.
|
| 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.
| dwmbt wrote:
| great rebuttal, i learned something new! i wonder, do you
| happen to know how this might impact the conversation between
| gender and sex being two different descriptors? i'm unsure of
| how to go about looking at the etymological origins of both
| words, so help in that regard could prove just as useful.
| thanks.
| leephillips wrote:
| Two different descriptors of what?
| brazzy wrote:
| Um... From TFA:
|
| 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.
| telotortium wrote:
| Thanks for that - I didn't see that.
| olau wrote:
| Persistence: I'm not sure that line of reasoning is actually
| valid. I think you need to be able to rule out other reasons
| for persistence before you can make that conclusion. The
| article mentions that the genders are learned at an early age
| and seem to be very resistent to change.
|
| 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.
| pgcj_poster wrote:
| > Both sides have an unwarranted belief in a strong form of the
| Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. But new pronouns would not automatically
| lead to greater acceptance of non-binary people
|
| 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
| javitury wrote:
| > In the fifth declension, the only word inherited as masculine
| is dies, "day" [...] Eventually, the feminine gender prevailed,
| and all Romance reflexes of dies are feminine.
|
| What about "un dia" or "el dia" in Spanish?
| packet_nerd wrote:
| The Sgaw Karen language from Thailand and Burma has a system of
| what I've always called classifiers, but reading this, it sounds
| like they might be properly called genders too?
|
| 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.
| foo_barrio wrote:
| Is it used only for counting? Mandarin and other East Asian
| language have a classifier for counting. English uses counting
| classifier sometimes. For example, "paper" without a classifier
| in English refers to an official document or essay. For example
| "I have to write a paper" or "Do you have your papers?"
| otherwise you have to use "a sheet of paper", "some paper", "a
| pack of paper" etc. It's not exactly the same as the counting
| words in Mandarin but play a similar role in grammer.
| packet_nerd wrote:
| Yes, sort of, but a lot more than counting. I think Thai has
| counting words too, but I think they are not as central to
| the grammar or as flexible as Karen classifiers.
|
| 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.
| rovolo wrote:
| > (but modern Karens sometimes use "round" for the earth and
| moon instead)
|
| 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
| packet_nerd wrote:
| The moon doesn't visibly have bulk or mass like a ball,
| house, or mountain does. And I was referring to earth as the
| entire world. Edit: But the landscape, fields, meadows,
| districts, states, countries, and continents are all still
| flat.
|
| Edit 2: Now that I think about it, I should have used
| "spherical" to describe that category rather than "round."
| gillytech wrote:
| From an outside observation, the amount of discussion on this
| ridiculously long winded article represents a non-tirvial amount
| of wasted production time.
| fidesomnes wrote:
| it amazes me how boring this topic is.
| [deleted]
| Hayarotle wrote:
| > Eventually, the feminine gender prevailed, and all Romance
| reflexes of dies are feminine.
|
| I believe this might be a mistake, as "the day" in Spanish and
| Portuguese are masculine, and come from diem: "el dia" and "o
| dia"
| maire wrote:
| I have always found gender in German confusing. This gives a
| little more context.
|
| 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.
| iammisc wrote:
| > This has become problematic when we use the plural.
|
| 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.
| kennywinker wrote:
| "Completely out of line with the culture" firefighter, for a
| moment, was an exclusively male job. Fireman made sense. As
| more women took on that job during the past 50-ish years,
| calling them "firemen" makes less and less sense. So to say
| it's people out of step with culture isn't quite right. It's
| more like entrenched language in conflict with shifting
| culture.
|
| 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
| frenchyatwork wrote:
| The problem here is not that "fireman" couldn't in theory
| be used to refer to both men and women; but that in English
| it doesn't, or at least not anymore.
|
| 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).
| kennywinker wrote:
| Interesting. I was aware of the shift... In university I
| would cringe every time a prof said "man" to refer to
| human or humanity, which seemed to me to indicate a very
| recent change. It's a surprising thing to hear it started
| as far back as Tolkien's time - I remembered that line as
| a Peter Jackson addition.
|
| 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.
| space_fountain wrote:
| It embeds assumptions about what the societal defaults are,
| nothing more and nothing less. Like you maybe I'm skeptical
| that it does harm itself, but certainly societal defaults are
| problematic. Maybe and probably, there are bigger problems,
| but whatever.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Not sure what you mean. It's certainly grammar that is
| _causing_ the problem. And yes, it 's a problem because some
| people think it's a problem--that's true of all problems by
| definition.
| iammisc wrote:
| Most people don't think it's a problem at all.
| soundnote wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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'.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I always liked this take on the "policeman, congressman" issue
| (back when that was the thing that people got upset about in
| newspaper columns):
|
| 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.
| rackjack wrote:
| Devil's Advocate: This piece is only analogous if "white" has
| been used as a generic term for color since at least 800
| years ago. The reason it sounds shocking is that "white" has
| only ever really, in a broad sense, meant white, while "man"
| has generically referred to humans for about 800 years:
|
| https://www.etymonline.com/word/man
| iammisc wrote:
| > 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)
| soundnote wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| rovolo wrote:
| > These are obvious differences in even my one year old
| noticed.
|
| 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?
| hodgesrm wrote:
| Gender in German is an incredible pain. There are rules for
| about 50% of the words, e.g., a word that ends in "ung" like
| Beleuchtung is always feminine. The other 50%? It's a guess.
|
| 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]
|
| [0] https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Butter
| bmn__ wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27714868
| kgeist wrote:
| >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.
|
| 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.
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