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?
"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"
Oh, are you? So the fact he is an asshole makes everything he did and thought “politics”? Is everything, any scientist does, which supports a world view you don’t like, “politics”?
Does this somehow invalidate the correction about the origins of ‘gender’’s popular meaning?
Have you read the article I linked? Do you still agree the distinction between sex and gender is all “politics”?
> 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.
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.
This is overstated. They used genus contextually, in an abstract sense, for biological sex, in the same way we might use kind for a brand of soda ("what kind of soda do you want?"), but genus didn't have the concrete meaning of biological sex for them any more than kind has the concrete meaning of soda brand for us.
It's the same for Greek γένος, e.g. in Plato's Symposium:
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).
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.
I don't think the etymological origins of the words really impact the current conversation. The meaning of words depends on how they are used, and "gender" today have quite a different meaning when talking about human gender identity than when talking about grammar.
i've found that there are arguments being had between people my age that sex is a biological descriptor (M/F) and that gender is a looser, more amorphous descriptor. for instance, you can be born a man (your biological sex) and identify as non-binary (your gender). i'm interested to see how the origin of the words could contribute to that discussion.
Various philosophers, such as Wittgenstein, have pointed out that much of what sounds like discussion only exists because one can arrange words into grammatically sensible sentences. That doesn't mean the discussion is actually about anything. People who know the words “Earth” and “flat” can theorize about whether the Earth is flat, but it’s a waste of time to pay any attention to them. A “non-binary” “gender” is just a noise with no idea attached to it.
I was replying to something. Just read the comment I was replying to. Also, yes, many languages have more than two genders. That’s a non-binary gender system. But no particular word in those languages is “non-binary”.
Words can certainly change gender over time or be non-gendered if that is what you mean. But it doesn't make any sense to say that a word is non-binary in a trinary gender system like in Latin.
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".
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.
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.
>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).
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.
It's not even their worst attempt. In France, those fringe "woke" people are advocating a forked version of French which is written with a lot of dots everywhere to display genders simultaneously. For example: "Bonjour à tou.s.tes les étudiant.e.s." which is very hard to read even for non-dyslexic people. The normal people are fighting it but they succeeded to promote that crap via a ministry and lot of universities are writing their emails like that.
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:
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.
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.
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").
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.
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')?
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?")
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?
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.
It can be considered an insult to get the sex of a baby wrong because males are generally considered more valuable than females. It's socially better the refer to an infant as inanimate than to mistakenly refer to a male child using the female gender. That said, as soon as one knows the correct sex (often indicated by the colour of cloth used in swaddling or clothing, or other markers like design patterns of trucks or ponies, as appropriate) it's important to start using the corresponding grammatical gender otherwise the early indoctrination lacks the enforcement required for a lifetime of identity with arbitrary social constructs like masculinity and femininity.
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
> 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”.
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.
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.
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 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).
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, το παιδί and το τέκνο (child, nonspecific) are both neuter. But το κορίτσι (girl) and το αγόρι (boy) are also neuter.
If I'm not wrong it's feminine in Ukrainian (dytyna). Not sure what it is for all Slavic languages (I think it's neutral in Croatian). Also not sure what is the history for the Ukrainian version.
The declension of "ditia" is not very productive (gen "ditiati" etc.) Usually a noun with a rare declension is moved to a different, more conmon declension by assigning a certain productive suffix which uses a common declension. Such suffixes have their own assigned gender.
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.
Danish have two grammatical genders, "neuter" and "common". Male and female have same grammatical gender. So conflating gender and sexual identity becomes really confusing!
That's interesting considering Germany had (more or less) one of the first queer centers in roughly the form we think of them now. I wonder what could have led to that and a diversifying concept of gender being wiped out of the language and culture...
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.
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.
> classifiers, but reading this, it sounds like they might be properly called genders too?
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.
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.
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.
Words with this range of meaning are simply called ‘noun classifiers’ in linguistics [0]. They’re pretty common both in the region and outside it: they’re also in Lao, Hmong and Minangkabau, as well as various Australian, Mayan and South American languages.
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."
> 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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
It doesn't turn the group masculine, it turns the word used to the masculine plural, which is the generic word for a group of people.
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.
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
> 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.
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
That resonates a lot with my observations as a native brazilian portuguese speaker. The gender of a thing has to do with how the word ends (o for male, a for female, e and r are a bit more tricky).
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.
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 '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.
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.
> 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”.
> “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'?
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.
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.
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 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.
>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.
I meant that no one pays attention that, for example, a teapot is "he", there's no meaning behind it.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Years ago I had a conversation with my brother, when his son was a few months old. At some point I mentioned something along the lines of "he [the infant] thinks such-and-such", and he countered with "he doesn't think, he doesn't have any language".
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.
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).
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.
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!
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
You're right although the English 's technically isn't a case marker. You can see this because 's doesn't mark nouns, it marks whole phrases, in things like "the Queen of England's hat." Since it modifies phrases and not single words, while not being a word in its own right, it's a clitic and not a case marker. It does descend from the Germanic genitive case, though.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
In Medieval Latin the adjectives were more frequently close to their nouns, because the writers were influenced by the word order from their native languages.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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:
> 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)
> 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.
> 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?
> 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'.
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]
>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.
“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
This doesn't always happen though; we have /dev/tty and it's used in common parlance, but this refers to Teletype, a company that went out of business in 1990. Hoover is the common name for a vacuum cleaner in the UK, and I'm not seeing that changing any time soon either, in spite of the company still being around. There are quite a few examples of this.
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.
The ship has, as you say, sailed. Man is not gender neutral, the -men suffix neither. Every case where it’s used is one where the stereotype is of a male dominated field. I say fireman, you invariably picture a man first. Can you give me an example of a job with the -man/men suffix that the stereotype is female? If that’s not the case how can it be neutral?
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).
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.
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.
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.
They have problems, but only insofar as any imperfect solution does. Having societal defaults itself is really good: If someone's confused as to what theyb should do with their life, bam. Here's a recipe that worked for your ancestors for ages, following it is unlikely to fuck you up badly. (This is, of course, a far bigger phenomenon than simply what jobs are called)
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 have to disagree with this. Many women want to have a family and will avoid careers that are not family friendly. This is still true today. But fixing those careers to be family friendly will benefit men as well as women.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.)
Thank you for breaking it down. One objection I might raise in your "given" statements is that the categories we use are not all on equal footing. I think the modern idea of gender identity seems to require dualism—a deeply implausible position—but that's a much longer conversation.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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. That doesn't really change if people say it a lot.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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) 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.)
> 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
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.)
> No, they aren't. They are distinct axes of variation, but not opposed.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
Because you didn’t read the book so you think I’m lying about what he said? He held various opinions about these issues through his life, as one would expect from an active thinker. But in the book I mentioned he specifically says that it is incoherent to claim to be an atheist or an agnostic, because both these descriptions implicitly refer to the “god” non-concept. And no, you can’t define a negative space by using a word that doesn’t refer to anything.
EDIT: As you’ve seen fit to edit your comment while I was replying to it, I’m done.
An atheist is anyone who lacks an affirmed belief in the existence of God - God being a powerful thinking entity responsible for the creation of the reality in which we exist.
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?
"Misrepresenting" isn't quite the same as "lying". It can be done unintentionally.
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".
> 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.
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.
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.
It provides a basis to argue about the sexism of the words we use for the two genders. What's the basis for arguing that "word is short. that's sexist". There is none and I don't think feminist scholars are stupid so I doubt they'd try to make such a baseless argument. And I'm really struggling to see why you would just assume they would...
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.)
From an outside observation, the amount of discussion on this ridiculously long winded article represents a non-tirvial amount of wasted production time.
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?