Shall we conjugate?
In response to his post, Libertie, Equalitie, and ...More Equalitie?, Figleaf and his readers engaged in a fascinating discussion on the concept of grammatical gender. Several commenters expressed the view that that there is no sociopolitical implication to the fact that native speakers often ignore the genders of words in their languages, because grammatical gender and biological gender are two different concepts. But Figleaf expressed his doubts:
And then there's the *philosophical* effort of trying to suppress incredulity that the etymology for each word really, truely has no gendered signficance.
I have to say that I agree with Figleaf on this point, and here is why.
My experience with the study of foreign languages is limited to three years of Latin during my high school years. That may seem too quaint to allow me to add anything of value to this discussion, but looking at the gender assignment in the Latin language is valuable for two reasons. First, since Latin is technically a dead language, in that it is not currently used and therefore not subject to random change, it provides a frozen specimen to test the assertion that there is some underlying rationale to the assignment of genders to animals, objects or abstract ideas. Second, until the 1960's the study of Latin was a requisite in the secondary educational curriculum in North American and, I would guess, Western Europe. For centuries the associations of certain objects or abstract ideas with nouns whose gender had to be memorized was part of the formal education for men and eventually for women. Therefore, the nuances hidden within these gender assignments would have been absorbed, although unconsciously, by students and scholars for hundreds of years. To assert that the associations and judgments embedded in the gender assignments did not exert an influence on literature and philosophy would be disingenuous, IMO.
Let us begin with the body, for it is my belief that the way we think of our own flesh will reveal the way we think about sex and the sexes.
Consider that in Latin, blood (cruor), sweat (sudor) and breath (spiritus) are masculine nouns. Masculine is the gender of the Latin words uterus and fetus, which have become part of the English lexicon.
Nouns that represent the less noble effluvia such as urine are designated as feminine (urina). The Latin word for sewer is the feminine noun cloaca, which also has been used to describe the stomach of a drunken woman. Is it insignificant that the sewer system of Rome was named Cloaca Maxima, and was believed to be under the protection of the goddess of filth, Cloacina, who also presided over sexual intercourse in marriage? The feminine noun latrina is the Latin word used to denote both a toilet and a brothel. After reading this should one be moved to shed a tear, please note that its Latin equivalent would be the feminine lacrima.
The concept of Nature is designated as the feminine Natura, and the feminine sylva is the Latin name for forest or woodland. But the feminine gender is also assigned to the less wholesome elements of the natural world: shade or shadow (umbra), fen or bog (lama) or a wild animal (fera). The less wholesome elements of the supernatural world are also designated as feminine: the lamia are the witches, vampires and ghosts.
As for the virtues, I am happy to report that courage or daring (audacia) and piety (pietas) come in on the distaff side. Unfortunately, they must share the stage with ira, their Latin cousin so given to anger.
The Wikipedia article on grammatical gender states:
Since all nouns must belong to some noun class, many end up with genders which are purely conventional. For instance, the Romance languages inherited sol "sun" (which is masculine) and luna "moon" (which is feminine) from Latin but in German and other Germanic languages Sonne "sun" is feminine and Mond "moon" is masculine. Two nouns denoting the same concept can also differ in gender in closely related languages, or within a single language. For instance, in Polish the word ksie;z.yc "moon" is masculine, but its Russian counterpart is feminine. The Russian word for "sun" is neuter...here is nothing inherent about the Moon or a potato which makes them objectively "male" or "female". In these cases, gender is quite independent of meaning, and a property of the nouns themselves, rather than of their referents.
I disagree that gender is quite independent of meaning. The meaning may be obscure, forgotten, or hidden in the oral traditions of the culture -- but it exists. Consider the fact that the moon is a feminine noun in the Romance languages and a masculine noun in Polish. If you examine the mythologies of these two cultures, you will find that in the Roman mythology Luna is the goddess associated with the moon. In the Polish pantheon of gods, Miesiac, the moon deity, is seen as both male and female. Before a culture would have recorded the names of objects, places and gods in written form, these words would have been part of an oral tradition, the stories of creation by which people tried to make sense of the outer physical world and the inner world of perception and emotion.
While there are valid criticisms of the the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, I think its value is the assertion that the instrument by which we name the external and internal world is not objective or neutral. While the connotations hidden within language may not have determined (in the strict sense of the word) our views about sex, the fact that we have to struggle to change our thinking about the qualities "naturally" attributed to each sex is an indication of the influence of these hidden meanings and the power of language.
Thank you so much for the lexical, well, fig leaf, Kochanie. I've been feeling a little more bare than usual and I appreciate the little bit of coverage. :-)
figleaf
(reCaptcha says "that Nesto." I have no idea what gender, or for that matter what kind of think, a "nesto" might be.)
[You are most welcome, fl. I am more than glad to offer a gentleman a bit of coverage, but there is no (lexical) cause for your to feel bare. The discussions that your posts generated on gender and language have been fascinating to read, so I hope you will return to this topic soon.
As for "that Nesto" -- I wonder if reCaptcha truncated the last consonant of "Nestor," the elder statesman from Homer's Illiad. Thanks. -- Kochanie]
The goddess who presides over sexual intercourse in marriage is the same as the goddess of filth? Wow.
[Charming, eh? See also jokes about civil engineers with punch lines about putting waste disposal in recreational areas. Thanks, Lynn. --fl]
Kochanie, I'm no expert on languages at all but I have to say that I can't see that the Latin gender of a word can have any bearing on how we feel about it when in English we use one descended from another source.
Be that as it may, I'm sorry that figleaf feels a little bare and that I may have had a hand in that. Umm, perhaps I should rephrase that. Or perhaps not.... I rather like him bare and I'd rather like to have a hand..., hmm... :)
And the reCaptcha words, which have been working well for me tonight, are "and" "calm"
You know, you are making me think of my former Russian teacher, who said that 'love' is feminine in Russian because "all things good and beautiful are of the feminine gender"...
What I'm objecting to is that
1) the main reason for any specific words to belong to a certain gender is because their referents are thought have feminine or masculine characteristics by the contemporary speakers of the language (I'm not sure if anybody really thought that), and they will in turn define the way the speakers think of male and female (which I think you are talking about here).
2) if a word changes gender, or if a language loses a gender, the most likely explanation for this is that the gender roles in society have changed. (This is what Figleaf's first post seemed to be arguing.)
It is pretty easy to see what's wrong with 2)... it contradicts with actual language history. English used to have masculine, feminine and neuter, but has now almost completely lost gender as a grammatical category. I'm no expert on the English language and I do not know when or how fast it disappeared (and I can't quickly get any books to look it up from, because my books are in another town and it's weekend), but it was long before feminism raised its head.
Similarly, Scandinavian languages used to have the same masculine/feminine/neuter system as German and Old English (to which they are related), but in Danish and Swedish, masculine and feminine merged into one, becoming the "common" or "non-neuter" gender, aka utrum. (Zeborah mentioned this in the earlier thread.) I can't speak of Danish, but in Swedish, words that denote human beings mostly (but not always) ended up in the common gender, which therefore became associated with humans and other living things. Consequently, neuter came to be (loosely) associated with lifeless objects.
Again, was this development preceded or followed by a societal change where natural gender started to matter less and the difference between humans and things became more important? Hardly. And do modern Icelanders, whose language still separates masculine and feminine, have more rigid gender roles than mainland Scandinavians? Naah.
One more thing: the word for human (or person) in Swedish is människa, which used to be feminine before it became non-neuter. When referring to the word human one will usually use the pronoun she if the natural gender is not known, as in "It's difficult for a person to know who she really is and what she really wants." Such has been the case for at least the past millennium. And have women in Sweden throughout this time been considered more deserving of human rights than in the rest of Europe? No.
For this reason, even if it was proven that the gender in French is getting more shaky than it used to be, my first thought would be that it's normal language change, caused by something within the language.
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As for 1), and having more to do with this particular post, there are a number of reasons why a word would end up in a certain gender. Potentially, it might even be possible to find out why harmonica is masculine in French, but I won't try that, because Figleaf has threatened to eat my hat if I do. So here are some general possibilities:
It could be semantically motivated. Or, as in the examples from mythology which you provided, it could be semantically motivated diachronically (when the history of the language is taken into account) but arbitrary synchronically (when we look at the language as it is now). Contemporary German speakers learn that 'sun' is feminine long before they learn anything about ancient sun-goddesses, if they ever do.
Or, gender could be *formally* motivated, determined by something in the shape of the word. In the languages that I speak, the most important thing is the ending: so in Russian, if a word ends in a hard consonant, it is masculine, no matter what it means. "Khemburger" (hamburger) was borrowed from English, and it ends in r, so it became masculine.
Or it might be analogy. Another word that either sounds or means something similar already is of this or that gender, so this new word will be as well.
Or there might be stranger reasons - in some languages I know, loanwords tend to be neuter; in some other cases, a loanword has retained the gender it had in the language it came from, even when that went against the rules of the language that borrowed it.
And all these things will happen within the same language, and sometimes contradict each other - causing native speakers to disagree on genders of some words.
And then, the effect one might think they could have on the speakers' worldview will be blurred by the vast amount of contradictory messages you'll find in the vocabulary of any real language. You might notice that 'tear' is feminine and think it reinforces the idea of women as weepy creatures, or was caused by that idea, unless... unless the act of crying happens to get a masculine word. I don't know if it does in Latin, but in Spanish, it does.
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But what I don't at all disagree about at all is that natural and grammatical gender interact in various ways, some subtle, some not so.
I could go on about this for a long time, but it seems a bit OTT to write a comment that is longer than the original blog post. Especially as the post is getting old and nobody might even read this. :-/ But if I ramble, it's because I find language an endlessly fascinating thing (and sort of think that everybody else should, too ;-). And like most things it loses much of its wonderfulness if you simplify it too much.
[I've read it with gusto, Larus. I totally appreciate the thought you've put into this. I will say it's interesting that you (correctly) point out that English is almost entirely gendered-pronound free. Except, of course, for things that might have a gender plus boats and... well... whatever it is that blows when we yell "There she blows!" But of course it doesn't seem neutral to us at all because when it comes to people we struggle with gender pronouns quite a bit, complete with cognitive psychologists measuring what images pop into people's minds when you employ nominally gender-free usage such as "all men are created equal." (Turns out nearly everyone imagines a gendered man after hearing that when, if we had real gender neutrality, you'd expect to see something closer to random choice whether a man or woman was called to mind.) So at least for me, since I'm already conscous of controversy with the little bits of gendered pronouns we've got left, the idea of having to learn to disregard the meaning of a whole set of new ones feels unrewarding. But! I expect I really just need to travel abroad, whereupon I might discover more pragmatic reasons to stop complaining and begin immersing myself. Thanks again. And please feel free to comment about this or anything else no matter how deep in the archives they might be. That's why, after all, I like to keep archives! :-) --fl]
Yep, female boats and winds and different pronouns for men and women are exactly what I meant when I said that gender has *almost* completely disappeared. I think those are remnants from the three-gendered past of the language.
And I totally underestand that all this bugs you, because there are so many things that bug me about the languages I speak. My native language doesn't even make the difference between he and she, and so I feel a bit weird being referred to as a "she," let alone talking about myself in third person, because I feel it emphasizes my femaleness in a way that is... not quite decent. It's like the language equivalent of wearing a too short skirt. But I guess for a native speaker like you it doesn't *emphasize* anybody's gender any more than having beard or breasts.
And what really annoys me is definiteness, making the difference between "a" and "the." It seems completely useless: "a" means something is new, "the" means it's familiar - but if it is familiar, you should know that already without needing an extra word to tell it! But there are so many languages that do make the difference that it probably does some good after all. People are lazy. They don't keep pronouncing extra syllables without a good reason to do so.
But things like that don't keep me from using English, most of the time I don't even think about them. You don't need any reasons to stop complaining, you just get used to it.