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Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take

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Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take

#21

Post by AutumnCurtain »

animal_spirits wrote: post #5

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 altogethe…

This would be an interesting exploration of a sort of Sapir-Whorf type question.

Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take

#22

Post by ZeroGravitas »

maire wrote: post #3

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…

I always liked this take on the "policeman, congressman" issue (back when that was the thing that people got upset about in newspaper columns):

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html

25 years old, and probably the most striking thing from this distance is the implicit assumption that all the readers would believe in racism, but not sexism.

Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take

#23

Post by kennywinker »

iammisc wrote: post #4
maire wrote: post #3

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…

> This has become problematic when we use the plural. Grammatically, it's not problematic at all. Some people with new ideas completely out of line with the culture at large make a big deal of it.

“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

Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take

#24

Post by bregma »

Kye wrote: post #16
retrac wrote: post #11

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 myst…

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").

Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take

#25

Post by culi »

retrac wrote: post #11

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 myst…

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".

Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take

#26

Post by retrac »

canjobear wrote: post #8

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.

Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take

#27

Post by hodgesrm »

maire wrote: post #3

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…

Gender in German is an incredible pain. There are rules for about 50% of the words, e.g., a word that ends in "ung" like Beleuchtung is always feminine. The other 50%? It's a guess.

After a while I concluded it must be a defensive mechanism designed to detect and repel foreigners. As evidence I adduce the fact that some words change genders between regions. Well-known example: die Butter and der Butter depending on where you are from. [0]

[0] https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Butter

Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take

#28

Post by packet_nerd »

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.

Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take

#29

Post by culi »

Kye wrote: post #16
retrac wrote: post #11

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 myst…

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.

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

Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take

#30

Post by [deleted] »

bregma wrote: post #24
Kye wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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").

[deleted]
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