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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

#61

Post by frenchyatwork »

kennywinker wrote: post #23
iammisc wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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).

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

#62

Post by School-Cotton »

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 dislike the term "gender" in linguistics.

I think you have it backwards. The term “gender” meant grammatical gender, i.e. noun classes, before being extended by analogy to the current meaning.

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

#63

Post by rovolo »

iammisc wrote: post #55
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 i…

> 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?

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

#64

Post by UnpossibleJim »

tsimionescu wrote: post #51
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…

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…

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.

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

#65

Post by adrian_b »

allturtles wrote: post #6

I didn't read the whole article but skimmed through it and didn't see a clear answer to the question "why does grammatical gender exist"? As a native English speaker, I've never understood why it was invented in the first place.

Multiple genders have 2 advantages.

The first is that by having different pronouns for each gender, when you must use more pronouns in the same sentence, there are good chances that you will be able to use different pronouns so there will be no ambiguity about what the pronouns are referring to.

The grammatical gender is a hashing function, with 2 or 3 buckets in the Indo-European languages but with many more buckets in some languages.

When you are lucky and there are no hash collisions, you use only different pronouns in a sentence, when you are unlucky and there are hash collisions, i.e. nouns with the same gender, you use the same pronoun twice, or even more times, and the sentence becomes ambiguous.

Because this role of the genders is hard to replace, even English has retained the gender for pronouns.

The second role for the genders was for adjectives. By making the adjectives repeat the gender of the noun to which they applied, when there are no hash collisions it is clear to which nouns the adjectives are connected, otherwise, like for pronouns, the sentences remain ambiguous.

This was important in the old languages, with free word order, where the adjectives were not necessarily placed besides their nouns.

English has lost the agreement in adjectives, but this simplification has been paid by the loss of flexibility in word order. English has a much more rigid word order than most other languages.

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

#66

Post by School-Cotton »

culi wrote: post #29
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.

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”.

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

#67

Post by School-Cotton »

alexfrydl wrote: post #47
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…

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 c…

> 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.

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

#68

Post by chewxy »

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…

"Gender" as a concept came in linguistics first[0]. Social sciences co-opted the word later in the 1950s (Simone de Beauvoir comes to mind as one of the first people to use "gender" in its modern sense). The linguistics notion of gender is not tied to masculine or feminine (though they are taught thus). We now associate the word "gender" with its modern political meaning but in the past, the word "gender" was treated the way you'd use "noun class"

[0]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gender&year_st...

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

#69

Post by telotortium »

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 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.

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

#70

Post by dragonwriter »

UnpossibleJim wrote: post #64
tsimionescu wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> 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”.

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