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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

#71

Post by jasonhansel »

One really interesting case is the use of the English pronoun "she" to refer to ships (and sometimes countries). This is a rare situation in which English nouns for inanimate objects can still have gender.

This usage seems to be in decline, though, and is sometimes seen as sexist. But it's still used, e.g., by the National Parks Service:

> Construction began in 1794 and [the USS] Constitution launched on October 21, 1797. She went on her first cruise the next year as the Quasi-War with France emerged. Later she served in engagements with pirates off the Barbary coast in the Mediterranean. [...] She earned the nickname "Old Ironsides" because the cannon fire from enemy ships seemed as if they couldn't penetrate her strong oak hull.

Source: https://www.nps.gov/bost/learn/historyculture/ussconst.htm

(Edit: clarified)

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

#72

Post by blhack »

jasonhansel wrote: post #71

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,…

Is this rare?

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

#73

Post by frenchyatwork »

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…

I doubt it, except perhaps as some sort of re-analysis. See "The Awful German Language" (https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html) starting from "To continue with the German genders:"

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

#74

Post by macdice »

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…

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.

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

#75

Post by bluedino »

jasonhansel wrote: post #71

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,…

automobiles as well

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

#76

Post by ttmb »

blhack wrote: post #72
jasonhansel wrote: post #71

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,…

Is this rare?

I think it's common in colloquial speech but rarely used in formal speech these days.

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

#77

Post by handrous »

blhack wrote: post #72
jasonhansel wrote: post #71

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,…

Is this rare?

I'd not have called the usage rare, just situations that call for it. Maybe it is and I've just not noticed, though?

[EDIT] notably, I think it occurs pretty often in recent movies, mostly referring to cars, ships, and space-ships. Not just period pieces, either.

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

#78

Post by apocolyps6 »

kgeist wrote: post #40
culi wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I like the fact that in most languages with 3 genders, the word kid is neuter: German "das Kind", Slavic "ditia", Greek "teknon". I guess that's because a child is not a fully developed man/woman, so it's assumed genderless.

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.

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

#79

Post by masswerk »

kkoncevicius wrote: post #10

> 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 becau…

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.)

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

#80

Post by tsimionescu »

dragonwriter wrote: post #70
UnpossibleJim wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, pe…

> “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'?

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