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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

#81

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

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’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.

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

#82

Post by masswerk »

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…

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.

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

#83

Post by tazjin »

kgeist wrote: post #36
bregma wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Russian also has this for feminine plural accusative.

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

#84

Post by dragonwriter »

tsimionescu wrote: post #80
dragonwriter wrote: post #70

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) 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…

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.

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

#85

Post by [deleted] »

vehemenz wrote: post #37

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, de…

[deleted]

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

#86

Post by soundnote »

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…

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.

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

#87

Post by denton-scratch »

mjevans wrote: post #18
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.

More importantly; why hasn't it been removed? 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.

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

#88

Post by denton-scratch »

vehemenz wrote: post #37

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, de…

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.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally

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

#89

Post by demetrius »

mjevans wrote: post #18
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.

More importantly; why hasn't it been removed? 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)?

> can I please have a logical language

Does Lojban fit the bill?

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

#90

Post by allturtles »

adrian_b wrote: post #65
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…

> 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.

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