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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

#111

Post by fourtrees »

kgeist wrote: post #39
culi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Originally, most Indo-European languages had the three classes of feminine, masculine, and neuter. Early Proto-Indoeuropean is theorized to have 2 genders - animate/inanimate, but by the late PIE period it evolved to the classic three.

Having missed your comment, I was about to post about this. One interesting fact I can add is that Hittite, the oldest written IE language, has the animate/inanimate gender system rather than the 3-way system. You can also see remnants of the old system here and there in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, ect.

Of course, this is largely theoretical like you said, and I'm sure you could dig up some dissenting papers if you wanted to.

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

#112

Post by AutumnCurtain »

Tagbert wrote: post #100
AutumnCurtain wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why is Sapir-Whorf so appealing? No one has been able to show more than a trivial effect on cognition from the language influences that that paper was promoting. Human thought is not rigidly channeled by vocabulary in the way that they described.

Appealing in what way? A "strong" Sapir-Whorf is rejected completely by mainstream linguists, to my knowledge.

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

#113

Post by omegaham »

occamrazor wrote: post #105
retrac wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's a linguistics term. Animate things are perceived as having human-like agency. Many languages have a grammatical category clustering things like large non-human animals, the weather, or fire, or trees, together with humans. Animate. Everything else is inanimate and presumably less alive. In English, many animals are referred to with "he" or "she". Being a mammal, large, being domesticated, being familiar, ar…

When I first learned English in school (almost 40 years ago) I was told that very young babies were grammatically neuter. Now I never hear anyone using “it” for a baby. Has English changed in the last decades, or was my teacher wrong?

I was loudly corrected on this subject (that is, I had used "it," and he asserted that I was wrong) by a drill instructor in Marine Corps basic training a little more than a decade ago.

I'm not quite sure how much credence to give his opinion considering that his expertise was in pain, misery, and shooting guns rather than linguistics and grammar, but he certainly had strong beliefs on the subject, and I wasn't going to try to convince him otherwise.

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

#114

Post by dragonwriter »

denton-scratch wrote: post #106
School-Cotton wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The colloquial meaning of “literally” isn’t quite “not literally”; it’s more of a generic intensifier.

That's not what M-W says. They've gone the whole hog, and said that one meaning of "literally" is "not literally".

> That's not what M-W says.

M-W is [EDIT: or would be, see below], in that case, simply in error. The OED gets the colloquial use right: “Used to indicate that some (frequently conventional) metaphorical or hyperbolical expression is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense: ‘virtually, as good as’; (also) ‘completely, utterly, absolutely’.”

It also traces it back to at least 1769, which should shut up those people treating it as some new corruption.

https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/109061

EDIT: On actually reading the M-W link, the characterization upthread is false: it doesn't say it means “not literally” but that it is “used in an exaggerated way to emphasize a statement or description that is not literally true or possible”. This seems to just be a poorer wording of the OED take, especially in light of the extended discussion of that usage that is presented below thr definition proper.

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

#115

Post by kgeist »

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…

In Russian, gender confusion is mostly about professions (the rest of the gender system makes no sense, like a car is "she" but the plane is "he" -- so no one bothers with it).

For example, the word for "doctor" is, well, "doktor". But the word is masculine. There's a feminine derivation, "doctorsha" - "female doctor" -- but it sounds somewhat condenscending to me, like you doubt her competence. "Oh this doktorsha prescribed me wrong pills again".

So the neutral, respectful way to refer to a female doctor is to refer to her using the "neutral" masculine form "doktor". And it doesn't sound odd to me at all. But here's where the fun starts: adjectives need to agree in gender with their noun. And the correct grammar is "good (masc.) doctor (masc)". However, there's a recent trend to have it like "good (fem.) doctor (masc)". I.e. the grammar is completely bonkers but somehow it sounds acceptable to my ear.

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

#116

Post by imbnwa »

Tagbert wrote: post #96
alexfrydl wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

English lost it’s gender and most of it’s verb declensions as a result of the Norse occupation. The Norse occupied around half of Britain for several hundreds of years. Both Norse and English had these linguistic forms, but the specifics did not match and were confusing to the adult Norse trying to learn English. They adopted a simplified version and that spread among the population. The grammatical effect was strong…

The amount of common, everyday, practical vocabulary that descends from Old Norse that you use all the time on a daily basis is impressive.

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

#117

Post by culi »

School-Cotton wrote: post #66
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

> 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”.

No I said and I meant "most languages with grammatical gender". Other languages have different noun class systems, but these are not generally called "grammatical gender" if they're not tied to feminine, masculine, etc.

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

#118

Post by denton-scratch »

dragonwriter wrote: post #114
denton-scratch wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what M-W says. They've gone the whole hog, and said that one meaning of "literally" is "not literally".

> That's not what M-W says. M-W is [EDIT: or would be, see below], in that case, simply in error. The OED gets the colloquial use right: “Used to indicate that some (frequently conventional) metaphorical or hyperbolical expression is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense: ‘virtually, as good as’; (also) ‘completely, utterly, absolutely’.” It also traces it back to at least 1769, which should shut up those peo…

Yeah, I'm good with that OED explanation. It's hard to get the nuance, but that's not bad. M-W is just incomprehensible - it's hard to understand how a lexicographer can make such a mess of defining a word.

I mean, that's the core business.

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

#119

Post by filiphorvat »

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…

>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?

As someone who speaks a Slavic language with masculine, feminine and neuter genders (Croatian), I've never heard of anyone identifying as non-binary in my language. It'd be extremely difficult because all adjectives and verbs in some tenses change based on the gender of the person in question. Singular they wouldn't work because it's already used to formally refer to someone (similar to German Sie). You'd have to rethink half of the language to not gender someone, which no one is going to do for such a niche problem.

One thing I see Anglophones do when talking about other languages is confuse neuter gender for gender neutral, which equates to calling someone an "it".

>...English doesn't use gendered nouns so maybe we have less deeply entrenched ideas about gender and what is masculine or what is feminine...

That's another thing Anglophones get wrong. At least in my language, when not talking about people, 99% of the time the gender is determined by the ending (suffix?) of the word it's referring to, not some mystical gender role we imbue that object with. When using the word human, the rest of the sentence refers to them as male, whereas if you're using the word person, it'd be female even if you're using them to talk about the same guy.

One other thing is, when referring to a mixed group of people, you use a masculine form of plural, same as "latinos". It REALLY doesn't matter and it only bothers people who don't speak gendered languages.

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

#120

Post by kgeist »

fourtrees wrote: post #111
kgeist wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Originally, most Indo-European languages had the three classes of feminine, masculine, and neuter. Early Proto-Indoeuropean is theorized to have 2 genders - animate/inanimate, but by the late PIE period it evolved to the classic three.

Having missed your comment, I was about to post about this. One interesting fact I can add is that Hittite, the oldest written IE language, has the animate/inanimate gender system rather than the 3-way system. You can also see remnants of the old system here and there in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, ect. Of course, this is largely theoretical like you said, and I'm sure you could dig up some dissenting papers if…

>You can also see remnants of the old system here and there in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, ect.

For example, there are some adjectives in Latin and Ancient Greek, which only have two declensions instead of three: one common declension for masculine/feminine, and one for neuter.

For example: naturalis (masc), naturalis (fem), naturale (neut), as opposed to novus (masc), nova (fem), novum (neut).

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