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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

#121

Post by graeme »

filiphorvat wrote: post #119
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 i…

> It REALLY doesn't matter and it only bothers people who don't speak gendered languages.

May depend on place and culture. I recall my French teacher in 4th grade got snide about this while explaining that even a single man in a group will turn the group masculine. She was francophone.

This certainly bothers anglos much much more though.

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

#122

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…

It also says "a story that is basically true even if not literally true".

I don't think mine was a false characterisation, but see for yourself. I think M-W are descriptivist zealots, who will never accept that there is an incorrect usage. Therefore they contradict themselves in their own definition of this word. I don't think it's just a poorer wording; there's an ideological difference, one so important that it's defence requires this lexicographer, whose business is publishing definitions, to make a definition incomprehensible.

This isn't the only example - M-W seems to be Google's preferred dictionary lookup for search terms (after some nasty spammy searches). I've seen a lot of M-W definitions that are contradictory, because of the ideology.

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

#123

Post by alexfrydl »

vehemenz wrote: post #54
alexfrydl wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think bad faith misrepresentations like this are the primary source of the supposed “impossible discourse” on the “subject.” What “subject” by the way? Who are the specific people who use this supposedly confusing, brand-new meaning of the word “gender,” who are so impossible to talk to?

Bad faith might be part of it. I think bad faith is more conducive when neither side of an argument are able to communicate clearly enough for the other. If that's the case, then a better understanding of English is the remedy, not formulating needlessly metaphysical conceptions of gender. But I still think there is more going on. The subject in question is gender and gender identity. To begin with, even educated fol…

Okay, gotcha. So who are the two sides of this argument, and what are they arguing about exactly? I'm just trying to get clarification on who it is in particular that needs to stop “formulating needlessly metaphysical conceptions of gender” (i.e. making things up) and accept your biologically-grounded definition instead. Who are these strange, confusing people who even “educated” people can't understand?

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

#124

Post by kgeist »

hodgesrm wrote: post #27
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 w…

>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.

It's not uncommon for a noun to change their gender at some point in history. As far as I know, it's often analogical changes. For example, feminine noun X describes an item of a larger class Y, and it just happens that most items of class Y are masculine. So the noun X, being feminine, is an exception, which is "fixed", and it becomes masculine.

An example from Russian language: most words denoting shoes and related items were masculine: boot, shoe, sock etc. Then there was the word for "slippers", feminine. I and my family still use the word in the feminine form, because the change is very recent. Today most speakers (especially younger ones) use the masculine form.

It's expectable that a change can happen in some dialects, but not in others.

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

#125

Post by dllthomas »

School-Cotton wrote: post #101
denton-scratch wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://…

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

My go-to on this is that if someone says "you left me waiting for days" we don't say "sometimes 'days' means 'a few minutes'" and wring our hands about how anyone will communicate time. We say that people exaggerate. That doesn't really change if people say it a lot.

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

#126

Post by apocolyps6 »

kgeist wrote: post #97
apocolyps6 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not cherry-picking, it's a well-known fact in Indoeuropean studies, and this interpretation is supported by some linguists. For example (Luraghi 2018): "More than simply indicating referential sex, Luraghi (2009b: 127 and 2011) makes the argument, with which Melchert (2014: 264) agrees, that an involvement in procreation may have played a role in gender assignment in PIE. It may have been a key factor motivating…

Thanks for the citations. I'm always wary of this sort of reasoning since people often arrive at it via folk etymology, but this was very informative

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

#127

Post by pgcj_poster »

> Both sides have an unwarranted belief in a strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. But new pronouns would not automatically lead to greater acceptance of non-binary people

This gets the causation backwards. People started to accept non-binary identities, which led them to invent new pronouns as a solution to the problem of "what should I call this person?"

> Typically, these are people who are biologically male or female and have not undergone any gender reassignment surgery or hormonal treatment

I'm not sure what this has to do with the point being made, or why the author felt it was so important as to mention it twice, but for accuracy's sake, I'll point out that about half (49%) of non-binary people in the U.S. want hormone treatment. As of 2015, most of those who want it lack access to it, but it seems kind of unfair to characterize non-binary people's transitions as typically non-medical when that's only (sort-of) true because our medical system makes it difficult for them to get transition-related care.

https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/usts/USTS... pg. 99

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

#128

Post by kgeist »

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…

I think a better analogy is error correction code. Some redundancy in a language can be a good thing. Gender information may be redundant, but the fact that adjectives agree in gender with their nouns, helps better distinguish what adjective refers to what noun. Same with pronouns.

For example, the famous Jespersen's cycle[0]: in many languages, "I not know" eventually becomes "I not know a thing" (like in French "je ne sais pas"). "A thing" is completely redundant here, but it helps better understand that it's a negation, in case the first "not" was not heard.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jespersen%27s_Cycle

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

#129

Post by dragonwriter »

vehemenz wrote: post #54
alexfrydl wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think bad faith misrepresentations like this are the primary source of the supposed “impossible discourse” on the “subject.” What “subject” by the way? Who are the specific people who use this supposedly confusing, brand-new meaning of the word “gender,” who are so impossible to talk to?

Bad faith might be part of it. I think bad faith is more conducive when neither side of an argument are able to communicate clearly enough for the other. If that's the case, then a better understanding of English is the remedy, not formulating needlessly metaphysical conceptions of gender. But I still think there is more going on. The subject in question is gender and gender identity. To begin with, even educated fol…

> But I still think there is more going on. The subject in question is gender and gender identity. To begin with, even educated folks operating in good faith do not have a particularly coherent account of either.

I think there is a common, clear, useful model of both what descriptively exists and what the two main factions prefer normatively:

Given: that there exist actual physical differences between people, and

Given: that these differences are the basis for different descriptive labels on several orthogonal axes,

Given: that there are categories i to which people are assigned by society, and

Given: those categories are on a number of orthogonal axes, and

Given: that people have idea of which of those categories they should be assigned by society.

There is one of axes of physical trait based differentiation called “sex”.

There is one axis of social differentiation called “gender”, for which the corresponding self-understood correct category is “gender identity”.

The two major conflicting normative camps are: one that holds that sex determines correct socially ascribed gender (of which there are two possible categorizations of each) and correct gender identity (the same as correct ascribed gender), and one that holds that gender identity defines correct socially ascribed gender and that sex is largely beside the point (even if it statistically correlates with gender identity.)

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

#130

Post by bmn__ »

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.

> why does grammatical gender exist

See https://www.belleslettres.eu/content/deklination/genus-gende...> around the 40 to 60% content region.

tl;dr Originally Proto-Indo-European had no genders. The concept was added piecemeal. Subjects were marked with ·s. Results of an action or grammatical objects were marked with ·m, this was generalised and transferred onto actual objects/things. This was the birth of the first gender distinction, neutrum, and the ·s words assumed the role of the default gender. Collective words (before the invention of plural) and abstract words ended in ·a. The animate/inanimate distinction mentioned by thread neighbours is a red herring, disregard that theory.

The conflation of genus and sexus and hence the unfortunate misnaming of default gender as masculine and abstract gender as feminine which is still in use today is due to bad Roman grammarians; the HN submission article mentions that in contrast Varro understood it better.

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