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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

#131

Post by olau »

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…

Persistence: I'm not sure that line of reasoning is actually valid. I think you need to be able to rule out other reasons for persistence before you can make that conclusion. The article mentions that the genders are learned at an early age and seem to be very resistent to change.

I just looked up Danish - it used to have masculine, feminine and neuter, but masculine disappeared into feminine. The theory given here is that it was a consequence of bilinguals simplifying things:

https://dialekt.ku.dk/dialekter/dialekttraek/navneordenes_ko...

It wouldn't surprise me if modern English is a result of the same kind of multilingual simplification.

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

#132

Post by apocolyps6 »

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 hasn't it been removed?

nobody owns a language

>can I please have

Take your pick. There is Esperanto, Loglan, Lojban, Ithkuil etc. The rabbit hole goes as deep as you want

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

#133

Post by kgeist »

allturtles wrote: post #90
adrian_b wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 examp…

>Is this really the case? I don't know Latin, but AFAIU, adjectives have to go right next to their nouns.

I don't know about Latin, but here's examples from Russian (also true for Acient Greek) where adjectives can be found far away from their nouns (word-by-word translations in their original order, just found on Lenta.ru):

"Lost his family in fire Russian critizes verdict" ("lost" refers to "Russian")

"Found in car minister's corpse moose's seized investigators" ("found" refers to "corpse")

"Recreated existing inside planet giants dark ice" ("existing" refer to "ice")

Gender and declension help tell what refers to what.

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

#134

Post by mnl »

kgeist wrote: post #115
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 pr…

In Spain's Spanish we ended up with "new" feminine forms for professionals. Now it's commonplace but some of them sounded pretty strange back then.

For instance you talked about female doctors using "la médico". It's perfectly natural to change that to "la médica", yet you referred to the guard as "el/la guardia" and we still do, we don't talk about a masculine "el guardio".

Here's the funny thing: we had/have "juez" for judge, and albeit is was ordinarily masculine it's not an obvious masculine form according to phonological conventions, so "el/la juez" was common and sounded very right. Then female judges started to prefer the new form "jueza" that sounded awful (it still does), but we ended up adopting it because it's their prerogative anyway, who can argue about that?

It's interesting to compare this with the deprecation in English of the term actress. Well, in Spanish the non-sexist attitude is to preserve the feminine forms (actriz for actress) and to come up with new explicit ones, exactly the opposite that is. So nope, there isn't a universal sociolinguistics that you can extract from the use of contemporary English and I don't understand how come anybody might expect such a thing.

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

#135

Post by bmn__ »

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…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27714868

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

#137

Post by kgeist »

mnl wrote: post #134
kgeist wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

In Spain's Spanish we ended up with "new" feminine forms for professionals. Now it's commonplace but some of them sounded pretty strange back then. For instance you talked about female doctors using " la médico ". It's perfectly natural to change that to "la médica" , yet you referred to the guard as "el/la guardia " and we still do, we don't talk about a masculine " el guardio ". Here's the funny thing: we had/have…

>It's interesting to compare this with the deprecation in English of the term actress. Well, in Spanish the non-sexist attitude is to preserve the feminine forms (actriz for actress) and to come up with new explicit ones, exactly the opposite that is. So nope, there isn't a universal sociolinguistics that you can extract from the use of contemporary English and I don't understand how come anybody might expect such a thing.

Exactly. Now that I think about it more, it's not so black-and-white in Russian. As I said above, the female form of "doctor" doesn't sound acceptable/neutral, but the female form of "football player" sounds completely neutral. So go figure.

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

#138

Post by not2b »

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…

At least in Quebec, objection to the use of the masculine form of the plural at some universities led to renaming organizations, to say for example students (female) and students (male). For an example see

https://sogeecom.org/

"Société générale des étudiantes et étudiants du Collège de Maisonneuve"

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

#139

Post by leephillips »

dwmbt wrote: post #93
telotortium wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

great rebuttal, i learned something new! i wonder, do you happen to know how this might impact the conversation between gender and sex being two different descriptors? i'm unsure of how to go about looking at the etymological origins of both words, so help in that regard could prove just as useful. thanks.

Two different descriptors of what?

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

#140

Post by cge »

apocolyps6 wrote: post #78
kgeist wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kgeist gives citations to the more general trend here, but in Modern Greek, terms for children of particular genders often also don't have matching grammatical genders. Thus, το παιδί and το τέκνο (child, nonspecific) are both neuter. But το κορίτσι (girl) and το αγόρι (boy) are also neuter.
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