Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take

antigonejournal.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 203 posts

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

#151

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> 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

No, they aren't. They are distinct axes of variation, but not opposed. (There are factions which are opposed on normative relations between the two categories, with one holding that the physical category should definitely determine the social one and one not holding to that view, but that doesn't make them antonyms; it does make them potentially confusing if care is not taken to assure what sense “gender” is being used in in a particular context.)

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

#152

Post by thewakalix »

leephillips wrote: post #150
thewakalix wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atheism is the negative space defined by 'belief in a god'. The position that 'god' is incoherent is in that negative space. Atheism is no more incoherent than your own comment, just for including the quoted word 'god' in its description. Wasn't Ayer an atheist, anyway? I think you might be misrepresenting him. Edit: Well, there's a subtlety here. The set of beliefs that concern god is an incoherent category (for the…

Because you didn’t read the book so you think I’m lying about what he said? He held various opinions about these issues through his life, as one would expect from an active thinker. But in the book I mentioned he specifically says that it is incoherent to claim to be an atheist or an agnostic, because both these descriptions implicitly refer to the “god” non-concept. And no, you can’t define a negative space by using…

"Misrepresenting" isn't quite the same as "lying". It can be done unintentionally.

Edit: This is not a chat application. I had no way of knowing if and when you were replying. I don't see how I broke a norm, unless the norm here is "never use the edit mechanism".

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

#153

Post by slibhb »

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.

It's appealing because it seems to lots of people, though not everyone, that we think in words.

(I strongly disagree with Sapir-Whorf)

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

#154

Post by orangecat »

denton-scratch wrote: post #87
mjevans wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

Latin's a dead language; we can't submit pull-requests.

We sort of can: https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/57/what-is-the-pro...

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

#155

Post by iammisc »

space_fountain wrote: post #7
iammisc wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This has become problematic when we use the plural. Grammatically, it's not problematic at all. Some people with new ideas completely out of line with the culture at large make a big deal of it.

It embeds assumptions about what the societal defaults are, nothing more and nothing less. Like you maybe I'm skeptical that it does harm itself, but certainly societal defaults are problematic. Maybe and probably, there are bigger problems, but whatever.

Why are societal defaults problematic? Providing clear guidance for young people is a good thing.

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

#156

Post by monopoledance »

chewxy wrote: post #68
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…

"Gender" as a concept came in linguistics first[0]. Social sciences co-opted the word later in the 1950s (Simone de Beauvoir comes to mind as one of the first people to use "gender" in its modern sense). The linguistics notion of gender is not tied to masculine or feminine (though they are taught thus). We now associate the word "gender" with its modern political meaning but in the past, the word "gender" was treated…

> modern political meaning

Going straight from linguistics to politics… that’s a little framing, isn’t it? The establishment of an extension of meaning for ‘gender’ is not a feminist power move, but recognized as useful distinction all over the place.

> “Sexologist John Money is often regarded as the first to introduce a distinction between biological sex and gender identity/role in 1955, although Madison Bentley had already defined gender as the "socialized obverse of sex" a decade earlier. As originally conceived by Money, gender and sex are analysed together as a single category including both biological and social elements, but later work by Robert Stoller separated the two, designating sex and gender as biological and cultural categories, respectively. Before the work of Bentley, Money and Stoller, the word gender was only regularly used to refer to grammatical categories.”

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_gender_distinction

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

#157

Post by monopoledance »

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.

I want that! If we ever get our shit together, let’s use that for a common language. For us, for our home - earth.

Edit: Oh, I translated this as alive/not alive. Guess, this was originally down to soul. Not advocating to go down that path again…

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

#158

Post by bradrn »

packet_nerd wrote: post #45
foo_barrio wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it used only for counting? Mandarin and other East Asian language have a classifier for counting. English uses counting classifier sometimes. For example, "paper" without a classifier in English refers to an official document or essay. For example "I have to write a paper" or "Do you have your papers?" otherwise you have to use "a sheet of paper", "some paper", "a pack of paper" etc. It's not exactly the same as t…

Yes, sort of, but a lot more than counting. I think Thai has counting words too, but I think they are not as central to the grammar or as flexible as Karen classifiers. Sort of like you can say "a sheet of paper" or "5 sheets of paper" in English to count papers, but imagine you could also say "typing on a sheet", or "your sheet is full of typos", or "could you hand me a sheet", where "sheet" is a broad category and…

Words with this range of meaning are simply called ‘noun classifiers’ in linguistics [0]. They’re pretty common both in the region and outside it: they’re also in Lao, Hmong and Minangkabau, as well as various Australian, Mayan and South American languages.

[0] Aikhenvald 2003, chapeter 3: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/classifiers-97801992...

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

#159

Post by dwmbt »

leephillips wrote: post #139
dwmbt wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

i've found that there are arguments being had between people my age that sex is a biological descriptor (M/F) and that gender is a looser, more amorphous descriptor. for instance, you can be born a man (your biological sex) and identify as non-binary (your gender). i'm interested to see how the origin of the words could contribute to that discussion.

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

#160

Post by podviaznikov »

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.

If I'm not wrong it's feminine in Ukrainian (dytyna). Not sure what it is for all Slavic languages (I think it's neutral in Croatian). Also not sure what is the history for the Ukrainian version.

Just adding some info maybe others can comment.

Post reply on HN