Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by doublepg23 » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 4:34 AM UTC

monopoledance wrote: post #156

chewxy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I'm surprised you'd reference John Money and not expect politics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Money#Controversies

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

#172

Post by kgeist » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 4:39 AM UTC

huma wrote: post #166

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…

> 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 It's actually pretty straightforward. Generally, nouns ending with an "a" are feminine, with an "o" are neuter, the rest are masculine.

I meant that no one pays attention that, for example, a teapot is "he", there's no meaning behind it.

>Generally, nouns ending with an "a" are feminine, with an "o" are neuter, the rest are masculine.

It's a rule of thumb, but it's incomplete.

"Starosta" & Co. are masculine, neuter nouns also end in -e (except for "kofe"); nouns which end in a palatalized consonant can be either feminine or masculine; there are words like "sudia" or "umnica" which can be masc. or fem.; some words like "nozhnicy" only have plural form and don't have gender.

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

#173

Post by kgeist » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 5:00 AM UTC

podviaznikov wrote: post #160

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.

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.

The declension of "ditia" is not very productive (gen "ditiati" etc.) Usually a noun with a rare declension is moved to a different, more conmon declension by assigning a certain productive suffix which uses a common declension. Such suffixes have their own assigned gender.

Same for Russian "rebia" (rare declension) which became rebenok (common declension) by assigning -ok suffix which happens to be masculine. Or in Greek, masculine "pais" had unproductive declension (gen. paidos) so it was assigned diminutive suffux -ion which happens to be neuter, hence modern Greek "paidi" is neuter.

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

#174

Post by arp242 » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 5:48 AM UTC

slibhb wrote: post #153

Tagbert wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Years ago I had a conversation with my brother, when his son was a few months old. At some point I mentioned something along the lines of "he [the infant] thinks such-and-such", and he countered with "he doesn't think, he doesn't have any language".

It's unlikely that this statement was informed on any sort of linguistic basis, as he's not the kind of person who would read such things (he's more of the artsy type, not the "hacker" type), it was just intuitive to him. I think it is for many people, including me, but the human sense of "intuition" on these things is not always equally accurate.

This is kind of similar to how many people have an intuitive sense of dualism, that the mind and body are two separate things. This concept is highly unlikely, but for almost everyone – myself included – it's very natural, hence the gazillion stories about people swapping bodies and whatnot.

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

#175

Post by arp242 » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 6:24 AM UTC

kennywinker wrote: post #23

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.

“Completely out of line with the culture” firefighter, for a moment, was an exclusively male job. Fireman made sense. As more women took on that job during the past 50-ish years, calling them “firemen” makes less and less sense. So to say it’s people out of step with culture isn’t quite right. It’s more like entrenched language in conflict with shifting culture. A non-gendered example of this would be something like…

This doesn't always happen though; we have /dev/tty and it's used in common parlance, but this refers to Teletype, a company that went out of business in 1990. Hoover is the common name for a vacuum cleaner in the UK, and I'm not seeing that changing any time soon either, in spite of the company still being around. There are quite a few examples of this.

It has always seemed to me that a far easier and less painful process would have been to simply accept "men" as gender-neutral, but it seems that ship has sailed *shrug*. I don't think that "Firemen is wrapped up in people’s beliefs about what gender roles SHOULD be" – or at least not necessarily – as many people still just see it as gender neutral.

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

#176

Post by adrian_b » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 7:02 AM UTC

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…

In Medieval Latin the adjectives were more frequently close to their nouns, because the writers were influenced by the word order from their native languages.

In Classical Latin, e.g. in Caesar or Pliny the Elder, the adjectives may be located either before or after the nouns and frequently with several other words interposed.

In poetry, having adjacent nouns and adjectives is more an exception than the norm.

In ancient languages, poetry was highly valued, being important both for entertainment and as a mnemonic aid for utilitarian texts.

Unrestricted word order was most useful for poetry, allowing any rearrangements of a sentence that were needed to match a desired rhythm.

The transition to a constrained word order, accompanied by the loss of many of the grammatical means used to mark the roles of the words, which became redundant with a fixed word order, went in parallel with the diminished importance of poetry.

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

#177

Post by tasogare » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 7:21 AM UTC

superflit2 wrote: post #60

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…

On Romantic languages "latinE" a noun ending in "e" or "ne" would express a word from French/Galic. "Champagne", "Vitrine" as exemple. The ""new"" gender neutral a woke fashion that has disregard for people with dyslexia or people who needs software to read (blind).

It's not even their worst attempt. In France, those fringe "woke" people are advocating a forked version of French which is written with a lot of dots everywhere to display genders simultaneously. For example: "Bonjour à tou.s.tes les étudiant.e.s." which is very hard to read even for non-dyslexic people. The normal people are fighting it but they succeeded to promote that crap via a ministry and lot of universities are writing their emails like that.

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

#178

Post by b3orn » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 7:45 AM UTC

tasogare wrote: post #177

superflit2 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Romantic languages "latinE" a noun ending in "e" or "ne" would express a word from French/Galic. "Champagne", "Vitrine" as exemple. The ""new"" gender neutral a woke fashion that has disregard for people with dyslexia or people who needs software to read (blind).

It's not even their worst attempt. In France, those fringe "woke" people are advocating a forked version of French which is written with a lot of dots everywhere to display genders simultaneously. For example: "Bonjour à tou.s.tes les étudiant.e.s." which is very hard to read even for non-dyslexic people. The normal people are fighting it but they succeeded to promote that crap via a ministry and lot of universities…

Shouldn't that be "Bonjour à tou.te.s les étudiant.e.s."? Also as far as I know it's banned from schools for now.

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

#179

Post by implements » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 7:56 AM UTC

alexfrydl wrote: post #123

vehemenz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Essentially the two sides are arguing about:

The concept of sex as a social category should be replaced by gender. An individual’s gender arrises from a strong innate subjective feeling, and is presented by a socially recognised performance of masculinity or femininity.

Contrast with:

The concept of sex is a biological category linked to bodily role in the reproductive process. An individual’s gender is just what sex they are.

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

#180

Post by Dma54rhs » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 8:09 AM UTC

Kye wrote: post #16

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…

I wonder if there are any examples of this in languages from the many cultures past and present that always recognized more than two sex-derived genders.

There are languages like German or Estonians where gender and sex have the same meaning, or rather term gender and the idea of it simply don't exist.