Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take

Post by monopoledance » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 8:24 AM UTC

doublepg23 wrote: post #171

monopoledance wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Post by implements » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 9:38 AM UTC

leephillips wrote: post #150

thewakalix wrote: post #147

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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…

Post by goto11 » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 9:58 AM UTC

leephillips wrote: post #168

dwmbt wrote: post #159

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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.

Various philosophers, such as Wittgenstein, have pointed out that much of what sounds like discussion only exists because one can arrange words into grammatically sensible sentences. That doesn't mean the discussion is actually about anything. People who know the words “Earth” and “flat” can theorize about whether the Earth is flat, but it’s a waste of time to pay any attention to them. A “non-binary” “gender” is jus…

Post by bregma » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 12:40 PM UTC

occamrazor wrote: post #105

retrac wrote: post #58

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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?

Post by peoplefromibiza » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 1:33 PM UTC

brazzy wrote: post #102

telotortium wrote: post #69

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> 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…

Um... From TFA: When the Romans started to get interested in grammar, genus came to mean “kind” of noun or “gender”, but because genus could also refer to biological sex, male and female, these concepts were occasionally conflated.

  Translate genere to English

  noun
  1. gender
  2. kind