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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

#191

Post by peoplefromibiza »

graeme wrote: post #121
filiphorvat wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

It doesn't turn the group masculine, it turns the word used to the masculine plural, which is the generic word for a group of people.

But if you take sciences, for example, it's plural feminine in French and Italian.

If you put a masculine discipline in the group, for example "law" which is masculine in Italian (il diritto), the group of disciplines is still referred to as feminine "le scienze"

It's a matter of gender of the plural word, it has nothing to do with biological sex.

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

#192

Post by leephillips »

goto11 wrote: post #185
leephillips wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> A “non-binary” “gender” is just a noise with no idea attached to it. Are you talking about grammar here? Because in many (most?) languages gender is not binary.

I was replying to something. Just read the comment I was replying to. Also, yes, many languages have more than two genders. That’s a non-binary gender system. But no particular word in those languages is “non-binary”.

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

#193

Post by School-Cotton »

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…

Similar systems are now widespread in Germany and as far as I can tell they don’t impede comprehension.

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

#194

Post by School-Cotton »

names_are_hard wrote: post #169
filiphorvat wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> One other thing is, when referring to a mixed group of people, you use a masculine form of plural, same as "latinos". It REALLY doesn't matter and it only bothers people who don't speak gendered languages. This is the traditional rule in Hebrew as well and it most certainly bothers people. Lately I've seen a lot of writing and occasionally even speech that attempts to be gender neutral by using the Hebrew equivalen…

> For example, at work I might get an email that starts: Dear employees (female suffix) and employees (male suffix)...

This sort of thing is also very common in Spanish, French, and German (at least).

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

#195

Post by soundnote »

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.

They have problems, but only insofar as any imperfect solution does. Having societal defaults itself is really good: If someone's confused as to what theyb should do with their life, bam. Here's a recipe that worked for your ancestors for ages, following it is unlikely to fuck you up badly. (This is, of course, a far bigger phenomenon than simply what jobs are called)

The freedom to define yourself is a good thing, but most people neither need nor want it, and for many who want it undertaking the excercise is a mistake, because it's more flippant wishy-washyness or deliberate, willful ignorance than self-building, per se. Consider the classic case of the Starbucks barista with a degree in postmodern dance theory.

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

#196

Post by kennywinker »

arp242 wrote: post #175
kennywinker wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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 p…

The ship has, as you say, sailed. Man is not gender neutral, the -men suffix neither. Every case where it’s used is one where the stereotype is of a male dominated field. I say fireman, you invariably picture a man first. Can you give me an example of a job with the -man/men suffix that the stereotype is female? If that’s not the case how can it be neutral?

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

#197

Post by School-Cotton »

denton-scratch wrote: post #118
dragonwriter wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yeah, I'm good with that OED explanation. It's hard to get the nuance, but that's not bad. M-W is just incomprehensible - it's hard to understand how a lexicographer can make such a mess of defining a word. I mean, that's the core business.

The editors of the OED are “hardcore descriptivists”, too. They’re just more complete and accurate than M-W, in this case.

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

#198

Post by Kye »

Dma54rhs wrote: post #180
Kye wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's interesting considering Germany had (more or less) one of the first queer centers in roughly the form we think of them now. I wonder what could have led to that and a diversifying concept of gender being wiped out of the language and culture...

I kid. Of course it was the purges leading up to WW2. I think they would have eventually developed as robust a concept of gender as we have today. It wasn't that long ago that we only had a concept in English of two binary sexes with gender being bound to secondary sexual characteristics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen...

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

#199

Post by maire »

soundnote wrote: post #195
space_fountain wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They have problems, but only insofar as any imperfect solution does. Having societal defaults itself is really good: If someone's confused as to what theyb should do with their life, bam. Here's a recipe that worked for your ancestors for ages, following it is unlikely to fuck you up badly. (This is, of course, a far bigger phenomenon than simply what jobs are called) The freedom to define yourself is a good thing, b…

I have to disagree with this. Many women want to have a family and will avoid careers that are not family friendly. This is still true today. But fixing those careers to be family friendly will benefit men as well as women.

I went to an all girl college prep high school in the early 1970s. All the girls on college track took an aptitude test. We were told to take both the boys and girls test. There were two tests back then. I scored very high in engineering and math on the boys test, but those options did not even exist on the girls test. I found the girls test ridiculous.

This will sound silly but I didn't even consider engineering until after I read The Menace from Earth by Heinlein. I thought engineering meant I wouldn't have a husband and family. I didn't even consider math until after I took this test. I ended up double majoring in Math and Computer Science.

This was in the early days before Comp Sci was gendered. 30% of my Comp Sci class was female. Compare that to my daughter's experience. Her Comp Sci classes were about 15% female until she took a Human Factors class which was 50% female. Sometime in the 1980s women enrolling in Comp Sci dramatically declined.

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

#200

Post by graeme »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #191
graeme wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It doesn't turn the group masculine, it turns the word used to the masculine plural, which is the generic word for a group of people. But if you take sciences, for example, it's plural feminine in French and Italian. If you put a masculine discipline in the group, for example "law" which is masculine in Italian (il diritto), the group of disciplines is still referred to as feminine "le scienze" It's a matter of gende…

Thanks! Good points. I half wonder if my teacher’s grievance didn’t come from living in a majority anglo culture.
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