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

141–150 of 203 posts

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

#141

Post by soundnote »

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…

> Also in English we have gendered pronouns which has become a hot topic in the last couple of years. I wonder what people who speak languages without gendered pronouns think of the current kerfuffle.

Upper class wokelets are being silly as usual. In part they're seeking identity, to belong. In another, they're terminally online and live in a world of words where speech defines the world. If you can make a sentence and replace one word with another of the same class, you should just treat them as equal because you grammatically can. Whether the real-world things the words point at are remotely similar enough is irrelevant, since to the woke, the real world isn't primary.

You could go to forums about unscientific personality typologies and see the exact behaviors of the gender-nonconformists on display in a completely different medium, and before they escaped tumblr into the world at large. It's just people grabbing self-definitions to build an identity - a special one - in a way that's cheap and doesn't require the real work that living an actually interesting life or even reading widely.

Why do you think there's stuff like genderqueer etc.? It's low-cost, you don't have to change anything about yourself, just make the claim. And it's high status, unlike being normal and heterosexual. If high status things are cheap to do, people will do them.

> 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.

This is a 'problem' in my native language as well. Otherwise, we're civilized and just call everyone 'it'.

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

#142

Post by asveikau »

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).

In both your examples (cf. Campania, vitrina), the pattern is that French makes an -a suffix in Latin into a silent -e. I believe there were earlier parts of the history of french phonetics where it was pronounced as a schwa, so you can kind of imagine it as "softening" over time, starting out as a proper A sound and eventually disappearing over the centuries.

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

#143

Post by soundnote »

iammisc wrote: post #55
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always liked this take on the "policeman, congressman" issue (back when that was the thing that people got upset about in newspaper columns): http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html 25 years old, and probably the most striking thing from this distance is the implicit assumption that all the readers would believe in racism, but not sexism.

> 25 years old, and probably the most striking thing from this distance is the implicit assumption that all the readers would believe in racism, but not sexism. Sex and race are not two equivalent classes. There are material differences between the sexes. These are obvious differences in even my one year old noticed. On the other hand, it is unclear if there are any differences in ability by race, and it looks like i…

> Sex and race are not two equivalent classes. There are material differences between the sexes. These are obvious differences in even my one year old noticed. On the other hand, it is unclear if there are any differences in ability by race, and it looks like if there are, they're mainly not material to success.

There definitely are, and there probably are depending on what traits are in question. But the difference is still not at all of a similar sort.

The crucial difference between men and women is one of two completely different mechanisms. Within each mechanism, there is variation of course, like the length of the... thing and other variables like that.

Insofar as there are differences in race, they are much more like height or eye color: Same system, different historically separated populations just have different distributions along the variation of that trait. Asian people are generally shorter than white or black people, for example: This doesn't mean you won't find a short white or black man, for example, or a tall East Asian one. The Asian man being really tall is just less common. Insofar as these things exist, they are a matter of count in a pile of people, and a difference in degree.

Men and women are truly a difference in kind, the same way goats and weasels have different digestive systems. It's not a matter of more or less of this or that between the two.

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

#144

Post by leephillips »

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 use of “gender” to mean anything aside from the grammatical category is similar to the use of “god”, as analysed by AJ Ayer in Language, Truth, and Logic. Ayer points out that when people talk about “god” they have no coherent idea in mind, but are simply making a noise with their mouths. Therefore, he concludes, no statement that refers to “god” can have meaning, including describing oneself as an atheist. When I hear people making the “gender” noise I know that they, too, are babbling.

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

#145

Post by thewakalix »

leephillips wrote: post #144
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 use of “gender” to mean anything aside from the grammatical category is similar to the use of “god”, as analysed by AJ Ayer in Language, Truth, and Logic . Ayer points out that when people talk about “god” they have no coherent idea in mind, but are simply making a noise with their mouths. Therefore, he concludes, no statement that refers to “god” can have meaning, including describing oneself as an atheist. When…

This is insufferable. Your sentence contains the word "god" -- does that make it meaningless? No, because of the use-mention distinction.

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

#146

Post by leephillips »

thewakalix wrote: post #145
leephillips wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The use of “gender” to mean anything aside from the grammatical category is similar to the use of “god”, as analysed by AJ Ayer in Language, Truth, and Logic . Ayer points out that when people talk about “god” they have no coherent idea in mind, but are simply making a noise with their mouths. Therefore, he concludes, no statement that refers to “god” can have meaning, including describing oneself as an atheist. When…

This is insufferable. Your sentence contains the word "god" -- does that make it meaningless? No, because of the use-mention distinction.

Your point is not intended to be serious is it? My comment also includes the word “gender”. As we both understand the use-mention distinction, what, exactly, is insufferable?

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

#147

Post by thewakalix »

leephillips wrote: post #146
thewakalix wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is insufferable. Your sentence contains the word "god" -- does that make it meaningless? No, because of the use-mention distinction.

Your point is not intended to be serious is it? My comment also includes the word “gender”. As we both understand the use-mention distinction, what, exactly, is insufferable?

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 sake of argument), but the set of beliefs which concern 'god' is not. (I also think that theism is a fairly coherent category, one which describes people more than beliefs, but that's a different argument.)

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

#148

Post by dragonwriter »

Tagbert wrote: post #104
kgeist wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Russian, the word for gender literally means "kind" or "genus", it's not related to gender/sex.

That is the origin of the word gender. It only relatively recently came to be applied to sexual roles and identity.

> It only relatively recently came to be applied to sexual roles and identity.

OED has it being used equivalent to “sex” (in the sense of male v. female categories) back to 1474, which is not all that recent. It’s only recently that models splitting “sex” (physical traits), “ascribed gender” or just “gender” (socially recognized role), and “gender identity” (self-identified social role) as distinct things with distinct names have come into use, but “gender” wasn’t plucked out of linguistics alone for its use in regard to such models, but from its longstanding use as another label for “sex” as a categorization axis. (That it was also used in linguistics, which might be viewed as social, may be why it got picked for the social aspects and “sex” for the physical, I suppose.)

[0] https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/77468

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

#149

Post by rackjack »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #22
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…

I always liked this take on the "policeman, congressman" issue (back when that was the thing that people got upset about in newspaper columns): http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html 25 years old, and probably the most striking thing from this distance is the implicit assumption that all the readers would believe in racism, but not sexism.

Devil's Advocate: This piece is only analogous if "white" has been used as a generic term for color since at least 800 years ago. The reason it sounds shocking is that "white" has only ever really, in a broad sense, meant white, while "man" has generically referred to humans for about 800 years:

https://www.etymonline.com/word/man

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

#150

Post by leephillips »

thewakalix wrote: post #147
leephillips wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point is not intended to be serious is it? My comment also includes the word “gender”. As we both understand the use-mention distinction, what, exactly, is insufferable?

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 a word that doesn’t refer to anything.

EDIT: As you’ve seen fit to edit your comment while I was replying to it, I’m done.

Post reply on HN