Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take
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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
#2it amazes me how boring this topic is.
Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take
#3I 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 years. I wonder what people who speak languages without gendered pronouns think of the current kerfuffle.
Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take
#4I 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…
> 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.
Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take
#5This brings up a slightly tangential thought I occasionally have. 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? Over the past 40 years at least it seems that in the USA all of these new labels and identifiers have evolved for people who perceived their gender as not "masculine" or "feminine" but are something different altogether.
I am curious if the language of the culture has anything to do with this, since English doesn't use gendered nouns so maybe we have less deeply entrenched ideas about gender and what is masculine or what is feminine and are more likely to explore that space.
Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take
#6I didn't read the whole article but skimmed through it and didn't see a clear answer to the question "why does grammatical gender exist"?
As a native English speaker, I've never understood why it was invented in the first place.
Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take
#7I 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…
> 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.
Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take
#8It's easy to look at these various grammatical gender systems and to think it's a bit of weird useless complexity. But systems like this are useful: you can see them as providing error-correcting parity bits on nouns which make information more robustly distributed through a sentence.
Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take
#9I didn't read the whole article but skimmed through it and didn't see a clear answer to the question "why does grammatical gender exist"? As a native English speaker, I've never understood why it was invented in the first place.
It is hard to give a general answer. It wasn't invented, as such, but in the Indo-European linguistic family, a distinction was drawn in the mists of time between an 'animate' and an 'inanimate' class (which is perhaps the most important category distinction that there was to be drawn), and it is from that binary division that a three-fold gender system evolved.
Re: Gender in Latin and Beyond: A Philologist’s Take
#10> Since my schooldays I have been listening patiently to claims that Latin and the Romance languages are inherently sexist because if you have a group of men and women, the adjectives will be masculine.
This can be just as easily reversed. Imagine if instead we would use feminine gender for a mixed group and masculine gender only when the group is composed of men. Someone then might complain that this is sexist because men have special treatment - a group consisting of only men has a separate word to highlight the fact that no women are present.
Same with claims that the word "woman" in English is sexist because it is derived from a word "man". If it were reverse (men were called "women") the same people would complain about sexism because the female version of the word is shorter - as if something was subtracted from the masculine version of the word, suggesting that women are lesser than men.
So in summary - my impression is that the complains have nothing to do with the material, but are just the product of current cultural zeitgeist.