Friday, January 08, 2021

Gender Studies

Gender (from genus, kind) is weird. Given that most applications of it have nothing whatever to do with sex, it might be less confusing for grammarians to refer to A and B rather than masculine and feminine. Or neuter. Or common. Or animate/inanimate.

My original question had to do with whether languages from the same family tend to give the same genders to nouns (not always), but found deep rabbit holes when I left Indo-European: noun classifiers in Chinese etc (which includes some "counting" classifiers) and the more general noun class which seems to be a generalization of gender.

Oh joy. How are these assigned; and whodunit? From the "noun class" article:

  • according to similarities in their meaning (semantic criterion)
  • by grouping them with other nouns that have similar form (morphology)
  • through an arbitrary convention.

I get the impression that some of the rules can arise or change when two different languages meet. Old English had three genders, as German does, but modern English has only a handful of relic gendered nouns. Maybe the parallel language use played some role--though I can't quite visualize (auralize?) how.

Why would these arise in the first place? All I can think of is that somehow, at some time, a word just sounded more pleasant or more appropriate with a le instead of a la, and the nouns that sounded better got the characteristic. Of course animate/inanimate seems pretty clear.

2 comments:

  1. This is my wheelhouse, and I recommend The History of English podcast or John McWhorter's writings on the subject. Gender, a term we use because the first linguists were English and German and knew few languages that were not Indo-European, is something of an accident. Linguists are starting to prefer the term class instead because of the confusion "gender" causes politically. The other distinctions animate/inanimate, countable/uncountable, strong/weak are the same thing. Using endings and affixes is a shortcut, an efficiency, so that one does not have to use many words. It gives a shading of what the object is like, so that another word does not have to be added. When genders/classes go away, as is common when a language is learned by many adults because of trade, invasion, or intermarriage, the are usually soon replaced by new rigidity of word-order, additional words, or synonyms becoming more distinct in meaning.

    There have been recent studies about how much the Der/Die/Das words in German, even those that have no obvious relationship to either sex, capture what we would call a gender stereotype, especially a demeaning one. There is a weak trend of that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks, I'll look into those.
    Part of what brought this on was remembering that, years ago when it was relatively fresh in my mind, I could, more often than not, guess whether an unknown French word was masculine or feminine--but I had no idea how.

    Maybe it was a statistical fluke, or maybe the sound was the key--hence my suggestion.

    But when I went to look that up the fire hydrant opened.

    ReplyDelete