The other day I was looking over Mark Twain's The Awful German Language again - if you've got experience of learning German (or grappling with any other language's different way of doing things) a lot of the narrator's satirical grievances will be painfully familiar. One of his favourites is the fact that the genders of German nouns (i.e. whether they're grammatically masculine, feminine or neuter) frequently have little to do with any quality of the noun itself or what is termed its natural sex (for living things):
"Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this, one has to have a memory like a memorandum book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print - I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:
Gretchen. Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
Wilhelm. She has gone to the kitchen.
Gretchen. Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?
Wilhelm. It has gone to the opera.
To continue with the German genders: a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female, - Tom-cats included, of course; a person's mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body, are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and not according to the sex of the individual who wears it, - for in Germany all the women wear either male heads or sexless ones; a person's nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, hips, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience, haven't any sex at all. The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay."
This got me to thinking that the topic of gender in language is quite interesting in itself, if you can stand me po-facedly tearing down the preceding...
Time Flies Like an Arrow [link]
The first thing that I thought might be of interest is exactly why it is that linguistic gender is so apparently illogical. Well, with grammar as with people the ultimate answer (that I'm sure someone else has already phrased better than me) is that there usually is a reason why we do things in a certain way, but the reason often makes no sense.
A little gobbet of information that I remember from when people used to send those benign-ish chain emails with mildly interesting but often useless facts (if they were actually facts) was the origins of common phrases. Take, for instance, "Good night, sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite". The part about the bedbugs is evident enough, but (as I was reliably informed by a chain email with a forward header about three times the length of the actual text) the part about sleeping tight refers to people using ropes or buckles to tie a mattress together In Days Of Yore. (On checking it turns out that isn't actually true. Oh well.)
Whether it's actually true or not isn't the point, though. We have a phrase that originally had a clear literal or figurative meaning that has over time lost this - it becomes a single unit of meaning that people say to mean "sleep well" without needing to understand its derivation. People want to understand, though (wanting to make sense of the world is, after all, one of our most fundamental urges) so we end up with folk etymologies like the above where people rationalise a meaning out of thin air. Whether their explanation is historically accurate or not is an entirely secondary concern.
This neatly mirrors the linguistic concepts of synchronic and diachronic meaning. The two words are from the Greek khrónos (time) and the prepositions sún (with) and diá (through), meaning "at the same time" (exactly cognate with the Latin-based contemporary) and "through time". Features that synchronically don't make sense (i.e. you just have to learn them) will clearly, at some point in the past, have made sense, before the language moved on. A classic example is irregular verbs. Diachronically, there's no such thing as an irregular verb: it's just a verb that got left high and dry when the grammatical tide went in. In Semitic languages and in the Indo-European ancestor language it's perfectly reasonable and regular to change the vowel in a verb (or root) to express different meanings; for Modern English, though, a verb going sing-sang-sung (song) rather than play-played-played (play) is a strange remnant to keep an eye on in case it tries something funny.
There's nothing inherently wrong with a synchronic world-view - it is, after all, what 99% of people using a language to communicate will be using. Diachronic analysis is sort of like archaeology in this regard; it's interesting to see how the lie of the land has changed, but the average person living in it doesn't really need to know how it looked thousands of years ago to get by. Actually, we get to see a really interesting version of tectonic plates sliding along each other in the form of analogical levelling.
Analogical levelling is the linguistics manifestation of the rationalising drive I mentioned a minute ago. It's basically where people meet a form they don't recognise and correct it in their heads so that it fits the regular pattern (synchronically speaking), sort of like the adorable phenomenon of eggcorns - people who don't know or remember how to spell a word make a guess that's ingenious in its own way (so eggcorn for acorn, in the feeble position for fetal position and so on). They're nothing new - the term "bridegroom" comes from the Old English brȳdguma meaning "bride's man" (the word guma is cognate with homō in Latin), but when the latter word dropped out of English it was replaced with groom, as though the husband-to-be has to tend to his future spouse like a horse...
A more usual example is the way that strong verbs (verbs of the "sing-sang-sung" variety) have a habit of being strong-armed (ahem) into being weak ones ("play-played-played"). There are lots of verbs that used to be strong but now aren't, and if you've got a writer with a taste for old-fashioned forms you'll probably meet a few of the stragglers. I remember finding to my delight that it used to be thrive-throve-thriven and that colours could be "blent together" (where I would expect thrive-thrived-thrived and blended). Languages change and percolate and it's a lot of fun to watch ("text" seems to be becoming a strong verb - "I tex't her last night").
Rooting About [link]
The way this ties in to the synchronically arbitrary distribution of genders in some languages that mark them is (as you might have guessed) that it relates to the original form of the word. In Indo-European languages (basically most Western ones, the top half of India, and Iran) the gender of a noun mostly just depended on what vowel the word used in its stem. Here's some words in Latin with their genders attached:
| Noun | Stem | Gender | Meaning |
| annus | annō | masculine | "year" |
| bellum | bellō | neuter | "war" |
| mēnsa | mēnsā | feminine | "table" |
| spēs | spē | feminine | "hope" |
| gradus | gradū | masculine | "step" |
| genū | genū | neuter | "knee" |
You can see that the stems in O and U are masculine or neuter (more on which later) and the ones in A and E are feminine. This useful system still survives more or less intact in Italian and Spanish - in Italian il ragazzo is "boy" and la ragazza is "girl", and the equivalent el chico and la chica works the same in Spanish. In French, however, a lot of Latin roots got really chopped up, especially at the ends (they still don't like pronouncing the letters at the ends of words). The Latin word for water is aqua, which pops up in Italian as acqua and Spanish as agua. The French version is eau! (pronounced /o/) It keeps its underlying feminine gender despite the fact that that useful -a ending went AWOL quite a while ago. So if eau is feminine, does that mean that château (castle) will be too? Unfortunately not. The root is castellum, neuter O stem, so because the masculine and the neuter have merged it means it's masculine. Confused yet? We get a lifeline in the fact that some French feminines that used to end in a consonant and an -a still have an -e on the end: so port (a sea port) is masculine and comes from portus (masculine U stem), but porte (door, gate) comes from porta and the -e shows that it's feminine.
What this comes down to is that when you learn a French word you learn it with the article welded on - la porte, le port, le château etc. (The elision in L'eau means you usually get a little (f.) afterwards.) Same with German - der Hund, die Hand, das Fenster and so on. I promise you that the original Proto-Germanic forms had gender-marking endings (der Hund comes from *hundaz, for instance), but they dropped off and anyone who can't accept that it's Just A Thing You've Got To Learn will either never get very far in German or write a hilarious satire of people who think that way.
Typecasting [link]
If you're keeping score at home, you might have looked up at the end of that section and thought, "So, you said that gender was arbitrary because it's traditional, and then you said it's really that way because of old vowel stuff which is also... arbitrary." Very perceptive of you, dear reader - might I invite you to cast your gaze back up the page to where I said that there's usually logic behind most things in languages and in life, but that the logic frequently makes no sense?
If we put the word gender under the microscope, we see that it comes from the Latin genus, which means type, or family. It in turn comes from the same creating root that produces (hoho) generate, general, oxygen, photogenic, gonads, polygon, kin, king and so on. Basically, it just means "type". In the Eurocentric sphere I and a lot of people I know move in, we get used to the idea of there being two or at most three genders, relating male, female and objects (we still distinguish he/she/it in English, even if grammatical gender hasn't been a thing since Old English); outside of that there are languages that have much wider classification systems.
The canonical example is the Australian Aboriginal Dyirbal language, which has four classes/genders:
| I | - | Animate objects, men |
| II | - | Women, water, fire, violence |
| III | - | Edible fruit and vegetables |
| IV | - | Everything else |
The second class was used for a title for a linguistics book by Lakoff (as Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things), because who in their right mind would pass on such a gift of a phrase?
There are languages that have even more classes (a Wikipedia page I consulted for this mentions that "... the Anindilyakwa language has a noun class for things that reflect light"), and if you saw my previous pontification on language learning you might remember that Mandarin and a lot of East Asian languages have a similar system of over a hundred classifiers (set count words) that you use with nouns. Others (like Basque and some South Indian languages) have just a two-tier animate/inanimate system.
It turns out that Indo-European used to be one of the latter group. Going back this far involves a certain amount of speculation, so pack spare asterisks (they mark we-don't-have-any-direct-written-evidence-but-we're-pretty-sure reconstructions), but most research suggests that originally there were only the O stems (like annus/bellum) and equivalents. This would be why the masculine and the neuter share so many endings: they're originally one pattern. The idea goes that the neuter plural in -a (think the of stuff like millennium having the plural millennia) was taken as a collective and so an abstract (like lots of true things collectively being "the truth").
The innovation (in the linguistic sense of a grammatical feature suddenly appearing) came when these abstract neuter plurals were reanalysed as singulars with an A stem, which hadn't existed before (there's quite a lot of debate over whether Proto-Indo-European originally even had an A sound). And guess what, presented with this new category which represented abstract, "other" things, people decided to apply it to women.
You Are What You Speak [link]
Think about that for a minute - since before recorded history, women have been intrinsically marked as "different" in the language group that has the most native speakers in the modern world. We still see the repercussions of this all the time when the masculine is used for concrete, strong things and the feminine for delicate, abstract ones, when male is the default option when gender is unspecified or mixed. Now, in languages that have grammatical gender this is less jarring - in Russian, for instance, "person" is chelovyék, which is a masculine noun, so it sort of makes sense that if you're not referring to any person in particular you would use the masculine. This isn't always the case, though - in French the word for person (personne) is feminine (ends in an -e!), so in phrases that explicitly use the word the person will be feminine; however, if you have an unspecified person (like quelqu'un, meaning "someone") it's still masculine.
Some languages manage to have separate, native words for male, female and human. Classical Greek has ánthrōpos for a person in general, the stem andrós for "male", and gunaikós for "woman". This is where you get the terms misanthropy (using the root miséō, "I hate") for a general loathing of mankind, misogyny for woman-hating, and the recently coined "misandry" for hatred of men. (The validity of the latter as a concept is something I haven't got the time or the patience to take on here.) In fact, in older English man was gender neutral: this is why you frequently come across "man" used as a synonym for "humankind" (e.g. This is one small step for man...). We've already seen one of the words used for male (guma), and there's also the word were (cognate with Latin vir, also "male", root of words like "virility" and "virtue") which survives in "werewolf".
As a useful sidenote, this is an example of synchronic and diachronic usage in action. I've heard people defend the use of man for "humanity" in contemporary English because of its etymological basis as a non-gendered term. However, I think this is to ignore the synchronic reading that reinforces on a deep level the idea that women don't matter, or that men are somehow more integral to humanity, because the word man is no longer ungendered in the way it once was. It's sometimes hard for people unfamiliar with social justice work to grasp first time the effect that subtle so-called micro-aggressions like these have on the oppressed party; each is small enough that drawing attention to it opens the complainer to accusations of being petty or demanding, but the combined effect of all these tiny hostilities is a climate where the oppressed party is made to feel belittled and unwelcome. What, you defend your use of "gay" as an insult because you don't actually actively hate gay people? Regardless of your intentions, it still enforces on whatever level the concept that "gay" equals "bad".
There's a seductive idea called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that states (in its strongest form) that you can't think of something you can't express in your language. The idea in that original form has several flaws that have been pointed out, but the core idea that how you talk affects how you think is a pervasive one. Words are power - that's the idea behind a whole host of things, from NLP to prayer and mantras to magic. Even if we reject the strong form of the hypothesis, I think it's still valid to recognise this interplay. Does the fundamental grammatical otherness of women cause or result from their marginalisation by society?
We call heterosexual people straight, even if it's largely no longer socially acceptable to call people who aren't bent. But at every turn, our language tells us that being straight is correct - the root rect means straight itself, as does right. Do you know right from wrong? Roots beginning wr- in English involve an idea of turning or twisting (wrap, wrist, wriggle, write, wreck...) so we're still hammering away at the straight vs bent dichotomy. A ruler is the one who keeps the country on the straight and narrow, and hopefully defends their subject's rights. People who aren't telling the truth are lying, the opposite of right is left, which is also abandoned (the Latin word for "right" is dexter, giving dexterity, but for left it's sinister!). These are all connected etymologically.
You might be wondering about the validity of slamming people over-relying on diachronic analysis only to pull out a great heap of word derivations myself, but what I wanted to show is that certain biases are very deeply woven both into our languages and our psyches. If you describe someone as straight it can mean that they are a law-abiding citizen (or have become one) rather than a crook (itself from crooked). Tell me then that there's nothing wrong with not being straight, even though you have many more positive associations for straight than for gay, lesbian, bi etc. We've got a lot of work to do.
This post is already long enough, but if you're interested in what a female-centred language would look like, the constructed language Láadan was explicitly designed by a woman (author and linguist Suzette Haden Elgin) to cater to women. I don't know of any native speakers of it, but it would be fascinating to hear the effect that the language had on their world-view.
In Summary...
What I've been interested in exploring is the way that arbitrary linguistic categories like gender work, are preserved, and perhaps influence their speakers' thought processes. I think if it was more felt that gender is at root a social construct (the usual distinction is that sex is the physiological distribution of chromosomes and reproductive organs, and gender is the rest) we might be able to be less rigid in our definitions of what it "means" to be male or female (or indeed, to be neither, or both). In a sense Mark Twain is right to be astounded that mouths are male and hands are female in German - the truth is that there is really no good reason for any set of characteristics to be thought of as fundamentally or exclusively masculine or feminine.
Beyond the general physiological tendencies of male people toward higher muscle mass and female people to a higher hip-to-waist ratio it seems more useful to me to consider people primarily as, well, people, with different physical and mental characteristics arising from this rather than from their adherence (or lack of it) to one or another vestigial mental box. I don't mean that I think that gender should be eradicated from people's individual identity, just that I don't think it's helpful to consider someone as primarily defined by their gender. After all, we could as well be classed as edible plants but for a few historical coincidences...
(Hooray for deconstructing things. Join us next week as the foray continues...)
No comments:
Post a Comment