[31/366] superpower and (grammatical) gender

[cosmolinguist]

31 What superpower best suits your personality?

This is such an interesting question, because it's so different from "what superpower do you want?" (that's easy for me: teleportation). What suits my personality? Maybe "magic healing": I just up from a dream where an acquaintance got sick?/injured? when he was driving me and some other friends somewhere. I made sure he was okay to drive, tried to help him concentrate, made sure our other friends were okay, called his wife when we got home so she knew what'd happened and that we'd arrived safely... I woke up thinking "well, that's very me." I hate to see people struggling and I know so many people whose chronic illnesses I'd love to be able to magically fix.

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I really like this article, I can't remember now who linked to it, on gender in Latin and ancient Greek grammar. It starts with stuff probably all of us know:

Latin obsessively genders its speakers. From pronouns to choice of name and use of adjectives, it’s one thing if you identify as masculine or feminine, but Latin presents real questions for non-binary speakers.

But it also makes some really interesting points I'd never thoguht of:

In addition, there is a chauvinism inherent in Latin grammar, like in the way that mixed-gender groups are referred to as masculine. There is a similar chauvinism in the Latin pedagogical tradition: the very ordering of adjectival forms as masculine/feminine/neuter (-us/-a/-um) presents a hierarchy of being masquerading as a lexicographical convenience.

I've never studied Latin, but I've found the same thing in Spanish, German, French, Arabic, even Old English. You learn the masculine version first and they're always listed in that order: masculine, feminine, neuter. (Another interesting thing this writer mentions later on is calling it "bizarre" that English adopted the word neuter from Latin rather than translating it into "neither." English borrowed tons of Latin words wholesale so I'm not necessarily surprised they did that here, but I didn't know its meaning was "neither."

I worry that our modern pedagogical practices implicitly present students a highly essentialized vision of gender: every noun has one gender exclusively, rigid and unchanging.

Yet grammatical gender is actually complex and shifting, a fact that Greek and Roman grammarians were highly conscious of. They debated whether grammatical gender was inherent in the things themselves or a product of human convention. They devised a technical vocabulary to articulate the difference between grammatical gender identity and grammatical gender expression. They argued about whether their language had three genders — as we teach — or perhaps only two, or maybe five, or even as many as seven, if you count “fluid” and “uncertain” and as distinct categories (and they did!).

Now I'm a monolingual speaker of a language that is almost entirely without grammatical gender, but like I said I've dipped my toes in the water of many that do have it and "nouns' gender is fixed" is one of those assumptions so deep I'd never thought about it until I saw it being challenged here.

Then we start the list, with an ancient Greek who divided words into "masculine," "feminine" and "things."

Aristotle changed the name of that last one to "in between," and also disagreed that gender was an inherent property of whatever was named by a word; he thought it was just a linguistic convention.

This carries on, with people saying either gender is innate or that it's just a convention. The people who think gender is part of a thing's nature tend to be pretty heteronormative about it! Like I don't really want to know why oceans are feminine and rivers are masculine but...oh, yep, there it is: the rivers are penetrating the seas, right?! Ugh. As you can probably tell, I have more sympathy for the other side of the argument, not just because fuck the patriarchy but also because it makes better points: like, if gender is so inherent, how come all languages don't gender everything the same way? Even dialects of the same langauge (Greek) don't manage to do this, according to an ancient writer.

Then another guy changed the name of that last gender yet again, to "neither" (this is where I found out that this is what "neuter" means. He also added two more, which ended up sorta being called "common" and "communal" in Latin. The common gender is for words that can take modifiers of either gender (like some kinds of animals). The communal gender is available for anything. A grammarian tried to explain which words could use common gender and which could only use communal genders, but it doesn't really hang together.

The only attempt at defining grammatical gender is from someone called Varro who seems to be saying only animate things have gender (humans and animals have gender "by nature" and things only have gender "by tradition") and that gender is super heteronormative. But even in Varro's two-gender paradigm, he says neuter is neither, the common gender is both, and the communal gender can be either. There are definitely complications: a Latin word can have inflections that look feminine, but take masculine adjectives so Varro makes a distinction between "figura" and "materia," which the blog post writer says best correspond to "gender expression" and "gender identity." I find this fascinating, and it's really not too much of a stretch because Varro defines "figura" as a woman in masculine clothes/man in feminine clothes. The blogger says

Every translation risks anachronism, and particularly so with social and cultural constructions. Yet in rendering figura and materia as “gender expression” and “gender identity,” I don’t think we’re imposing modern ideas on ancient Rome. I In fact, this seems to be a case where English terminology has only recently caught up with Roman notions.

Varro also believes that gender is a social convention, not a natural property of anything. He talks about how the word for dove had been communal gender but once doves started to be domesticated and it mattered whether one was male or female, you get masculine and feminine versions of the word.

Then there's a guy who says there's seven genders in Latin: as well as the five we know about (masc, fem, neuter, common and communal), there are two classes whose genders vary:

The first group comprises nouns whose gender isn’t quite certain, like finis (“limit”) and margo (“edge”). Priscian calls this group dubia genera, which we might translate as “uncertain” (“questioning”?) genders. The second group is composed of nouns that can happily be more than one gender, like filius/filia (“son”/“daughter”). He calls this group mobilia genera, which we might translate as “fluid” genders. Priscian sees each category not as a monolith but as a group of genders, since nouns can be “uncertain” or “fluid” in more than one way. (For instance, he outlines five distinct types of fluid genders.)

So there's some more ammo for the next time anyone tells you there's only ever been two genders. I imagine this debate must happen really differently in languages with grammatical gender than it does in English. Yesterday I read about video game localization/translation that'd been given the brief “Use neutral pronouns or whatever their equivalent is in your language,” by possbily-naive English speakers and had to wrestle with the fact that there aren't neutral pronouns in Italian and also practically every way you can talk about people requires gender too because adjectives have to agree in gender! They came up with a really clever solution, and perhaps as importantly talked about how they came to that decision, other options that they rejected, and how much work -- both linguistic and political -- really goes into making languages inclusive. It's way beyond just "use neutral pronouns!"

Comments

[alexseanchai]

wait where's the whole post you're quoting

[cosmolinguist]

Argh, bloody HTML. I fixed it now but to save you having to scroll around for it, it's here. Thanks for spotting the error for me!

[alexseanchai]

sweet! thx

[jesse_the_k]

WOWOW

This is fascinating! Thank you so much for linking & highlighting!

The fact that we think of these classes as “genders” at all is a product of historical circumstance rather than linguistic necessity. [... snip ...] From a purely morphological perspective, we could dump the very concept of grammatical gender and call these groups “noun classes,” which is apparently the usual term for them in Bantu languages.

ASL is the only language I can discuss with any skill; its pronouns don't include gender. It does have scores of noun classes "classifiers" nominated by hand shape.
For example CL-B (flat hand in ASL "b") signifies
* A non-motorized riding device: horse, bicycle
* Smooth, flat surfaces: road or runway; wall, hallway, ceiling, floor, shelf
* Flat mobile surfaces: surfboard, skateboard, snowboard, people mover (moving sidewalk)
* Inanimate objects in specified locations: pictures on a wall, books on a table, racecar on a road
* Inanimate objects in specified positions: books lined upright on a shelf, papers facing down
* Delineating 3 dimensional objects: house, box

[cosmolinguist]

The fact that we think of these classes as “genders” at all is a product of historical circumstance rather than linguistic necessity

Yep! This is a fact I've been konwn to solace queer friends with: "gender" just means, like, category. It comes from the same Latin word as "genre," so it's like a genre of person. :) And some people, just like some art, overlap or transcend genres, some don't really fit in any one at all. I think it'd be much better if we called them "noun classes" or whatever too -- I know Swahili does that becuase it has like sixteen and it's just ludicrous to think of, or name, sixteen genders. There's absolutely no need for there to be only two or three grammatical "genders," (which of course is also true of social genders!) that just happens to be a common feature in a bunch of European languages, and it was Europeans who thought they got to go around classifying everybody else's languages.

It's great to have this ASL example too! Thanks for sharing.

[conuly]

The fact that we think of these classes as “genders” at all is a product of historical circumstance rather than linguistic necessity. [... snip ...] From a purely morphological perspective, we could dump the very concept of grammatical gender and call these groups “noun classes,” which is apparently the usual term for them in Bantu languages.

Their noun classes definitely do not in any possible way shape or form slot into "masculine/feminine/neuter", which is why we don't use "gender" for those terms. It'd be funny if we did, then we could tell people that Swahili has 18 "genders" without explaining that those "genders" are things like "animate objects, inanimate objects, diminutives...."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantu_languages#Noun_class

Gender is a specialized type of noun class.

[hrj]

That's a great discussion! (Both the original article and your summary.) Medieval grammarians really got into the philosophy of language meaning in interesting ways. (And sometimes they veered way off into the weeds.) I always like to remember that the root meaning of "gender" from "gens" is along the lines of "family, nation, tribe" and has nothing to do with sex/gender in the modern sense.

[cosmolinguist]

I'm glad you liked the discussion! I've been writing essays forever so I guess I'm still in that mode. :)

I thought "gender" came from "genus" and not "gens," but thus is so very not my area and the point still stands that it's nothing to do with there being only two of them or them being immutable from birth or anything like that, and that's the important point!

[hrj]

Gens and genus have the same root -- we're both right.

[otter]

Quick answer - the ability to tesser. similar to teleportation, but not quite. I'm on a different computer while on vacation and don't have my usual computer glasses with me, so I didn't read the long part of your post.

[cosmolinguist]

I think being on vacation from looking at the computer too much is a good part of vacation. :) And yes tesseracting would be a great superpower!

[redbird]

Some of it feels like we've gone around a room dividing a group into teams: blue, green, red, yellow, blue, green, red, yellow… with the goal of randomness—and then someone shows up late and constructs a baroque theory about what being blue "means" and what all the green people have in common and so on.

The human brain is wonderful at finding patterns, except that it's not very good at saying "there is no pattern here," especially if primed by someone saying "find the patterns here".

[cosmolinguist]

Yes absolutely. And especially if the pattern has become "people on this team are better than people on that one;" people who happen to be on the preferred team have a vested interest in that pattern continuing to exist. (This goes for race, among other things, as well as gender.)

[sfred]

This is fascinating - thank you.

[cosmolinguist]

I'm glad you liked reading it!

[silveradept]

The classical fragment piece was very interesting to read in context with the translation one, because there are a lot of proposals around now on how to produce non-gendered elements in languages where everything is gendered. I've been looking at some proposals for French, where one of them suggests different endings for people who are not on the binary, and inclusive language decisions what consist of mashing together the masculine and feminine pronouns into one to describe singular or plural of mixed-gender groups, with the corresponding agreements taking the form of the masculine ending, a dot, and then the feminine ending on top of that. ("Citizens" becomes citoyen.nes. for example.) It's really interesting to watch those proposals and their adoptions in other spaces.