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Lack of Noun Gender in English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6402 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 89 of 126 21 December 2013 at 4:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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English is easier because it's everywhere and you don't need to look for it.
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| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3837 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 90 of 126 21 December 2013 at 7:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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Let's focus on gender and the impact on the Anglic culture and the view of it internal and external. Would it be
better off as a genderless languages (Finnish for example) or does it have a lack when compared to immediate relatives? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6402 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 91 of 126 21 December 2013 at 9:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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Every language is just fine as it is. We can just subjectively like or not like the grammar.
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5235 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 92 of 126 22 December 2013 at 7:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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Since the thread seems to be meandering off into terra incognita, I'll attempt to have a look at how the movement to eliminate sexism in language has had to deal with grammatical gender in the languages I know best, English and French.
I'll preface all this by saying that I did not follow the intricacies of the debate in this thread on linguistic sexism. So, I apologise if I repeat things said before. The problem, as it was framed in the English-speaking world, is that biological gender-related stereotypes detrimental to women are embedded in the hitherto traditional usage of English. Professions of high prestige or authority have traditionally been associated with men. Other occupations have been specifically associated with women: secretary, housewife, nurse, babysitter, elementary school teacher, etc. Linguistically, these stereotypes have manifested themselves in certain noun endings such as -man, -ess, and -trix or, more importantly in the personal pronouns "he" and "she" "him""her" and the attributive adjectives "his" and "her". The bulk of efforts to make English less sexist has been on the pronouns. Here is an example of various attempts to counter the idea that all doctors are male. First, we have the traditional sentence: I want a doctor who knows what he is doing. Now various alternatives: I want a doctor who knows what she is doing. I want a doctor who knows what she or he is doing. I want a doctor who know what s/he is doing. I want a doctor who knows what they are doing. The last sentence is quite popular and seems to be the best solution although it does do the bit of violence to the number agreement system. But it seems to be gender-less. The other area of change is the elimination of the morphological noun gender markings. Gone are the days of salesman, spokesman, fireman, chairman, actress, poetess, etc. in favour of salesperson, spokesperson, firefighter, chair, actor, poet, etc. It's also interesting to note that words like wife and husband in some areas are giving way to "partner." I should point out that there is considerable variation across the English-speaking world and not everybody is obsessed with making English non-sexist. The problems of making English non-sexist pale in comparison to those of a grammatical gender language like French where all nouns have been traditionally classified as feminine or masculine. Let me first state that I truly believe that one of the greatest mistakes in grammatical terminology has been the use of the words feminine and masculine for the two noun classes of French. This has lead to considerable useless and silly debate over what being feminine or masculine can mean. The fact that we say la lune for the moon and le soleil for the sun has absolutely nothing to do with any inherently feminine or masculine characteristics of either object. This is a purely arbitrary distinction. Biological gender is generally encoded in grammatical gender. I use the word generally because the big problem amd the cause of considerable headache is the fact that, just like in English, certain professions and occupations are traditionally associated with either men or women. Unfortunately, whereas in English it is relatively easily to erase or modify the morphological gender markers, in French these markers are "hard-wired." The names of traditionally male professions are hard-wired with the article UN or LE and with endings like -ier, -eur or -ant. The names of female professions are similarly hard-wired with the articles UNE or LA and endings like -ière, -trice, -euse, etc. An engineer is traditionally un ingénieur and a nurse une infirmière. It goes without saying that there are considerable implications on sentence syntax because of the rule of gender morphological agreement. Just as in English, social change within the professions and in general has forced speakers of French to deal with this of sexism in language. The solution is complicated. To illustrate the problem, I'll take the same example as above but modified to highlight gender agreement across the sentence, The traditional form would be: Je cherche un médecin compétent. (I'm looking for a competent (male?) doctor.) The three words un, médecin and compétent are hard-wired for male. The female counterpart would be: Je cherche une médecin(e) compétente. I've put the "e" ending of médecin in brackets as controversial because la médecine or une médecine is the name of the science (medecine). I suspect that most female doctors probably use "médecin" rather than "médecine" when speaking about themselves. So, let's say we would probably hear. Je cherche une médecin compétente. or Je cherche une femme médecin compétente. But what we have here is reference to a female doctor and not to a gender-neutral one. This is where we hit a wall in French: because of grammatical gender there is no simple way to make a gender neutral statement. The only solution is to try to include both biological genders. Here are some attempts. Je cherche un(e) médecin(e) compétent(e). Je cherche un/e médecin/e compétent/e. Je cherche un médecin compétent homme ou femme. Je cherche un homme ou femme médecin compétent ou compétente. Don't laugh. All of these forms have existed or exist. Actually, the most simple solution that one sees in advertisements for jobs or in contracts is a statement in a footnote or at the top of the text something like: To simplify the text, the masculine form used here includes female persons. This of course is a cop-out and simply reverts to the traditional sexist form but it illustrates the fact that there is no simple solution to this problem in a grammatical gender language. In my mind, the only solution, as hard as it might be to imagine, is to eliminate the gender agreement rule. But that's another debate. Edited by s_allard on 22 December 2013 at 8:04pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6402 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 93 of 126 22 December 2013 at 8:23pm | IP Logged | ||
And as I said previously, in languages with noun classes each of them is named after its main representative. It's just not realistic to think that the grammatical genders could've had more neutral/arbitrary names. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4470 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 94 of 126 22 December 2013 at 8:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah, you either end in giving up the possibility of reading it aloud ("Je cherche un(e) médecin(e) compétent(e)") or making it long and unwieldy.
"Je cherche une personne compétente qui est médecin." :-P 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4095 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 95 of 126 22 December 2013 at 8:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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Also, for female heads of state, English cannot force a feminine marker to emphasise
that the leader is female without sounding overcomplicated: http://michellebachelet.cl/ Notice that "Presidenta" is used in every case where the old Spanish "Presidente" was used for both male and female, but with a feminine article (una presidente/la presidente). In Spanish one can say "Nuestra Presidenta" but in English to say "Our Female-President" each time sounds too long compared to the Spanish version, because English cannot inflect its nouns according to gender except in set terms that are borrowed from French, such as "actor" and "actress". The fact that English requires an extra word "female" as a prefix to denote gender if they want to emphasise that the head of state is female demonstrates the lack of grammatical gender in English like in French or Spanish. Edited by 1e4e6 on 22 December 2013 at 8:58pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3837 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 96 of 126 23 December 2013 at 1:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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I get that, but is it possible to also discuss some other topics concerning gender? One of the biggest questions is
what leads to gender? Noun classes, but what leads to noun classes? Perhaps cultural association. Why did some Amazon Rainforest languages, Native American, Caucasian, African languages, Semetic, or PIE evolve such while many Asian languages, Uralic, Turkic, and such never did? And the tendency to slowly lose one gender or so in Indo-Euro languages. 3 genders down to 2 is common and no gender may happen to y'all language as well. Edited by Stolan on 23 December 2013 at 1:20pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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