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Lack of Noun Gender in English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4512 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 33 of 126 18 December 2013 at 5:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The German/Dutch usage of the diminutive. It's just that there exists a form "meid" in
Dutch (it's actually used for teenage girls, but never formally), it's just that the form happened to fall out of use. Nobody thinks of young ladies as having no gender. There's a purely etymological reason for that, all diminutives are neuter. It just happens to be such, we could have chosen to make them feminine or call it "stone gender" or whatever. I don't personify the government as female even though it's feminine in Dutch. That's just weird. I don't think of windows being neuter either in Russian (or Dutch for that matter). Grammatical gender is just a grammar thing. To me the sun has no gender, even though it should be feminine according to Dutch grammar. Personification is a load of bull. It only works when a noun actually refers to something that is sex-specific, like using the word "stewardess" in Dutch (as opposed to steward). Edited by tarvos on 18 December 2013 at 5:43pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| pesahson Diglot Senior Member Poland Joined 5533 days ago 448 posts - 840 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: French, Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 34 of 126 18 December 2013 at 5:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This reminds me of a fascinating article written by a linguist Guy Deutscher. Here's the part about noun genders and personification. Full article can be found HERE
" In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brucke), for instance, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love. On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more 'manly properties' like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are 'he' in German but 'she' in Spanish, the effect was reversed. In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman's voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that 'gendered languages' imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers' ability to commit information to memory. Of course, all this does not mean that speakers of Spanish or French or German fail to understand that inanimate objects do not really have biological sex - a German woman rarely mistakes her husband for a hat, and Spanish men are not known to confuse a bed with what might be lying in it. Nonetheless, once gender connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with associations and emotional responses that English speakers - stuck in their monochrome desert of 'its' - are entirely oblivious to. Did the opposite genders of 'bridge' in German and Spanish, for example, have an effect on the design of bridges in Spain and Germany? Do the emotional maps imposed by a gender system have higher-level behavioral consequences for our everyday life? Do they shape tastes, fashions, habits and preferences in the societies concerned? At the current state of our knowledge about the brain, this is not something that can be easily measured in a psychology lab. But it would be surprising if they didn't. " 7 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 35 of 126 18 December 2013 at 6:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I know that it's because the diminutive. But look at the masculine words: you can attach the diminutives to them but it's not the default form!* I'm also obviously not accusing the modern German speakers of sexism, but clearly nobody ever asked the girls/women if they mind being neutral instead of feminine. In the opposite situation, men clearly wouldn't buy the "it's grammar!" argument. Note how papa is an exception in Russian and nobody considers it a female word just because it follows the same pattern as mama.
*not to mention the word Junge, literally smth like "the young one". the young one is male by default, yeah great. And yeah, as a Russian speaker I totally understand that there's normally no personification about it. But why would it mean there's no sexism involved in how grammatical gender got codified? Edited by Serpent on 18 December 2013 at 6:09pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 4861 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 36 of 126 18 December 2013 at 6:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
No. It is a masculine noun in English becaus eit MUST be replaced by the pronoun "he". The reason for being masculine is the sex of the person it refers. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4512 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 37 of 126 19 December 2013 at 12:47am | IP Logged | |||||
But it's a grammatical construct. The name of the gender is entirely arbitrary - we could call it Fork and Spoon gender for all you care. Or Fork, Spoon and Knife gender. And then what? It just happens to be an easy way out because in many cases the gender HAPPENS to coincide with sex, but that doesn't mean that it SHOULD, or that it even MATTERS. We called them such because it's CONVENIENT, not because there's any inherent sexism involved. Edited by tarvos on 19 December 2013 at 12:47am 4 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 38 of 126 19 December 2013 at 2:05am | IP Logged | |||||
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My understanding of languages with many noun classes might be incomplete, but afaiu the word "defining" the class tends to be its most important representative. So it would be more realistic to have the genders of Man, Sun and Moon or something.
The concept of grammatical gender is not sexist. But how can it not be sexist that two neutral, default words for ladies both are technically diminutives? (but there's die Tochter and die Frau, reflecting the reality that back then a woman was nothing without her father or husband) How is it not sexist that we add affixes to man-something to denote woman-something? (and this one is changing, cf chairman vs chairperson and many more like that in English) Not to mention that the binary genders are one more reminder to people who don't identify as either that society ignores them or considers them "less than" others. (And no, I'm not saying we should introduce a special grammatical gender for them) 2 persons have 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 39 of 126 19 December 2013 at 2:37am | IP Logged | |||||
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In Spanish and French, the femininisation of unchangeable nouns seems to increase, i.e.
close ago it used to be the only way to say "the president" in Spanish was to change the article to feminine, viz. "el presidente", "la presidente". Pero in recent times I notice that "la presidenta" is being used now, I notice that this is actually the only usage for the newly president-elect Michelle Bachelet during Chile's general elections this past Sunday. It seems that this term is also apported for Presidenta Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina. But of course English keeps it the same, "She is the President"/"He is the President". However interesting is that in modern Dutch, the masculine and feminine seem to be practially combined into "gendered" and the neuter stays neuter, but "gendered" nouns take male pronouns and possessives (de-->hij/zijn), whereby not everyone knows which gendered nouns were feminine. I am not sure how such a phenomenom affects the perception of gender appropriated to inanimate objects though. Edited by 1e4e6 on 19 December 2013 at 2:40am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5235 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 40 of 126 19 December 2013 at 5:45am | IP Logged | |||||
English does not have grammatical gender comparable to that of languages like French, Spanish or German. In the case at hand, the only reason we know or assume that John is a so-called masculine noun is because we assume that all people named John are men. The pronoun "he" refers to the sex of John. But look at the sentence: Madison is tall. Is Madison a female or masculine noun? It's not indicated. anywhere. Take the sentence: The car is nice. It is not expensive. Are we to say that in English the word "car" has a neutral gender because we use the pronoun "it"? "Boy" is not a masculine noun in English. "Girl' is not a feminne noun. They both refer to young people of a certain gender. But this does make English a language with grammatical gender. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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