Jane's Posts

Sep 7 1998 12:00 am

['They' is of course genderless, so adding plurality always neutralises.]

But unfortunately, it also pluralizes. So you end up with disagreement in number, which is every bit as inelegant as defaulting to a masculine pronoun. (The latter also has the benefit of being traditional--and of being in sync with at least the Romance languages.)

There is no perfectly elegant solution in English. One could make a case for introducing neutral pronouns (like "Ms.") into the language. But no such solution is likely to ever make English into a perfectly clean, elegant language anyway. It has many other "problems."

The real problem in this case is society's preoccupation with being politically correct when it comes to gender. If we'd simply lighten up on that issue, a sentence like "When a person sleeps, he often dreams" would sound perfectly OK and would offend no one.

I would write:

When people sleep, they often dream.
A sleeping person often dreams.
While sleeping, a person often dreams.

I remember thinking that "on" was a handy little word in french.

It's the implication that "a person" is male that offends me.

jane

Sep 8 1998 12:00 am

BTW I never get the logic of gender in grammar. I think it is absolutelly unneccessary.

You know, I have never understood this, either. I understand that there are three general groups of nouns in Latin, and that they are called masculine, feminine, and neuter. I believe all the romance languages still have gender distinction. But why? How did this start? Why is a table feminine and a box masculine? That Swahili animate/inanimate distinction at least seems to have some rational basis. Is there any rhyme or reason to gender distinctions?

jane

Sep 9 1998

A grammarian savant friend of mine discussed this problem a few years ago. His solution: a new personal pronoun of neutral gender. His suggestion: CO [he or she] COS [his or hers] CO [him or her]. Let me try it: Many people bought lottery tickets. There will be only one grand winner. Co who is the winner will bring cos ticket stub to the lottery office. Arrangements will be made to have the prize sent to co promptly.

Do you think we could get used to that, Are we ready for a new personal pronoun? Any comments??

I don't think it's going anywhere.

As H pointed out, we already have "one." It's a perfectly good word, just what we need.

However, as Patrick pointed out, people don't use it because they don't want to sound affected. If people don't use "one," they are never going to get behind "co."

Personally, I'm pretty sick of a) pluralizing all my sentences, and b) people telling me that using "he" to refer to women is not offensive.

jane

Sep 10 1998

Maybe. But that begs the question: Why would the ancients choose to classify words into "masculine" and "feminine" categories?

This is exactly what I don't understand. Even if the original dichotomy was passive/active or receiver/donor, how did this end up being called masculine and feminine? We have active and passive voices. We have subjunctive and indicative moods. How the hell did gender get involved with nouns?

I don't think it has specifically to do with sex either. I think sex is a manifestation of the same essential distinction that noun gender and other dichotomies arise from. In other words, I think it's a mistake to picture our distant ancestors as ignorant cavemen who knew nothing beyond sensory experience. I think that at the time our "root language" came into being, man had the availability of mathematics and such. And the gender distinction arises from something like the distinction between 1 (unity/action) and 2 (duality/reaction).

But where did neuter come from? And what kind of society would consider these concepts of such fundamental import that all nouns were categorized along these lines?

Is there any chance that gender in language arose during a time where men's and women's lives were largely separate? Maybe anything related to stability, agriculture, and family was feminine while objects connected with hunting, fishing, and travel were male?

jane

Sep 11 1998 12:00 am

[Is there any chance that gender in language arose during a time where men's and women's lives were largely separate?. . . ]

I believe gender is merely a human symbol for something subtler that goes beyond gender. Consider creation myths, for instance. In virtually all of them, there is a deity (usually described as masculine) who somehow brings all things into manifestation. Quite often, the deity accomplishes this by copulating with a female deity. But in the interest of preserving the notion of there being just one supreme deity, the ancient Egyptians said God created the universe via masturbation. All such creation myths, however, are pretty obviously symbolic. God is anthropomorphized so that human beings stand a chance of understanding the story. The truth behind the story is that some active primordial energy (or deity) acted upon an inactive substance (inert matter) and brought it to life. IIRC, Christian tradition has it that God created man from a lump of clay--again, an active force enlivening inert matter.

I'm a little sleep-deprived, and I am no anthropologist. Is this what you are saying?
- There is an intrinsic duality in existence beyond sexuality.
- This may be perceived as a distinction between the male and the female, the active and the passive, the spiritual and the substantive, etc.
- Early humans intuitively perceived this duality.
- This intuitive perception is evidenced by myths of creation which demonstrate interaction of the male and female, active and passive, spiritual and substantive, etc.

I do not understand 1) why the intrinsic duality would be expressed in terms of gender and 2) why such a gender distinction would be reflected in language. Shouldn't a society's language reflect its perception of your intrinsic duality?

For me, it is much easier to believe that the origin of gender distinction in language is related to a difference between male and female human anatomy. That distinction must have been apparent to the earliest humans. Sexual creation myths, OTOH, obviously can only occur much later when the culture has discovered the connection between sex and procreation. How did the culture's language reflect the intrinsic duality before that. Was this such a profound discovery that it altered earlier myths? I can believe that in some societies it did. It seems fairly simple to add "mother" and "father" to the earth/sky and sun/moon myths. Even if some cultures found the discovery that sex leads to procreation so earthshaking that they changed their creation myths, would they really change their whole language? Or is that why the distinction seems artificial today, because it was stuck into language development in the middle?

Apparently, other societies maintained myths of action upon inert matter. It seems to me that this is reflected in the Judaeo-Christian creation myth in Genesis. In fact, the Jesus myth directly rejects the concept of sexualized creation. You say that the Egyptian creation myth also involved action upon the inert. Do you know off hand if either Ancient Egyptian or Hebrew dichotomized nouns according to gender? If sex was rejected (or simply not accepted) as an expression of your intrinsic duality in religion, then I would expect it to be rejected in language as well.

Do you know if there is such a correlation between gender in language and sexualization of creation myths? IIRC, people mentioned Finnish and Turkish and languages which reflect no gender distinction. I believe that the early Finnish creation myth entails two females, the god Luonnotar who floated on the water until a duck laid eggs on her knee. I don't really know much about pre-Islamic Persian paganism, except that the major gods were female. This would seem to mildly support your position.

It also seems to me that many societies reflect no duality in their theology. In fact, I believe some cultures have no creation myth. This would indicate to me that even the ultimate example of duality, existence and nonexistence, life and death, is not given importance in that culture. If the duality you speak of were truly intrinsic to the human experience, I would expect it to be universal. Also, I would expect these cultures to reflect no gender distinction in language.

I would suppose gender came into language because it's more easily comprehended than abstract concepts like active/passive or spirit/substance. Thus it makes a convenient handle for such concepts. Even today, plumbers speak of male and female pipe fittings. There's a male and female end to your garden hose. It's just simpler to grasp "female" than "the sort of convex part that's threaded so that the other part will fit into it." People relate to human things much more readily than abstractions.

But these concepts also occur in language. I don't know too much about very early languages, but Latin and Greek had both the male/female and the active/passive distinction. Surely the distinction between subjunctive and indicative moods demonstrates a dichotomy between the tangible and intangible, the concrete and the imagined. These are fairly subtle concepts comprehended and expressed by young civilizations. The gender distinction in nouns, OTOH, is so obscure that it makes no sense to us today. If there was no concrete, practical purpose, why would any early culture bother to complicate their language unnecessarily?


What kind of society would consider these things so fundamentally important? Any society with a creation myth that involves a creator/creation dichotomy. Such societies would see that the dichotomy is reflected, microcosmically, in the creation itself--hence in all the things that nouns name.

Where did neuter come from? Two possible answers: (1) from frustration with having to tell whether a given object is essentially masculine or feminine in nature--some things must have baffled the namers, or their successors; so maybe they just gave up and declared the tough cases to be neuter; (2) from the same concept that the Egyptian creation myth tries to convey--that God is really neither masculine nor feminine, but beyond duality--i.e., neuter.

When a language like English (or the Scandinavian languages, etc.) discards gender for most nouns, it's most likely answer (1) above at work: people just get tired of remembering the gender of so many nouns, and they can't remember why it was ever done in the first place, so they drop it and introduce a "neuter" or "common" gender.

Do you know when gender was rejected in the English language? Did it just fizzle out when Old German was brought to the British Isles and melded with the native languages?

When an ancient language includes a neuter gender, it's most likely answer (2) at work: the recognition that God--who created good & evil, male & female, light & dark, and all pairs of opposites--is Itself above any such dichotomy. God cannot be either male or female, since God cannot be limited.

If this were the case, I would expect either male and female to be dropped at the same time, or the neuter words to connote unity, divinity, etc.

jane

Sep 12 1998 12:00 am

P1:
I see "she" or "her" used as the genderless pronoun. This jars my mind. (But, why should it?) There's a defect in our language and I still maintain that.

P2:
Agreed. The sensible way to 'fix' the defect is perhaps to use the existing gender-neutral terms ("he", "him", etc.) in all cases - even where the reference is to an undisputedly female person - and allow the feminine forms ("she", "her", etc.) to disappear from the language.

I'll buy this as long as we keep "she" and get rid of "he."

P1:
Ouch! Now her true colours are showing! :-)

Yes, I'm a bluestocking.

jane