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I dislike the term "gender" in linguistics. Many languages have grammatical gender that has nothing to do with masculine/feminine. "Noun class" gives the idea

• Kye 5y ago
  I wonder if there are any examples of this in languages from the many cultures past and present that always recognized more than two sex-derived genders.
  • bregma 5y ago
    English, for example, has two pronoun genders: animate and inanimate. The animate gender is further subdivided into two subgenders: masculine and feminine. Of course, none of this has anything to do with sex, unless you prefer to attempt reproduction with inanimate objects as many have instructed me to do using the imperative mood (literally "fuck it").
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • kgeist 5y ago
      Slavic languages have both 3 classic genders and grammatical animacy for masculine. I.e. if you view an object as an inanimate object, it will have a slightly different declension in accusative compared to animate objects. But it only works for words of masculine gender.
      • tazjin 5y ago
        Russian also has this for feminine plural accusative.
    • tsimionescu 5y ago
      Doesn't 'it' refer to both inanimate objects and animate objects (animals)? Or is 'inanimate' a kind of term of art here refering to humans and human-like beings (instead of the more common meaning of 'non-living')?
      • retrac 5y ago
        Yes, it's a linguistics term. Animate things are perceived as having human-like agency. Many languages have a grammatical category clustering things like large non-human animals, the weather, or fire, or trees, together with humans. Animate. Everything else is inanimate and presumably less alive. In English, many animals are referred to with "he" or "she". Being a mammal, large, being domesticated, being familiar, are all more likely to be animate rather than inanimate. A pet mare is going to be "she". Insects are always "it". Livestock or a reptile might get either. Babies sometimes get treated as inanimate. ("Is it a boy or girl?")
        • occamrazor 5y ago
          When I first learned English in school (almost 40 years ago) I was told that very young babies were grammatically neuter. Now I never hear anyone using “it” for a baby. Has English changed in the last decades, or was my teacher wrong?
  • culi 5y ago
    Most languages with grammatical gender have a distinct third class which linguists usually call "neuter". Languages like French are somewhat unique in having lost that third gender It's important to note that neuter is distinct from "gender"-less nouns
    • kgeist 5y ago
      I like the fact that in most languages with 3 genders, the word kid is neuter: German "das Kind", Slavic "ditia", Greek "teknon". I guess that's because a child is not a fully developed man/woman, so it's assumed genderless.
      • apocolyps6 5y ago
        This feels like cherry-picking. There are non-neuter ways to refer to kids, including in those languages. Also, the diminutive (at least in German) is neuter, and is often used with children. Some of these terms are specifically neutral (i.e. not "boy" or "girl"). So the reasons are much more likely linguistic than ..sociological.
        • kgeist 5y ago
          It's not cherry-picking, it's a well-known fact in Indoeuropean studies, and this interpretation is supported by some linguists. For example (Luraghi 2018): "More than simply indicating referential sex, Luraghi (2009b: 127 and 2011) makes the argument, with which Melchert (2014: 264) agrees, that an involvement in procreation may have played a role in gender assignment in PIE. It may have been a key factor motivating the split between masculine and feminine. Nouns that referred to male or female humans/animals were, for the most part, assigned to masculine and feminine, respectively (Lundquist and Yates 2018: 2095). For example, there was the masculine noun ph2tḗr ‘father’ beside feminine méh2tēr ‘mother’ and wĺ̥kwos ‘(he-)wolf’ beside wl̥kwíhxs ‘she-wolf’ (Lundquist and Yates 2018: 2095). However, words that indicated children and young animals were often neuter in the IE languages (Melchert 2014: 264), e.g. Gk. téknon, OHG kind, and OCS dětę (Lundquist and Yates 2018: 2095). The humans/animals to which those nouns refer are too young to procreate, so, despite being physically animate, they are grammatically neuter. A questionnaire experiment determined that feminine anaphors were used more if Mädchen referred to, for example, an eighteen-year-old girl “as opposed to a two- or [twelve]-year-old one, where neuter pronouns were more frequent. These results show that speakers perceive biological sex as more important for adults than for children” (Corbett and Fedden 2016: 522). This supports Luraghi’s theory that involvement in procreation was a factor—alongside individuation—in gender assignment in PIE" Words that refer to children and which aren't of neuter gender today may simply be of later origin, when the system stopped being productive. For example, the Russian word for "child" is rebenok, which today has masculine gender, but stems from earlier "rebia" which was neuter (a synonym of another word, "ditia", also neuter).
  • Dma54rhs 5y ago
    There are languages like German or Estonians where gender and sex have the same meaning, or rather term gender and the idea of it simply don't exist.
    • Kye 5y ago
      That's interesting considering Germany had (more or less) one of the first queer centers in roughly the form we think of them now. I wonder what could have led to that and a diversifying concept of gender being wiped out of the language and culture... I kid. Of course it was the purges leading up to WW2. I think they would have eventually developed as robust a concept of gender as we have today. It wasn't that long ago that we only had a concept in English of two binary sexes with gender being bound to secondary sexual characteristics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissenschaft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen...
  • goto11 5y ago
    Danish have two grammatical genders, "neuter" and "common". Male and female have same grammatical gender. So conflating gender and sexual identity becomes really confusing!
  • peoplefromibiza 5y ago
    German
• culi 5y ago
  It's worth pointing out that, in linguistics, grammatical gender can be seen as a specific type of noun class system. The term is mostly useful when talking about Indo-European languages where the feminine-masculine distinction is most prevalent It's also worth noting that grammatical gender evolves over time. Originally, most Indo-European languages had the three classes of feminine, masculine, and neuter. But, for example, French's loss of the neuter class is pretty recent. We're also seeing modern efforts to drive these processes with, for example, the usage of the gender-neutral term "Latine" instead of "Latino" or "Latina".
  • kgeist 5y ago
    >Originally, most Indo-European languages had the three classes of feminine, masculine, and neuter. Early Proto-Indoeuropean is theorized to have 2 genders - animate/inanimate, but by the late PIE period it evolved to the classic three.
    • monopoledance 5y ago
      I want that! If we ever get our shit together, let’s use that for a common language. For us, for our home - earth. Edit: Oh, I translated this as alive/not alive. Guess, this was originally down to soul. Not advocating to go down that path again…
    • fourtrees 5y ago
      Having missed your comment, I was about to post about this. One interesting fact I can add is that Hittite, the oldest written IE language, has the animate/inanimate gender system rather than the 3-way system. You can also see remnants of the old system here and there in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, ect. Of course, this is largely theoretical like you said, and I'm sure you could dig up some dissenting papers if you wanted to.
      • kgeist 5y ago
        >You can also see remnants of the old system here and there in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, ect. For example, there are some adjectives in Latin and Ancient Greek, which only have two declensions instead of three: one common declension for masculine/feminine, and one for neuter. For example: naturalis (masc), naturalis (fem), naturale (neut), as opposed to novus (masc), nova (fem), novum (neut).
• School-Cotton 5y ago
  > I dislike the term "gender" in linguistics. I think you have it backwards. The term “gender” meant grammatical gender, i.e. noun classes, before being extended by analogy to the current meaning.
• chewxy 5y ago
  "Gender" as a concept came in linguistics first[0]. Social sciences co-opted the word later in the 1950s (Simone de Beauvoir comes to mind as one of the first people to use "gender" in its modern sense). The linguistics notion of gender is not tied to masculine or feminine (though they are taught thus). We now associate the word "gender" with its modern political meaning but in the past, the word "gender" was treated the way you'd use "noun class" [0]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gender&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cgender%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gender&year_st...
  • monopoledance 5y ago
    > modern political meaning Going straight from linguistics to politics… that’s a little framing, isn’t it? The establishment of an extension of meaning for ‘gender’ is not a feminist power move, but recognized as useful distinction all over the place. > “Sexologist John Money is often regarded as the first to introduce a distinction between biological sex and gender identity/role in 1955, although Madison Bentley had already defined gender as the "socialized obverse of sex" a decade earlier. As originally conceived by Money, gender and sex are analysed together as a single category including both biological and social elements, but later work by Robert Stoller separated the two, designating sex and gender as biological and cultural categories, respectively. Before the work of Bentley, Money and Stoller, the word gender was only regularly used to refer to grammatical categories.” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_gender_distinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_gender_distinction
    • doublepg23 5y ago
      I'm surprised you'd reference John Money and not expect politics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Money#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Money#Controversies
      • monopoledance 5y ago
        Oh, are you? So the fact he is an asshole makes everything he did and thought “politics”? Is everything, any scientist does, which supports a world view you don’t like, “politics”? Does this somehow invalidate the correction about the origins of ‘gender’’s popular meaning? Have you read the article I linked? Do you still agree the distinction between sex and gender is all “politics”?
• telotortium 5y ago
  > I dislike the term "gender" in linguistics. Many languages have grammatical gender that has nothing to do with masculine/feminine. You realize that the use of gender for grammatical noun class is the original meaning of the word, correct? Gender comes from the Latin genus, generis (via Old French), which means type, kind, sort. The genders in Latin were called masculine, feminine, and neuter because one of the noun classes contained most, but not all of the nouns that refer to males, one of them contain the nouns that refer to females, and the last one, neuter, literally means neither. If anything, it's English that is to blame here for taking the original meaning and corrupting it. I believe most non-english languages, when they want to use the modern English sense of gender, either borrow the word directly from English or just use a translation of sex role.
  • dwmbt 5y ago
    great rebuttal, i learned something new! i wonder, do you happen to know how this might impact the conversation between gender and sex being two different descriptors? i'm unsure of how to go about looking at the etymological origins of both words, so help in that regard could prove just as useful. thanks.
    • leephillips 5y ago
      Two different descriptors of what?
      • dwmbt 5y ago
        i've found that there are arguments being had between people my age that sex is a biological descriptor (M/F) and that gender is a looser, more amorphous descriptor. for instance, you can be born a man (your biological sex) and identify as non-binary (your gender). i'm interested to see how the origin of the words could contribute to that discussion.
        • leephillips 5y ago
          Various philosophers, such as Wittgenstein, have pointed out that much of what sounds like discussion only exists because one can arrange words into grammatically sensible sentences. That doesn't mean the discussion is actually about anything. People who know the words “Earth” and “flat” can theorize about whether the Earth is flat, but it’s a waste of time to pay any attention to them. A “non-binary” “gender” is just a noise with no idea attached to it.
• masswerk 5y ago
  Yet another aspect: In Latin, after the Republic, there's an increasing loss of punctuations and word separators in the written language, and with varying writing directions, as in verses, a distinctive word ending becomes really important. (Which may be a cause for the simplification mentioned in the article.) Now also take the rather free word order into account and it may become quite clear, why forming a relational web using types and repeating the respective word endings is really helpful. The other way round, that this loss of word separators and punctuations had been possible at all illustrates rather well the amount of redundancy and robustness this system introduces in a language.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• olau 5y ago
  Persistence: I'm not sure that line of reasoning is actually valid. I think you need to be able to rule out other reasons for persistence before you can make that conclusion. The article mentions that the genders are learned at an early age and seem to be very resistent to change. I just looked up Danish - it used to have masculine, feminine and neuter, but masculine disappeared into feminine. The theory given here is that it was a consequence of bilinguals simplifying things: https://dialekt.ku.dk/dialekter/dialekttraek/navneordenes_koen/ https://dialekt.ku.dk/dialekter/dialekttraek/navneordenes_ko... It wouldn't surprise me if modern English is a result of the same kind of multilingual simplification.