All right. Grammatical gender.
At first glance, there seems to be an unofficial consensus, from native speakers
of gendered languages, to snarky monolingual Americans in YouTube comment sections,
from the poor souls forced to learn Arabic or French in school, to your average polyglot...
all the way up to people with formal linguistics educations...
that grammatical gender is just... the worst.
And believe me, I've spent plenty of time learning
German and French - I hate grammatical gender just as much as the next person.
I mean it's a set of groups we almost arbitrarily throw nouns into, and suddenly all the adjectives
and articles describing that noun, sometimes any verb that noun is the subject of, has to change?
And we just have to learn, along with every single noun,
whether it's a "le" or a "la", a "der", "die" or a "das", an "en" or an "ett".
And that sucks. There's no denying it.
But I think we need to challenge this notion that it's somehow
incomprehensibly and irredeemably ridiculous and useless... something especially terrible.
So let me take you through what I think are some of the biggest
misconceptions about grammatical gender, and maybe, though I don't
expect you to love it... we can all learn to appreciate it together, for what it is.
"Grammatical Gender Carries No Meaning"
I think it would be unfair not to mention that sometimes, in some languages,
the gender or class of a noun can be a distinguishing factor in its meaning.
There are lots of fun little examples of this dotted around.
In German, "der See" in the masculine means "the
lake" whilst "die See" in the feminine means "the ocean".
In Swedish "en öl" using the common gender is "a beer" while
"ett öl", using the neuter, is a type of beer.
Allegedly, in Serbo-Croatian, "bol", meaning "pain", typically connotes
physical pain in the masculine, but emotional pain in the feminine.
And on top of these perfect pairs,
there are a lot of words which are very similar which have different genders.
Take, in Italian, "la frutta", referring to the culinary concept of "fruit",
versus "il frutto", an individual, scientifically classified "fruit".
In Swahili, the same noun stem can often take different prefixes for the
different noun classes, forming different, but related, words.
For instance, while in "mswidi" and its plural "waswidi" are the
Swahili words for "a Swedish person" and "Swedish people" respectively,
that same stem can also form "Uswidi", the country of Sweden, or "kiswidi", the Swedish language.
Some nouns can be put into a different class to create an augmentative:
"nyoka" is a snake but "joka" is a big snake.
And sure, in these cases the fact that all the adjectives and articles and,
in the case of Swahili, even verb conjugations, now have to change
because the grammatical gender of the noun is different... isn't really necessary.
But that brings me on to my next misconception...
"Grammatical Gender (Usually) Has No Meaning, and That's a Bad Thing"
Now that we've established that we can have similar sounding words with different genders,
we can see that differentiating these is made easier to the listener when
the words around that noun are changed based on the gender.
Essentially, the difference between "la frutta" and "il frutto" is much
easier to hear than "la frutta" and "la frutto".
Even with more distinct words, like "kiswidi" versus "mswidi", that extra inflection can
make up for difficulty in processing in a high-noise environment, or correct a mishearing.
In fact, I'd generalise this.
If you hear the gender of a French noun is feminine, without having heard the noun itself,
you've narrowed down your options to 44% of the nouns in the language.
In Swahili, if you hear from a verb that a noun is in the m-wa class,
you're looking at only 7-15% of all nouns.
In the context of an actual sentence, this extra clue as to what a word you
missed could be can feasibly aid in speed up comprehension.
This particular misconception is an example of what I like to call "the Ithkuil
fallacy"... something which a great linguistics YouTuber allegedly made
a video about not too long ago... I don't know I hear it's pretty goo...
"Grammatical Gender Changes How You Think (in a bad way)"
One thing you'll often hear about grammatical gender is that it affects the way people think.
And Boroditsky's study is pretty famous.
It suggests that if you ask a German and Spanish speaker to describe an inanimate noun,
like a bridge, you'll get different answers.
In German, where the word for bridge is feminine,
speakers were likelier to describe it as "elegant" and "fragile",
whereas in Spanish, where "bridge" is masculine,
speakers were likelier to say it was "dangerous" and "sturdy".
And I'm not going to argue against this. There is plenty of evidence to support this: for instance,
this analysis of naturalistic writing found that there was a statistically significant
correlation between the genders of nouns and the adjectives likely to be used for them in German,
Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
But I do have two things to say about this.
Firstly, the random division of inanimate nouns into masculine
and feminine is not something which occurs in all gendered languages.
In Tamil, the primary division of nouns is into rational, including people and deities,
and non-rational, including animals and inanimate objects,
with the masculine/feminine division only existing within the rational nouns.
In Danish and Swedish, the genders are common and neuter,
where masculine and feminine have collapsed into one category.
Other languages, like Xhosa and Swahili,
have noun class systems which have nothing to do with natural gender at all.
This idea of grammatical gender changing how we think is sometimes used to discredit the
entire idea of categorising nouns... and that... that isn't very fair now, is it?
And secondly... right, speakers of different languages associate
different ideas with nouns based on their grammatical gender...
Well... so what?
What makes people uncomfortable about these results is that these
demonstrate our... quite problematic... ideas of masculinity and femininity.
But that's all this is: a demonstration of those ideas.
There's nothing inherently wrong with linking different ideas to
different inanimate objects - the problem here is the sexism.
And there are plenty of cultures where lack of grammatical gender or even any sort of
gendered language have not stopped people from holding those sorts of sexist ideas.
"Male", "Female" and "Neutral"
Look, we need to get rid of these words when talking about grammar.
Because they cause a lot more confusion than they're worth.
It's not "male" or "female" or "neutral". It's "masculine", "feminine" and "neuter".
I know the Germans have a habit of calling their
nouns "männlich, weiblich oder neutral" as well... this is not just the fault
of analysts coming in from languages which don't have grammatical gender.
Native speakers of gendered languages make this mistake
too. But I think these terms are MUCH better.
There is a reason for this beyond being petty - which I'm all for anyway,
don't get me wrong - because I think this imprecise language contributes to...
A Misanalysis of What Grammatical Gender Is
Here's the thing. We need to get it into our heads that these are
grammatical categories, not necessarily semantic ones.
Some people seem to be of the impression that because the French say "la table",
this means they consider tables to be female, while,
say, the Germans, who use the word "der Tisch", consider tables male.
See why I don't like these words now?
As we saw earlier, the association between the table and the feminine or masculine might
occur... but this does not literally mean those objects are seen as female or male.
In French, there is the word "la bicyclette", which means "bicycle". This is a feminine word.
Take, on the other hand, the masculine word "le vélo", which means... also "bicycle"...
And why is this? Well, it's because in gendered languages, things aren't gendered... words are.
When the word for "human" is masculine in loads of European languages... this
doesn't mean that all humans are literally male.
Similarly, the word for "person" being feminine doesn't mean all people are literally female.
In Swahili, the word for insect is in class 1, usually reserved exclusively for people...
I mean, in German, the word for "girl" isn't even feminine! "Das Mädchen" is a neuter noun,
because all German nouns with the diminutive suffix "-chen" are neuter.
This is a perfect example of how the morphology of
a word takes priority over the natural gender of what is being referred to.
De Saussure, the father of structural linguistics, argued that although language
is composed of words and declensions and conjugations, signifying ideas... a language
is also a self-contained system where parts are defined by their relation to each other.
From this perspective, maybe we could see grammatical gender more as an
internal part of the system, rather than representing some idea in and of itself.
Even in languages with almost completely consistent assignment of nouns into
different classes, these grammatical genders can only really be understood
in relation to each other, and to the rest of a language's grammar.
They are not signifiers of real world properties... even
if they happen to correlate with those properties.
Genders are part of the internal logic of the language. Take, for instance,
pronouns and demonstratives, used to refer to something that's already been talked about.
In gendered languages, it's often easier to keep track of more things in a single
sentence or paragraph, because the referrence changes by gender.
Let's say "I don't want to eat the orange with the apple because it doesn't taste good".
Without careful use of emphasis, we're left wondering... what doesn't taste good?
The orange? The apple? The combination of the orange and the apple?
In German, this is easily solved by gendered reference.
Think of it like this: in English, it's way easier to keep track of
who's doing what in a story about a man and woman, than in a story about two men.
Because in the first example, the characters use a different set of
pronouns from one another, while in the second, they use the same.
And in a language like Italian or German, inanimate nouns act in the same way... which means
you get loads of cases of that first example in words that in English would just be called "it".
And recently there's been a wave of videos more sympathetic to grammatical gender,
which I think is great, because it gets dragged through the mud way more than it deserves!
But let's not forget that ultimately... grammatical gender is meaningless.
Over half the world's languages have no gender system at all,
and they are really not missing out on much.
And the specific systems of grammatical gender employed in certain languages... especially
with masculine/feminine dichotomies... do actually make life harder for some people.
What I'm talking about is...
Trans People and Grammatical Gender
Okay, I'm gonna start this section by saying that grammatical gender
isn't exclusively a bad thing for trans people.
Sure, in a language like Italian, where so much is inflected by natural gender,
there are more chances for misgendering to occur, and it's more sustained when it does.
But on the other hand, using an adjective and a particular gender for yourself can be an easy
way to tell everyone how you identify without having to have a big "coming out", and... as
much as misgendering is bad... there's also more chances to figure out who the transphobes are.
But when your language only allows for adjectives to be masculine or feminine,
or the neuter is seen as denoting inanimacy or irrationality... that leaves very little space,
grammatically, for non-binary people to exist in that system.
Non-binary people are those who identify as a gender other than being a man or a
woman... somewhere in between or somewhere outside of the gender scale, if you like.
An increasing number of people are identifying this way and,
naturally want language to accommodate them.
And there's no way of getting around the fact that this is hard in French or Spanish or Italian!
And that sucks. Maybe this is a bit defeatist, and there are various sets of neopronouns being
popularised in different languages, various conventions for adjective inflection...
which I fully support. They even put "iel" on the Wiktionary for
French personal pronouns, look at that!
But grammatical gender continues to be a problem for trans people,
especially those who are non-binary, and I don't think that can be ignored.
Thank God we all speak English, where we can all happily agree on a nice,
simple, gender-neutral pronoun to use whenever people want it...
Right?
I mean... I mean...
Right?