Sometimes I wonder why it’s called “grammatical gender” at all, when it so often has no connection to actual gender whatsoever. In your example, there’s no gender information transferred at all! It may as well be called “grammatical colour” or “grammatical arbitrary class”.
On the other hand, you’d be lucky to be able to exert enough control on convention to make “he” into that kind of word.
Sometimes I wonder why it’s called “grammatical gender” at all, when it so often has no connection to actual gender whatsoever. In your example, there’s no gender information transferred at all! It may as well be called “grammatical colour” or “grammatical arbitrary class”.
The Chinese and Japanese character for “sex” (as in, which reproductive organs you have) can also be translated as “a quality” or “nature”: 性 is the same character used for “nature” in the expression “Buddha-nature”, i.e. “the characteristic quality of a Buddha”. The concept could possibly also be expressed as “distinction”, as in the limerick of the young lady from Exeter; or as “difference” as in the French expression “Vive la différence” (“Long live the difference” between men and women).
The concept of “grammatical gender” in linguistics is often taken to be a specialization of the more general concept of “noun class”. Some languages, particularly African languages closer to the likely point of origin of human language, grammatically distinguish a large number of different noun classes, for particular kinds of things. Some European languages make a distinction between animate and inanimate nouns, but most preserve only the distinction between masculine and feminine nouns.
This may be taken as indicating that as human languages continually diversify and mix in human societies, that the distinctions which are preserved are those which human societies find the most significant: distinctions of sex. Which isn’t surprising, since humans do need language to talk about and perform mate selection, where (for almost all humans) sex is highly significant.
English does not express grammatical gender on nouns in general, as French or German do. Indeed, even remaining feminizing suffixes such as -ess are falling out of use: uses such as “poetess” and “authoress” are now seen as dated (and sexist), and even “actress” is obsolescent. However, like other Indo-European languages (but unlike the Finno-Ugric languages, or many East Asian languages) English retains gendered pronouns.
It is not at all clear that removing gender from pronouns is a step in the direction of a less sexist society. Japanese does not use gendered pronouns except for intimate relations; but few would assert that Japan had perfect sexual equality. Sweden is often identified as a society with an unusually high level of sexual equality; but Swedish has gendered pronouns. However, deliberately using gender-neutral pronouns in English draws attention to the gender distinction, and implicitly asks, “Why are we making this distinction here, when we’re not doing mate selection right now?”
Well, that’s interesting, although it still doesn’t explain—or rather, justify—the use of the words masculine and feminine for a distinction that has nothing to do with sex. You’d just end up with people getting confused by the words and thinking words like feminine-was have genders or something (whatever it even means for a string of phonemes to have a gender).
Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way? It turns out that it does. In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a “key” — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like “hard,” “heavy,” “jagged,” “metal,” “serrated,” and “useful,” whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say “golden,” “intricate,” “little,” “lovely,” “shiny,” and “tiny.” To describe a “bridge,” which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said “beautiful,” “elegant,” “fragile,” “peaceful,” “pretty,” and “slender,” and the Spanish speakers said “big,” “dangerous,” “long,” “strong,” “sturdy,” and “towering.” This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender. The same pattern of results also emerged in entirely nonlinguistic tasks (e.g., rating similarity between pictures). And we can also show that it is aspects of language per se that shape how people think: teaching English speakers new grammatical gender systems influences mental representations of objects in the same way it does with German and Spanish speakers.
Sometimes I wonder why it’s called “grammatical gender” at all, when it so often has no connection to actual gender whatsoever. In your example, there’s no gender information transferred at all! It may as well be called “grammatical colour” or “grammatical arbitrary class”.
On the other hand, you’d be lucky to be able to exert enough control on convention to make “he” into that kind of word.
As it turns out, that’s exactly the original meaning of the word “gender”—of which the French translation is genre.
The Chinese and Japanese character for “sex” (as in, which reproductive organs you have) can also be translated as “a quality” or “nature”: 性 is the same character used for “nature” in the expression “Buddha-nature”, i.e. “the characteristic quality of a Buddha”. The concept could possibly also be expressed as “distinction”, as in the limerick of the young lady from Exeter; or as “difference” as in the French expression “Vive la différence” (“Long live the difference” between men and women).
The concept of “grammatical gender” in linguistics is often taken to be a specialization of the more general concept of “noun class”. Some languages, particularly African languages closer to the likely point of origin of human language, grammatically distinguish a large number of different noun classes, for particular kinds of things. Some European languages make a distinction between animate and inanimate nouns, but most preserve only the distinction between masculine and feminine nouns.
This may be taken as indicating that as human languages continually diversify and mix in human societies, that the distinctions which are preserved are those which human societies find the most significant: distinctions of sex. Which isn’t surprising, since humans do need language to talk about and perform mate selection, where (for almost all humans) sex is highly significant.
English does not express grammatical gender on nouns in general, as French or German do. Indeed, even remaining feminizing suffixes such as -ess are falling out of use: uses such as “poetess” and “authoress” are now seen as dated (and sexist), and even “actress” is obsolescent. However, like other Indo-European languages (but unlike the Finno-Ugric languages, or many East Asian languages) English retains gendered pronouns.
It is not at all clear that removing gender from pronouns is a step in the direction of a less sexist society. Japanese does not use gendered pronouns except for intimate relations; but few would assert that Japan had perfect sexual equality. Sweden is often identified as a society with an unusually high level of sexual equality; but Swedish has gendered pronouns. However, deliberately using gender-neutral pronouns in English draws attention to the gender distinction, and implicitly asks, “Why are we making this distinction here, when we’re not doing mate selection right now?”
Only partially true: the Japanese language has differently gendered versions of “I”. Pronouns for “you” are indeed generally reserved for intimate relations, and third person pronouns don’t seem to exist at all, as far as I can tell.
Well, that’s interesting, although it still doesn’t explain—or rather, justify—the use of the words masculine and feminine for a distinction that has nothing to do with sex. You’d just end up with people getting confused by the words and thinking words like feminine-was have genders or something (whatever it even means for a string of phonemes to have a gender).
Although I agree it’s odd, it does in fact seem that there is gender information transferred / inferred from grammatical gender.
From Lera Boroditsky’s Edge piece