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Re: [OT] Grammatic gender


From: David Wright
Subject: Re: [OT] Grammatic gender
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2017 20:04:43 -0600
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15)

On Wed 15 Nov 2017 at 21:32:52 (+0100), David Kastrup wrote:
> David Wright <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > On Wed 15 Nov 2017 at 11:56:07 (-0500), Kieren MacMillan wrote:
> >> Hi Simon,
> >> 
> >> > On Nov 14, 2017, at 5:47 PM, Simon Albrecht <address@hidden> wrote:
> >> > 
> >> >> Again, here English is very unusual because words do not have a gender
> >> >> (the objects they refer to may, but that's different ... :-)
> >> > 
> >> > How would that be true?
> >> 
> >> See, e.g., <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender>:
> >> Although Old English had grammatical genders (masculine, feminine,
> >> and neuter; as in Modern German), modern English is not considered
> >> to have them and aside from a handful of nouns such as "god" and
> >> "goddess", "duke" and "duchess", "tiger" and "tigress", and "waiter"
> >> and "waitress", gender is found almost exclusively in pronouns and
> >> titles.
> >
> > A duchess has gender, but I don't see that the word "duchess" has
> > grammatical gender. How is that expressed?
> 
> "The duchess ate her lunch" as opposed to "The duchess ate its lunch"?

It seems reasonable to distinguish between Grammar and Vocabulary.
English has a vocabulary of natural-gender-specific (NGS) words
(ie based on sexual identity (Sex)) which were not necessarily tracked
by grammatical gender (GG) when English grammar had GG. Some of the
rules for generating NGS words are sexist in themselves, and many of
the words are also seen as sexist, so nowadays people are moving away
from using them, in favour of neutral words (flight attendant) or
newly minted ones (salesperson).

If you go back far in enough in English, you find the usual GG
system where the genders seem quite random and there are
*grammatical* rules on agreement, just as we still have for
number etc.

You wrote "her" because the person who ate their lunch was female,
and the *pronoun* has a gender based on the natural gender of the
subject, not on a hypothetical GG. For referring to a human, it's
discomforting to use a neuter pronoun. We can use "it" for a child
as long as we really don't know its sex. For an adult, there are
various devices like he/she and (s)he in writing, and breaking
number agreement in speech ("The burglar caught their sleeve
on the window catch.")

> German: "Das Mädchen aß seine Mahlzeit.".
> 
> >> > It may seem so, because the articles for all three genders are the
> >> > same, but words are referred to by ‘he’, ‘she’, or ‘it’. In
> >> > English the sun is male, the moon female

Think so, grammatically?

> >> 
> >> I've spoken English my entire life, and I have literally never heard
> >> an exchange like:
> >> 
> >>   Q: Is the sun up yet?
> >>   A: Yes — he rose an hour ago.
> >
> > Neither have I, though there is the song "The sun has got his hat on".
> > Again, personification, not grammar.
> 
> "Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines
> And often is his gold complexion dimm'd"
> 
> Sonnet 18 by Shakespeare.

Ironically, although the usual personification of the sun is male,
its GG was feminine. Likewise, the female moon had masculine GG.
I would guess the reason for the change has to do with education
in the Classics and the gods Helios and Selene.

Cheers,
David.



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