Going back to the assignment of gender to a ship or some similar vessel, the gender In English has always been feminine. In wartime, that sounds odd at times considering how often such vessels are either delivering damage to the other side or taking damage. I may be exhibiting some latent sexism, but it does seem odd to me that the men who assigned the gender of this word (and we all know it was men) chose to use the feminine gender to a machine that was designed for war.
Maybe somebody had a real spitfire for a wife.
Nah… it would have to be a whole group of guys who were dominated by their wives.
Something similar can be observed in German, which seems to be an example of how speakers of gendered language do not associate grammatical with natural gender nearly as much as speakers of English imagine.
The noun Person (person) is feminine in German. A police report will say “Witnesses reported a male person leaving the scene and crossing the street. She was then observed driving away in a dark car.” and that will not be considered incongruous.
No it hasn’t. In Old English, which had three grammatical genders and used them a lot more pervasively than in Modern English, the word for ship was neuter.
We don’t know that it was men. Except for very recent coinings, we never know who first decided what gender to assign a noun. Anyway the assignments seem to be arbitrary in most cases.
Not all ships are designed for war. Languages have been referring to ships for longer than ships have been used in combat.
I expect ships being referred to in the feminine originates from people aping Latin in an attempt to sound fancy. The Latin word for ship, “navis”, is feminine.
I didn’t mean that people who refer to ships as “she” are doing so in a deliberate attempt to use Latin grammar. I just speculated that that was the origin of it. Not every attempt to import Latin vocabulary or grammar will stick and gain wider use.
It would sound somewhat incongruous in French, but because of the feminine pronoun. In fact, both using the masculine and using the feminine pronoun in this case would look weird to me (in French). I’d probably just rewrite “the person”. Now, of course, the adjectives would agree in gender with “person”, i.e. would take the feminine form, and that wouldn’t be incongruous.
I read that “gender” didn’t imply sex in any usage until pretty recently, and that it meant “type”. That is, the linguistic sense was the only sense until recently.
In Spanish, many (but not all) nouns can be divided by gender on sight. Nouns that end in -a are generally feminine, and nouns that end in -o are generally masculine. But this doesn’t apply for everything because not all nouns end in -a or -o (e.g. “[el] presidente”), and there are some words that break the above rule, for example, “[el] problema”, “[el] esquema” (c.f. “scheme”), and “[la] mano” (of fate?). For some reason, a lot of the -a masculine nouns are of Greek origin. Some words look the same and are distinguished only by gender, for example el radio = radium or radius vs la radio = radio, or el papa = pope and la papa = potato.
It should be noted that grammatical gender doesn’t have to mean masculine, feminine, and neuter. Those are the classes common in Indo-European languages. The Wikipedia page says there are languages with up to 18 genders (Swahili).
If somebody already pointed that out, I apologize for being redundant.
I think those numbers for German and Romanian are a bit misleading. All thing being equal, a two-gender language should have a “prediction” rate of 50%, not 0%, right? But for all Indo-European languages, there are far more masculine words than feminine words. I’d like to know, for that study, how they controlled for guessing based on the meaning, and how they controlled for the fact that the genders aren’t distributed 50/50 in the language.
Besides, there are many languages where gender is more difficult to tell by sight.
Welsh, for example, has some endings whose gender can be learned (-yn (m.) vs. -en (f.)), but rhymes and even a lot of homonyms have unpredictable gender:
iau (f) “liver”
iau (m) “Thursday”
gwaith (f) “time, occasion”
gwaith (m) “work”
cig (m) “meat”
gwig (f) “woodland”
pig (f) “beak”
gwas (m) “servant”
tas (f) “haystack”
not to mention words that vary by dialect, masculine in some regions and feminine in others.
Before anyone points it out, they do explain in the linked study, and according to them at least I’m wrong about masculine nouns outnumbering feminine ones. Feminine are the largest category in German and Romanian, though the distribution is nearly equal (M/F/N) in German and much more weighted to the feminine, and although I can’t follow the math it does seem they controlled for it.
No, but el Papa is and my papá was but, as you say, la papa definitely is not, although maybe if Mormons decide that papas have souls, papas will end up getting baptised Mormon post-mortem…
Dr. Drake, I’m recalling those threads on “what is a word?” and “which language has the most words” (or similar) which I’m too lazy to look up at 5am. I’m wondering: when the people who did that study counted the amount of (m) vs (f) words, did they count words with (m) and (f) versions in both groups, or only in the masculine under which they’re listed in the dictionary? Using examples from Spanish, would something like canario/a (where the two versions have the exact same meanings, differentiated by the gender of the person, bird or object to which the word refers) be counted only once, whereas something like perro/a (where perro means dog or bad man, and perra means dog or bad woman, but perra also happens to mean coin - a meaning not shared by the (m) version) would be counted twice?
ETA: or canario could be counted, canaria would be counted, perro would be counted, perra (bitch) would be counted, and perra (coin) would also be counted… anyway, it’s something where once I’m awake enough to read the study I’ll be interested in their fingercounting before I even start to worry about any higher math.
I don’t see where they explain what to do in the cases you describe. I don’t know German well or Romanian at all, but I’d imagine such things exist in both languages.
Which South Indian languages are you referring to? Are you sure about that? Tamil and Telugu have masculine, feminine, and neuter grammatical inflections. But the 3 genders in Dravidian languages don’t pattern the same way that they do in Indo-European languages. Dravidian genders are applied somewhat differently. Masculine and feminine are only used for sentient beings, while all other nouns are a default neuter.
Persian has absolutely no gender at all. Not even gendered pronouns like in English. The Persian third-person singular pronoun u means he, she, or it.
This is the language spoken in Iran and Afghanistan. Where women living under the Islamic Revolution or the Taliban would have a thing or two to tell you about sexism in society. And their language’s freedom from gender didn’t do them a bit of good. You only get your rights when you organize.
