The words for sea in French (mer) and Spanish (mar) are almost identical, and yet the gender is different. What happened there? After that incident with the Spanish Armada, did Spaniards decide there was nothing feminine about that damned ocean and change it? What gender is it in Latin?
It really has nothing to do with sex, even though the word ‘gender’ is used in conjunction with the endings. Feminine and masculine endings/modifiers often follow no real logic other than common usage, although words with Greek roots seem to all be masculine in gender, IIRC.
mare, maris, marium - Neuter.
Most neuter nouns from Latin became masculine in the various Romance languages, it’s a good question why French turned it into la mer.
ETA: And yeah, it’s reading too much “social gender role” types of interpretation into what is really just a grammatical construction.
Also, in Spanish it’s both “el mar” AND “la mar”. The former is the more common, everyday, literal “materialistic” usage and the latter is considered more of a literary way of saying it, associated with books about old sailors, but it has frequent enough usage in modern Spanish - the phrase referring to waters well away from land, “high seas”, in Spanish is “alta mar”.
“Gender” as used for language is derived from the original meaning of “kind” or “type” rather than the common modern usage as a synonym for sex. “Masculine” and “feminine” genders were identified as such because of a presumed common link of some words in each classification with what the grammarians identified as male/female roles (with other words of the same type dragged along regardless - in Irish, “girl” is masculine and “stallion” is feminine). The fact that a word is identified as “masculine/feminine/neuter/whatever” is a recent arbitrary grammatical classification that has nothing to do with how the word form actually developed in its language.
In German, the word for girl is neuter (das Mädchen). Mark Twain famously complained that in German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has.
HEY! Only because my uncle JM (merchant captain) would be almost 80 doesn’t mean you can call him old! And my cousin R is in his 30s! I don’t think I’ve ever heard either one, or R’s Red Cross of the Sea friends, or Father Mateo (who was a merchant captain before entering Seminar), or JM’s wife V (whose family are all sailors and fishermen, and who answered his proposal with “I’m no willing to share you with that bitch: la mar or me”) refer to it but as la mar; my paternal grandfather died when I was 3 so I don’t remember much about him directly, but the stories about his work at sea always mentioned la mar. The father of my friend Ene is a customs officer in a harbor: again, la mar.
People who work with/at sea normally call it la mar; it’s also called la mar in legends and songs about it (in Mecano’s “Ana y Miguel”, the genders are inverted: they speak of the sea as el mar and the reason “he” kills the fisherman is because “he” is in love with Ana… but the three people who formed Mecano are from Madrid and their idea of “the sea” is “the wet part of the beach”).
So, for inland people, el mar, and for people who deal with her daily, la mar. El mar is more common simply because there’s more inlanders.
I find this interesting, because it seems to run somewhat contrary to the SDMB boilerplate about grammatical gender not really implying sexual gender.
Please could you elaborate on the practical, everyday distinctions (or overlaps, if any) between the notions of grammatical and sexual genders?
Fin is the exact same word, yet it’s ‘la fin’ in French and ‘el fin’ in Spanish. I don’t have any knowledge of the specifics, but given how arbitrary gender is in language, I’m not too surprised that you get these occasional divergences.
Well, the sea doesn’t actually have a sexual gender, any more than God or rivers or most trees do.
But when we anthropomorphize them, the anthropomorphizations do; it’s a requirement of anthropomorphization. (Now try to read that sentence out loud without tripping over your own tongue)
Electrons and protons don’t have sexual genders, either. But when some classmates of mine couldn’t understand how electrical condensers get charged, and realizing it was the girls who spent all their waking hours thinking of where would their next “boyfriend” come from, I asked the teacher for permission to try and explain. He granted it, and my explanation involving he-electrons wandering through a long road (the cable) in search of those she-nuclei they’d seen at the other side of a cliff (the insulator), abandoning the she-nuclei they’d previously been paired with, leading to an excess of she-nuclei (positive charge) on the first side of the cliff and an excess of he-electrons (negative charge) on the other one… actually worked, as I’d put things in terms that particular brand of idiot could understand. The teacher let us out early because he was laughing so hard he couldn’t speak.
And I almost peed my panties laughing when the same subject came up in Physics I in college and the teacher started talking about she-electrons wandering through a long road (the cable)…
So when speakers of languages with grammatical gender anthropomorphise, do they typically do so in gender-consistent fashion?
I never wondered about that, but I guess you have to. It would be weird to call “he” (in a poem for instance) something that is normally refered to as “she”.
I guess you can get around it by using a similar word. For instance, in French, you could use the word “mer” if you wanted it to be female, and “ocean” if you wanted it to be male.
Typically, but not always. Electrons, nuclei and protons all take male grammatical gender in Spanish, but in my examples above it wouldn’t have worked without making the two elements of the pair have different genders (so, I spake of fickle electrones and unmovable núcleos full of protonas, while my teacher used fickle electronas who ran away from their unmovable núcleos full of poor, sad, abandoned protones - the underlined words got changed so their grammatical gender would match the needs of the story).
Sometimes the anthropomorphization takes different genders by picking different words, as clairobscur said; sometimes you pick a different pre-existing anthropomorphization (Poseidon; Tethys); sometimes you just have to break the usual grammatical gender because of the story’s requirements.
I think you overstated this. I recall reading in a serious book that grammatical gender in Proto-Indo-European really did have something to do with mystically ascribing male, female, and neutral traits to objects and concepts. (Sorry, no cites, and if it turns out I’m wrong, so be it.)
Certainly, linguists use “gender” today to mean “group of nouns with some common grammatical trait”, e.g., some African languages with a dozen or more genders.
I read about a study done on quite a few languages from quite a few families and there was a strong correlation between a language’s genderization of their words for Day and Night and the gender of Day and Night when they’re personified in poetry, music, and art. I think it was on languagelog.
Gender is very fluid. Le compte (French) is obviously cognate with la cuenta (Spanish). I know a woman who grew up 100 miles from Rome and she mentioned once that there a number of nouns in her dialect with different gender from the Roman dialect.
In fact, I even wonder why we have conflated gender and sex. Why doesn’t Latin, say, just have gender 1, gender 2, and gender 3, the way they have five conjugations?
On the other hand, a French Canadian linguist (her PhD advisor was in fact Noam Chomsky) once told that there was a feminist periodical that would reject articles that didn’t use a sufficient proportion of feminine nouns.
In german, the sea can be “das Meer” (neutral), “die See” (female) or “der Ozean” (male). A lake is “der See” (male).
In Latin, the words for the essentially exclusively male professions of sailor and poet (nauta and poeta, respectively) are feminine gender.
Isn’t there a famous (and probably apocryphal) quote from Casanova about why the male and female genitals are gendered female and male, respectively?
Something about how the slave always takes the name of his master. My google-fu is failing me.
A few weeks ago I posted a link to this Cracked article, which presents some research suggesting that indeed, the grammatical gender of a noun influences how we think of the object it represents. And as the article mentions, this effect can also be seen in English.
While it’s true that “gender” in the grammatical sense is today applied to things that have nothing to do with gender in the sexual sense, in many languages both use the same terms. So it’s not surprising that it may influence how we think about the world.
“Job” is an English word, but it’s been adopted into popular registers of French. It’s “le job” in France and “la job” in Quebec.