ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 56: Concept: Grammatical Gender While today “gender&r
ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 56: Concept: Grammatical Gender While today “gender” is typically used to describe a social categorization often conflated with sex, the original use of the term was linguistic. It comes from the Latin word for “type”, the same origin as “genre” and “genus”. In linguistics gender simply refers to a category of noun differentiated by the grammar of the language. This is not to be confused with semantic gender, which is a meaningful but not necessarily grammatical feature. For example, in English we could say women are female in gender semantically but they are not grammatically female as English does not differentiate noun classes like that. However in German the word “Frau” is both semantically and grammatically female; it means “woman” and conjugated in accordance with the female paradigm. The German word “Sonne” is grammatically feminine but no semantically feminine. It conjugated just like “Frau” but it means “Son” (the star, not a child), which is an inanimate object. For Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages masculine and feminine are the most common genders, named for the parallel with human genders they provide when accounting for semantically human words. Another common pattern for genders in world languages is animate and inanimate, where typically living creatures are in one category and non-living in another. I should stress though that the categories, being grammatical in nature, inherently have some arbitrariness to them; some semantically animate objects will take inanimate forms and vice versa. The names we give the genders are only for the ease of the human mind which thrives on analogy. A more honest form of gender is found in the Bantu languages, who have an average of ten or more genders that people rarely bother to even try an name because their semantic relations are so very tenuous, instead linguists typically just assign a number. The book “fire, women, and dangerous things” is named after the semantic associations of one of the genders of the Australian native Dyirbal language. Between Germanic and Romance languages masculine and feminine genders are often flipped, most obviously between German and Spanish. So the next time some terrible person tries to tell you that gender is defined by genitalia, you can tell them with confidence that it is in fact defined by arbitrary grammatical association. -- source link