IMO the gender part just became the term because female and male pronouns happen to be separated by many of these systems.

What if nouns were categorised in Welsh (a “gendered” language) by their feline (femme) or canine (masc) traits, or some other arbitrary distinction that was lost over centuries of linguistic shift to align with Anglo-Saxon sexual hierarchies?

It seems small, but subverting the idea of “binary gender” in languages is one of the ways we can give people the language to describe sexuality and gender as a spectrum.

Any linguist chads who know more about why we use “gender” and “masc vs femme” and what people are saying about this in a world where that binary isnt useful anymore?

  • huf [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    7·
    4 months ago

    the original meaning of “gender” (in latin) was “kind” (but also “kin” (a cognate, actually), so there was always a shade of meaning relating to reproduction there).

    by the time romans started writing about their grammar, latin had lost its third noun class (i think very originally it also had m/f/n, like germanic languages). so i think already with the romans the concepts of noun class and social gender and sex got confused with each other a bit. at any rate, the romans found latin to have two noun classes, and words like mother and girl belonged to class A, while father and boy belonged to class B, so they ran with that, and called the two classes m and f. and it stuck.

    and so in european languages, whose grammars were all written down by people familiar with latin grammar, the conflation was carried forward (and also because european languages often have a noun class system that maps to m/f somewhat).

    so it’s eurocentrism, in a way, but even within europe, it takes a lot of handwaving to sustain this idea, because apart from words for people and animals, pretending that social gender and grammatical gender are the same concept is difficult.

    but yes, grammatical gender is just an arbitrary grouping of nouns into classes. which is why i like the term “noun class” better.

    anyway, i think a bit too much is made of grammatical gender, in the sense that it’s just as possible to be breathtakingly sexist in a language with no grammatical gender, so it’s clearly not a very important cog in the great wheel of oppression.

      • Le_Wokisme [they/them, undecided]@hexbear.netEnglish
        5·
        4 months ago

        We get too hung up on language, IMO. For example, calling someone “unhoused” vs “homeless” does nothing to put a roof over someone’s head. Whether we capitalize Black or not does nothing to undo systemic racism. “Latinx” doesn’t make anyone less sexist, or create more opportunities for women. And so on. It seems we’d all rather have good feelings about our word choices than actually solve any problems. Just my 2¢.

        i think there are different categories of this. some (not necessarily in your examples) are chipping away at a hierarchy or reducing microaggressions and some are just liberals doing nothing.

        also Black vs black is like a culture vs skin color thing sometimes idk if always (also maybe that edges onto that FBA or ADOS shit that none of my mentors like) My understanding is the capitalization is for when you’re referring to the new-world cultural group that was developed by enslaved black people, but maybe that distinction isn’t valuable to everyone.