As a public service announcement, I am posting the text of a letter published in the TLS of May 9, 2025:
In Cristina Rivera Garza’s Death Takes Me, reviewed by Lucy Popescu (In Brief, April 18), a character points out that “in Spanish, the word victim, or victima, is always feminine”. This is evidently true, but it would be wrong to draw conclusions regarding any inherently gendered notions of victimhood from this fact; the Spanish word for person (la persona) is also feminine, but it does not therefore follow that persons are essentially female.
Many languages have a range of noun classifications and, while gender is among them, this has nothing to do with femininity or masculinity. Gender has the same root as genre and genus, so, in a grammatical context, refers to the category of a noun and is usually determined by its final syllable; hence, victima is “feminine” because it ends with an “a”. English-speakers, accustomed to a mother tongue without such noun classifications, may find it difficult to divorce the idea of gender from concepts of male/female, let alone avoid the temptation to find significance in a word’s gender. But many nouns belong to a gender category at complete variance with their meaning: the Spanish word for masculinity (la masculinidad) is feminine because -idad is a feminine ending. In contrast, el feminismo (feminism) is masculine because -ismo is a masculine ending. Nor is it only in Romance languages where such discrepancies occur; like its Spanish and French counterparts, the German word for “manliness” (die Männlichkeit) is feminine.
Etymologically, all versions of the word victim derive from the Latin victima and originally referred to a living creature offered in sacrifice to a deity. While meaning and usage have broadened over time to signify someone hurt by another in some way, conflating the word victim with concepts of the feminine risks presenting women as passive and powerless.
Rory McDowall Clark
St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex
Of course, the Spanish word víctima should have an accent mark, but never mind — Clark does an excellent job of spelling out what should be obvious but doesn’t seem to be. I’m sick of seeing the kind of idiotic pop-linguistic analysis typified by “in Spanish, the word victim, or victima, is always feminine” and am glad to see it skewered.
it seems to me that linguists and language teachers could completely eliminate this problem in a generation if they simply followed Rightfully Cranky In St Leonards-on-Sea’s lead, and used “noun class” as the term for, um, noun classes, instead of clinging to a term that’s both confusing and parochially bound to a subset of european languages.
We could just use “genre” (like French) or “genus” (like German) for the noun-class category, since those have other non-grammatical meanings in English that aren’t (inter alia) euphemisms for S-E-X.
That would be a beautiful alternate reality, but we go to
warpop-exegesis with thegeneralsterminology we have.St Leonard’s on Sea is exactly the right kind of place for complaints to come from, but I am mildly surprised by the complainers name
What is it about the word victim that makes etymologists certain it’s related to *weyk, to set aside as holy, and not *weyk, to overcome, deemed a separate root, the ancestor of victory?
Bantu languages use “Noun Classes”. Acc. to Wikipedia:
Swahili nouns are separable into classes, which are roughly analogous to genders in other languages. In Swahili, prefixes mark groups of similar objects: ⟨m-⟩ marks single human beings (mtoto’child’), ⟨wa-⟩ marks multiple humans (watoto ‘children’), ⟨u-⟩ marks abstract nouns (utoto’childhood’), and so on. And just as adjectives and pronouns must agree with the gender of nouns in some languages with grammatical gender, so in Swahili adjectives, pronouns and even verbs must agree with nouns.
In Bantu studies, “gender” is actually firmly established as meaning “a particular pairing of one singular and one plural noun class” (and, of course, has nothing whatever to do with sex.)
I can’t see the Bantuists changing their ways over this, though I must say it’s actually a pretty opaque term of art in this case, and I don’t imagine that anyone would suggest such peculiar terminology if we were starting afresh now.
(You end up with “locative genders”, for example; and it’s hard to see why “person” should really be distinguished from “gender” in a lot of these languages.)
I expunged “gender” from my Kusaal grammar, not really for ideological reasons, but because in Kusaal, as in most Western Oti-Volta languages, although the morphological class pairings are still central to noun flexion, there is no grammatical agreement, so if it weren’t for the hangover of traditional (Bantuist-originated) Volta-Congo grammatical terminology, you’d certainly just call these noun-class pairings “declensions” instead. (Tony Naden actually once suggested doing just that.)
I do see some utility in keeping “gender” as a technical term for “noun class system where other parts of speech agree with a noun they refer to by noun class.” At least, it would be nice to have some snappy name for it, distinct from plain “class.” All the Oti-Volta languages apart from the Western group are like (nearly all) Bantu in having “gender” in that sense.
Of course, since the MAGAfascist takeover in the US, there is another reason for avoiding the word “gender” in linguistic publications:
https://forward.com/fast-forward/696241/a-grant-to-study-hebrew-is-woke-dei-ted-cruz-says/
On reflection, perhaps I should put the word “gender” back in my grammar …
I suspect that ** for now **, because the noun classes we call genders have a primary use case in gendered pronouns, it’s less confusing to teach learners about masculine and feminine and then try to wave them off associating gendered nouns with gendered meanings, than it would be to try to teach them that “men take class b and women take class a” and hope it stuck.
** – Culture may be changing in a direction where this won’t be an issue, or at least not the same issue. I’m not trying to fight a pronoun war. Just pointing out there may be didactic reasons for speaking of gender today.
The typical English speaker’s confusion about grammatical gender and biological sex—often confused with gender—leads me to wonder why those same English speakers appear to ignore neuter gender. Have their misconceptions been castrated, or “fixed”?
Many, many decades ago I taught Spanish at a U.S. university that had a foreign language requirement for its undergraduate students. Adding insult to injury, the class met at eight in the morning. I would sometimes attempt to shock them out of their resentful, sleepy indifference with awful humor.
Confronting the gender≠sex issue, I posed a question: ¿Cuáles son los tres géneros de la palabra pez? [What are the three genders of the word for fish?] Bear in mind the masculine article el’, the feminine ’la’, and the neuter ‘lo’. Further aggravation may be had by remembering that López is a very common Spanish surname.
Son la pez, el pez, y López.
I see that, even though Mbelime does the whole Bantu-like agreement thing (with ten “genders”), Lukas Neukom’s nice grammar talks about e.g. “les classes 1/2”, “les classes 5/6” rather than ever calling the pairings “genders.”
So the exit is clear …
Linguists of the World, unite!
Thinking about the Bantuist custom: it really doesn’t have much to recommend it, in that although (for example) Bleek-Meinhof classes 1 and 2 normally pair as sg/pl, and likewise 3/4, 5/6 etc, in every Bantu language there are plenty of exceptional pairings, and each such pair then gets to be a “gender”, even if it’s only got one or two members. And the grammatical agreement is by noun-class anyway. So calling the pairings “genders” doesn’t really achieve much. It doesn’t add anything to the description.
Unfortunately the in-most-respects excellent “Noun Class Systems in Gur Languages” does it too.
cuchuflete: I learned that as el cura, la cura, locura.
@ cuchuflete
I know “pez” is masc. (el pez = “[the] fish”).
But what does “la pez” mean? “The female fish”?
Pitch, (in sense of “tar”)
La pez: producto de la destilación del alquitrán o de la trementina, conocido también como brea.
From Latin pix (which is, of course, also the source of pitch).
Quite true, but “vittima,” “guardia,” and “spia” are the classic examples that get hauled out in Italian as reasons why it’s ridiculous for feminists to suggest that women in traditionally male professions or positions should be called “medica,” “avvocata,” “ministra,” etc., rather than “medico,” “avvocato,” “ministro.” (This is changing, though, more rapidly with some words than others.) The idea that it’s just a noun class may hold up when you’re talking about people in the abstract, but when it’s a specific person whose gender doesn’t match the implied gender of the noun class, things get awkward. Otherwise you wouldn’t hear people who have a woman doctor – but aren’t comfortable yet with “la mia medica” – constantly switching over to “la mia dottoressa” instead of “il mio medico.”
And I learn that the ‘pitch’ root is also the source of Russian пекло ‘scorching heat; hell’ via Proto-Slavic *pьkъlъ:
@Biscia
To me “la mi dottoressa” sounds more like “my (adored) family member, who is a university graduate (a fact of which I am inordinately proud)” 😊
Oui, mon capitaine!
In case you’re curious, this is the canceled (both meanings) “advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda” grant to UMass:
NSF-BSF: Bridging Encoding and Retrieval Perspectives on Sentence Processing Errors: Comparing Hebrew and English
To understand language, people need to form links between words that are far apart. For example, the sentence “the dog with the very shiny and healthy black fur doesn’t usually bark” requires the listener or reader to associate the dog with “bark”, even though those words are quite far apart. To do this, language users need to rely on memory to link words and concepts. However, human memory is famously prone to error: humans routinely forget, misremember, and conflate aspects of their experience. In the context of language understanding, these memory failures can lead to incorrect interpretations of sentences.
This project aims to understand how and why memory can distort reading and language comprehension by looking at how memory errors impact users of two very different languages, English and Hebrew. English and Hebrew differ in how they organize the words within sentences and whether they assign gender to nouns; Hebrew assigns masculine and feminine genders to nouns, similar to languages like Spanish and French but unlike English. The researchers will study how these linguistic differences between Hebrew and English influence when interpretation errors will arise in users of these two languages. In doing so, the researchers will try to uncover characteristics of memory errors that have the same effect on understanding across languages and those that are language-specific. The results of this project will be used to understand how human memory systems support real-time language comprehension.
Research on this question suggests that two kinds of processes can disrupt language comprehension when a sentence requires the reader to hold multiple words in memory. One process occurs when the features of more recent words accidentally overwrite parts of earlier words. This type of “Encoding error” Means that the reader erroneously perceives a word that recombines the features of two different words. For example, in a sentence like “The road to the mountains was blocked,” they may misremember “road” as “roads” by combining the singular “road” With the plural feature of “mountains.” Another type of error can arise when trying to retrieve a particular word from memory. For example, a reader or listener might pick out the wrong word from memory at the critical moment in understanding a sentence, thinking that the mountains were blocked in the sentence above, rather than the road (a “retrieval” Error). Language comprehension can in principle be disrupted by either or both of these processes.
The investigators will track eye movements of people while they are reading in English and Hebrew and collect speeded acceptability judgments. Together these measures should reflect the relative contribution of encoding and retrieval errors in both languages. The particular pattern of comprehension errors that arises in reading will then be tested against computational models of human working memory in language processing. The combination of these two research methods will help account for how people understand sentences so easily most of the time, and why misinterpretations can and do arise at other times. Understanding how and when interpretation errors arise can also help us better understand various atypical language and reading patterns, such as shown in dyslexia.
This project will advance collaboration between American and Israeli language researchers and will involve advanced stem training for researchers at different career stages, from undergraduates to post-doctoral scholars. This project was co-funded by PAC, linguistics, and EHR core research. This award reflects NSF’s statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the foundation’s intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
@ Rodger C
I learned that as el cura, la cura, locura.
That’s fun. Did anyone ask if la cura was chileno (drunkenness) or venezolano (palta/aguacate avocado)?
@PlasticPaddy, also,
Pez
f. Excremento de los niños recién nacidos. [newborn infant shit]
(synonymous with most MAGA proclamations)
Usually translated – as Geschlecht, which usually means “sex*”, more rarely “noble lineage”, and shows up in even rarer poetic compounds like das Menschengeschlecht “the human race”.
* Not the intercourse thereof, though.
Still: Pech haben “have bad luck”, opposite of Glück haben.
Hat (citing Wikt): a semantic loan from cognate Old High German peh (“pitch; misfortune, damnation”).
Surely not cognate in the strict sense. Also, the linked OHG entry is empty, so I can’t see how it’s supposed to be descended from PIE..
Proto-West Germanic *pik.
I spent the last quarter of an hour letting the etymology drive me crazy. The textbooks postulate a PIE *pik- directly ancestral to the Latin, which was borrowed once into Proto-West-Germanic as an unchanged *pik. And then the abovementioned hell apparently broke loose. First, Pech is neuter, not feminine; neuter Fenster from feminine fenestra makes sense if it got the neuter gender of “eye” as in “window”; maybe “pitch” got the neuter gender of “luck”? Second, the vowel. It’s /e/ as opposed to /ɛ/ in my dialect, which can at least be explained, but in several separate ways: either the *-a- the PWGmc form was supposedly inflected with is to blame (*ɪ-ɑ > *e-ɑ is regular in, fairly specifically, High German), or this is one of the words that was borrowed by WGmc twice, once in the north ( > pitch), before the Western Romance *ɪ > *e shift, and once in the south, after the shift, except that the other example that comes to mind works the other way around (chest : Kiste). But why not. However, there’s a further complication: “glue” in Bavarian dialects is /pɪkː/. It’s masculine, and it comes with a diminutive that means “sticker”, a verb that means both “glue” and “be sticky”, and an adjective “sticky” that looks like it’s one of the handful of surviving present participles. And yes, it’s in Wiktionary, which says it’s “ultimately from” the very same PWGmc *pik. Hm. The /p/ (in those dialects that have one) means it must have been borrowed either after *p > pf or farther north than this shift reached; I don’t know if there are any traces of it farther north. The /ɪ/ means it must have been borrowed either before Western Romance shift (and, if applicable, the ~ High German shift mentioned above) or well after both, from Church Latin. The /kː/… did the word get randomly turned into a masculine *-jan- stem upon borrowing (before West Germanic consonant stretching!), or what? But in that case why doesn’t it have /e/? Or was /kː/ the closest sound available to the preserved short /k/ of an unidentified much more northern dialect? The masculine gender might also be copied from Leim “wood glue”.
So not a cognate in the strict sense.
Does the sense of the High German word look like it owes something to Lat. pecco?
@rozele: I made a post on BlueSky with that exact suggestion, in a reply to a post of Lameen Souag about the political issues David Eddyshaw is talking about. I don’t think it went down all that well; I guess some people saw my suggestion as a surrender to an odious and noxious political force, which I didn’t really intend.
BTW, Spanish cruz is feminine. I expect the honorable senator from Texas will impress on people to address her as God intended.
In Greville Corbett’s book just titled _Gender_ he notes that the word equivalent to “majesty” is feminine in most Romance languages and therefore the phrase “His Majesty” is feminine according to the usual rules, but that practice varies among the languages (and/or within the same language over time) in whether masculine or feminine pronouns are used when the antecedent is “His Majesty” meaning a clear-in-context specific royal male human. IIRC, Corbett treats this as part of showing that pronouns are sometimes “anaphoric” (pointing to the relevant prior noun in the discourse) but sometimes “deictic” (meaning in context pointing directly to the thing in the external world that was the referent of the prior noun in the discourse or at least pointing past/through that noun rather than just to the noun-as-such).
@Ryan. “What is it about the word victim that makes etymologists certain it’s related to *weyk, to set aside as holy, and not *weyk, to overcome, deemed a separate root, the ancestor of victory?”
Answer: the currently earliest-known meaning of Latin victima is ‘animal offered in sacrifice’.
(Hence, not surprizingly, Latin has victimarius ‘assistant at sacrifices’ and victimare ‘offer [an animal] in sacrifice’).
With “girl” in most kinds of German, the pronouns usually switch from neuter to feminine when the sentence is over.
Imaginable, but doesn’t help solve any of the phonological problems.
David M:
neuter Fenster from feminine fenestra makes sense if it got the neuter gender of “eye” as in “window”
Enchanting.
Browsing last night through my concise Clark Hall – a prelude to sleep that I cannot recommend highly enough – I discovered Anglosaxon ēagduru f. (“eye-door”) and ēagþȳrel n. (“eye-hole”) meaning “window” (various exact spellings, of course). Now I learn that window itself is “wind-eye”.
I had thought the ēagduru idea was that only the eye could in a good sense traverse a window, while a proper duru was needed for the whole body. But we find, as an alternative hypothesis, the house construed as a face – with windows for eyes.
And Germanic ?Augentor and ?Augenloch are shadowy lexical presences that I’m sure you, DM, could elucidate for us.
David E:
With “girl” in most kinds of German, the pronouns usually switch from neuter to feminine when the sentence is over.
At this point we remind Hatters that English girl originally meant “young person of either sex”. (Take that, MAGAmen.)
That was not I, but another member of the Dave Conspiracy.
However, I’m not sure that I follow this notion of Corbett’s that this kind of thing reflects a difference between anaphora and deixis in pronouns.
Compare with number: if I say
“The England team has come out onto the pitch; they already look thoroughly demoralised.”
it seems perverse to deny that “they” is anaphoric here. You still need the antecedent for this to be a cromulent sentence (unless we are all actually there at the doomed match, and I have just nodded in the direction of the disappointing players so you have an idea what I’m talking about.) Are we going to say “team” is just pretending to be the antecedent?
When I were a lad, we called this “constructio ad sensum.” None of yer fancy southron talk of “anaphora” and “deixis.”
Swahili nouns referring to people and higher animals induce (in verbs and modifiers) the agreements of the classic Bleek/Meinhof 1/2 “human gender” regardless of the actual noun class they belong to. It seems entirely pointless to me to attribute this to deixis rather than anaphora. Mere playing with words. The noun in question behaves exactly like any other noun would, when it comes to what agrees with it.
Are Swahili verb subject-agreement prefixes “deictic” when the subject is a cow, but “anaphoric” when the subject is a motor car? When the verb precedes the subject (as it may) are the agreement prefixes still “anaphoric”, or do we need another epicycle?
I can’t. It so happens that I was taught the etymology of window in one of my first 5 proper English lessons; probably a personal quirk of the teacher to do that.
Sorry DE. I always get you three members of the Davidsbündler mixed up.
Speaking of Schumannian conspiracy theories, let’s note an oddity in the early development of names for operating systems:
DOS (= doors, obviously)
Windows
Gates has much to explain.
Bisa takoreyɛr “window” has added an element borrowed from Hausa takwaro “window(frame)” to yɛr “eye.”
Kusaal nif “eye” figures in a good many idioms, but none of them seem to involve a sense “opening.”
In fact, they are almost all of the kind where, after a second, you go “yeah, I see that”, like nifsɔb “miser” (“eye-type person.”)
The only exception I can think of is sianif, plural sianini “kidney” (“waist-eye”) and even that seems to be a case of folk etymology: the Toende dialect has both sɛ-nif, plural sɛ-nini or sɛ-nina, and sɛ-iin, plural sɛ-iina, where the iin component has cognates meaning “kidney” elsewhere in Oti-Volta.
(Which show, incidentally, that the word must originally have had the plural iini rather than the current iina: the stem was originally *aam-, and the ii vowel is the result of umlaut caused by the original plural suffix -i, generalised to the singular in some languages but not others.)
development of names for operating systems
Which often get… ported. HMMM?
I note that with the hymn, Victimae paschalis laudes the English translation uses “paschal victim”. Is victim familiar to English-speaking Catholics with a sense of ‘sacrificial animal’?
DE, your example with English “team” doesn’t quite fit. Whatever else you can say about team, it always includes several people, but a victim can be a man or a woman which might trigger pronominal agreement of one kind or another. In Russian, if the real victim is a person of known sex, the agreement is “deictic”, but if it’s unknown or is a somewhat abstract intersex sacrifice, the agreement is with grammatical gender. Choose whatever words you want, but they describe a real thing.
Which often get… ported. HMMM?
And remember latchkey solutions, offered at eye-watering prices by developers in the early days?
@D.O.:
Yes, I see what you mean; I think my Swahili example is a better demonstration of what I’m driving at.
The constructio ad sensum thing with plurals is also rather less equivocal in Kusaal, where formally-plural nouns quite often have a singular meaning, and are referred to by singular pronouns, alongside the English-like use of human-reference ba “they” to refer back to formally-singular collective nouns.
I’m impatient, though, with all this kind of (mere) labelling, which strikes me as just juggling with names rather than creating any real insights into how the language in question really works.
However, I may well be being unfair to Greville Corbett (whom I’ve not read), who may very well (for example) have demonstrated that there are other significant differences between pronouns-as-anaphoric and (formally identical) pronouns-as-deictic, so that this supposed distinction actually correlates with some other significant syntactic phenomena. (It’s also possible that he didn’t intend this a cross-linguistic universal, but just as a feature of English, specifically.)
As a universal, it’s a dud.
Kusaal distinguishes animate from inanimate in singular personal pronouns, and that is not something you can just read off from the lexicon: an “inanimate” noun can end up with “animate” pronouns if, for example, it’s represented metaphorically as talking. The Kusaal version of 1 Corinthians 12:15, for example, goes
Nɔbir ya’a yɛlin ye […], lin kʋ nyaŋi kɛ ka o ka’ niŋgbiŋ la nii.
leg if say.DISCONTINOUS that […], this NEGATIVE.IRREALIS achieve let and (s)he NEGATIVE.EXIST body the at.NEGATIVE
“If the leg should say that […], this would not be able to make it not be part of the body.”
Nɔbir “leg” would normally be referred to by li “it”; but because it’s represented here as speaking and having an opinion, it gets to be o “he/she.”
However, I don’t think this is well described as an opposition between anaphora and deixis. It’s all anaphora; it’s simply the case that “gender” (animate versus inanimate) assignment is not lexical, but determined by how the referent is being conceptualised in context.
Kusaal actually has a formally distinct set of deictic personal pronouns: the third person singular forms are animate on, inanimate lin. Neither is used here: just the anaphoric pronoun o.
Emphasizing D.O.’s point, from the Daily Mail:
> The England team have touched down in the rain at Stansted on a private jet today
Team isn’t even entirely sure itself what number they has.
As Biscia’s comment has already indicated, the big problem with the argument made in the letter quoted in this post is the statement “Many languages have a range of noun classifications and, while gender is among them, this has nothing to do with femininity or masculinity.”
“Nothing to do with femininity or masculinity” is clearly false, and that will be obvious to anyone with even the slightest knowledge of a European gendered language. And it’s not just the words referring to people and animals where the link to femininity and masculinity becomes evident. French, Italian and Spanish poets anthropomorphize the Sun as a man, courting the lady Moon, while German poets have the Moon as a man and the Sun as a woman. Allegorical images from the Middle Ages onwards have depicted feminine abstract nouns as women (Justice, Fortitude, Fame) and masculine abstract nouns as men (Love, Time).
The association with gender in the sexual sense is relevant in a surprising variety of contexts. You aren’t going to convince anyone if you try to assert otherwise.
@NS: In general, if you think people have missed such an obvious thing as that, chances are you are misunderstanding them (whether through their fault or yours).
With “girl” in most kinds of German, the pronouns usually switch from neuter to feminine when the sentence is over.
I was just reading a newspaper article about the latest femicide in Austria. Because „victim“ (Opfer) ist neuter in German, at one point the article mentioned „seine Freundin“, meaning a friend of the victim, but it took me a beat to realize that the writer wasn’t referring to a friend of the attacker.
Cuchuflete and Rodger C: Thanks for those nimble contributions to teaching Spanish. I’ve passed both to our elder grandson who for his high school freshman year elective has chosen Spanish.
William,
It’s kind of you to mention us. Let’s hope the young fellow enjoys learning. You might advise him that many, but far from all, Spanish words of Greek origin, present a gender dilemma for learners. Tema, problema, drama, planeta, teorema, programa, clima, sistema and more all take the ‘masculine’ article el, despite ending in the ‘feminine’ letter a. This is a matter of etymology rather than gender dysphoria.
Just to confuse English speaking students, we have el problema, the problem, but la problemática, f. Conjunto de problemas pertenecientes a una ciencia o actividad determinadas, a set of problems pertaining to a particular science or activity.
French, Italian and Spanish poets anthropomorphize the Sun as a man, courting the lady Moon, while German poets have the Moon as a man and the Sun as a woman.
Though I recently read “No, que mi padre es la luna” in a version of the Spanish folktale "Blancaflor la hija del diablo". The next girl’s father is the sun.
But along the lines you mention, all the Spanish personifications of Death that I know of are female (la comadre Sebastiana here in New Mexico, Santa Muerte newly in Mexico (you can buy candles to her in grocery stores here), Death as the muse in Antonio Machado’s poem La muerte de Abel Martín—OK, it’s a short list). Is Death personified according to the gender of the noun widely in Europe? In other languages in which the word has masculine or feminine gender?
I thought it was sure – singular in the US, plural in the UK? Same for individual teams (“England have”) and companies. Bands seem to be plural everywhere, though.
Yes. Always a male skeleton (somehow) in German.
People do sometimes play with such things, but always deliberately and very rarely.
Not to complain, by the way, but the few Spanish learning materials I’ve seen ignore the question of the gender of masculine or feminine things when there’s only one word available. Apparently you say un halcón hembra ‘a female falcon’ (not una halcón hembra or una *halcona or un halcón **hembro, which were my other guesses), and likewise una cebra macho ‘a male zebra’. And, I guess, tres víctimas, todas machos. I don’t know whether you switch in the next sentence.
On another note, here in N.M. I’ve met a man named Cruz and a woman named Consuelo, and this is one of the regions where people’s names get definite articles, but I haven’t heard anyone say, “El Cruz se lo dio a la Consuelo.”
@David M.: Thanks. I’m told that in Germany the maiden calls the skeleton cruel, but he denies it.
In Dutch, dood as a noun (Eng. death) is masculine, but was in former days feminine (says Van Dale’s Groot Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal, 4th ed., 1898). Dutch skelet is neuter. I haven’t figured out when death went from fem. to masc. Very strange.
@Jerry Friedman: i didn’t know about the Mexican Santa Muerte, but in my hometown people pray to San La Muerte, an unequivocally masculine figure despite the term’s grammatical gender
As to la Consuelo, it sounds to me entirely unobjectionable, as do la Dolores, la Remedios o la Pilar. (I’ve never met anyone who went by just Cruz; there was a Juan Cruz in my school class, but he always used both names. )
> I thought it was sure – singular in the US, plural in the UK?
I thought so too. It was DE’s “ the team has” that sent me looking for the counterexample.
But he’s notorious as a code-switcher.
Ah, I missed that entirely.
Is Death personified according to the gender of the noun widely in Europe?
It’s not necessarily a straitjacket, according to discussion here in 2010 on personified Death in poetry (read the whole exchange, it’s long and interesting):
On the other hand, per another similar discussion here in 2011, Death is a male character in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, which became possibly confusing in Russian translation where Смерть was treated as masculine for verb and modifier agreement.
To Nat Shockley’s point about medieval allegory, here’s Indiana U’s Veritas Filia Temporis:
https://assets.simpleviewinc.com/simpleview/image/fetch/c_limit,q_75,w_1200/https://bloomington.simpleviewcrm.com/images/listings/original_veritas_filia_temporis_850D16D1-D283-8EF4-8241A65CBA0F68C5-850d11aef62b47d.jpg
Singular versus plural construal for words denoting groups was discussed starting here, although the topic is mixed sporadically in among a lot of other stuff.
In fact, both “the team has” and “the team have” are fine in my idiolect.
As with my Kusaal “leg”, which I would favour depends in how I am thinking of the team at the time.
For example: I’d be likely to say “our team has been relegated to the Third Division”, but “our team have sustained several injuries this season.” But I wouldn’t bat an eye if someone switched the number agreement. It’s all good.
The choice of “it” versus “they” in pronouns subsequently referring to said team follows just the same principles as the verb agreement. Attributing it to “it” being anaphoric and “they” being deictic in such cases is plain daft.
As I said in relation to my Swahili example, attributing the difference to anaphora versus deixis means that you need also to say that verb agreement, too, makes such a distinction. That way, madness lies.
You might say this is different from the case with German Mädchen, because the neuter alternative reflects a grammatical property of the noun, whereas feminine reflects the sex of the referent; but “team” is, from a lexical point of view, “grammatically” singular, with the perfectly regular plural “teams.” And in Swahili, number-marking and “gender” are all part of the very same morphological system.
The phenomenon of a speaker “forgetting” strict grammatical agreement as the utterance goes on is not unique to this issue. It’s all connected with the way anaphora actually works in discourse. No “deixis” needs to be invoked.
A similar “losing track” phenomenon appears in Kusaal reported speech: by default, Kusaal uses “indirect speech”, so you don’t say “He said, ‘I’m coming'”, but “He said he’s coming.”
Careful formal texts keep this up indefinitely. In the 1976 New Testament version, unbroken indirect speech can be carried on for several pages, and extends even to embedded vocatives, so that “God said: ‘My people, come out'” is rendered, “God said, his people, come out.”
But in informal texts, it’s not unusual for direct speech to break in after a bit:
O paae na n pu’usi o sid ne agola, agola, ka buos o ye, o daa yel o ye bo? Ye ka awala, ka o kae ka o ledigi aand zong la ka o kai? Ye o gosim ka on kudim zi’e nwa ba na kuu o. Ye on po’a nwa ken na, o ane son’e, ka pu boodne ye ku nida, ye o kpi’a la me ane son’e ka pigu ka li yuma lal, ka one nong o ka zangi o siig la su’a, ka man yeluf ka fu zan’as ka ning si’ema, fu siig la, ba gban’e li zina, ba nam pu kuu fo, amaa, yu’unga, ba lee na kuuf, nidib ya’a ti bood gbeem sanga la.
“She got there and greeted her husband very loud, and asked him, What had she said to him previously? Was it that he should go out and reroof the entrance hut like he had done? He should be aware that while he was just standing around, people were out to kill him. This wife of his who’d just arrived, she was a witch, but she didn’t want to kill anybody; but his neighbour was a witch who’d been out to get him for years, wanting to take away his life-force secretly, and I tell you that because you did what I’d told you not to, your life-force has got snatched today, and though they haven’t killed you yet, tonight they’re going to kill you when everyone has gone off to sleep.”
So the pronouns change from third person (for both the speaker and the addressee) to first and second person after a while.
the noun classes we call genders have a primary use case in gendered pronouns
this patently false claim, and its variations, are exacly what i mean by parochial. even in WALS’ treatment of variation in noun-class systems (which is not their phrasing for it), which defends the centrality of what they call “sex-based” “gender systems” unto active misrepresentation of the data they present (how, pray tell, can a characteristic shown by at most 84 of 257 languages – 33% – “overshadow” one exhibited by 145 – 56% – ?). but even in that transparently cooked account, the writer is unable to give a single example of a language that consistently divides even nouns for humans into noun classes corresponding to the gender of the people involved. the idea that there’s some underlying alignment between social gender and linguistic noun class systems is just plain junk, and what’s worse, it’s junk based not only on the ideological baggage of a small set of official languages of military powers, but on ideological baggage that doesn’t even correspond to how those lects actually work*.
and if for rigorous intellectual work (or for popularizations of it) we should eternally cling to terminology that is not only misleading and inaccurate, but inextricable from both toxic ideological material and european parochialism, why does this forum so rarely discuss the Hamitic and Japethitic languages?
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* a problem not solved by the existence of a handful of lects whose structures do – by chance, amid a wide field of variation – correspond somewhat more closely (WALS says “almost” in its strongest endorsement, of tamil) to that ideological baggage. however, i don’t know whether said baggage actually corresponds to the social gender system(s) of dravidian-speaking communities**, which would seem to be the most relevant information for any defense of this ostentatiously false account of noun classes.
** if we can extrapolate from their putative elamite origins, and if we can make some assumptions about regional consistency in gender systems across early mesopotamian city-states (emphasis on both ifs here), we can guess not. or we can just not pretend that there’s explanatory value in junk terminology, and not have to worry about it much.
The quote in the WALS article is “The wide scatter of these languages shows that animacy is a viable basis for gender systems. Nevertheless, it is overshadowed by sex-based-systems.” Over half the languages in their sample have no grammatical gender at all. But of those that do, three quarters are aligned to social gender (“sex”), and only a quarter to animacy or (as in Bantu) a whole bunch of things.
The map shows concentrations of social gender–based languages in Cape York and in NW Amazonia, not just in Europe / West Asia.
That’s immediately followed by the “exception” that male deities are grammatically masculine, too. Together with the slightly later statement that “bull” and “cow” are both neuter, it seems that the masculine gender is for male persons and vice versa.
(No further mention of female persons or the feminine gender. Interesting stories from Polish, though.)
three quarters are aligned to social gender (“sex”)
Sex-aligned gender systems typically cover not just humans but also culturally important animals, and sometimes even plants (date palms and fig trees come to mind). Do roosters have a “social gender”?
In Lavukaleve, which divides all nouns into masculine, feminine or neuter, in roughly equal numbers, all nouns referring to male human beings are masculine, and all nouns referring to female human beings are feminine, except for “baby”, which is neuter, and “old man” which is feminine (with much the same kind of fluctuations in referring pronouns etc as German Mädchen, incidentally.) Other nouns can be masculine, feminine or neuter; sometimes you can tell from the ending, often you just have to know. In fact, it’s all comfortingly SAE-like (unlike everything else in the language.)
You can actually have more than one “gender” system (by which I mean, noun-class system entailing agreement) at the same time in a single language. The Arawan language Kulina does: it has a masculine/feminine system more or less like French (males-masculine, females-feminine, everything else, could be either) and another two-way system quite orthogonal to this, which just requires agreement on verbs (along with the masculine/feminine system.)
[It’s all in Stefan Dienst’s grammar.]
Do roosters have a “social gender”?
That’s a good point. I am trying to be precise here, because there is not a perfect match between biological sex and social gender, just as “animacy” does not equal being alive. You could argue that in a sense, babies might not be “socially animate” or socially gendered, when they are referred to as “it” in some Englishes.
Another way to argue is to say that yes, roosters have a social gender, if we use a gendered grammatical marker for them. A gendered grammatical marker is a social convention attached to a social gender, just like a personal name or specific clothing. If we use it for an animal, we associate that animal with a human social gender.
Precise definitions are always good for clarity, even if from a distance they look arbitrary and tedious.
To refine the above: using “he” and “she” to refer to a rooster or a hen could be argued to reflect social gender. On the other hand, referring to an animal as a “bull” or a “cow” reflects biology, and so does “ox”, which does not have an equivalent in the human social or in the linguistic gender systems of English.
You can actually have more than one “gender” system (by which I mean, noun-class system entailing agreement) at the same time in a single language.
Michif is a particularly fun example of that: verbs (from Cree) agree for animate/inanimate, adjectives (from French) for masculine/feminine.
roosters have a social gender, if we use a gendered grammatical marker for them.
It’s kind of appealing to say Death or the Sun have social genders in Spanish as well as roosters, but much less appealing to be forced to say that tables do; more to the point, it seems to make the notion of “aligned to social gender” circular.
I think it’s actually reasonable to label an agreement class as “feminine” (say) if most nouns referring to female human beings belong to it. Such a label is really just a kind of mnemonic referring to a salient semantic feature of the class, and needn’t imply that biological sex is actually the basis of the class.
Trying to do that in any case rapidly devolves into obvious absurdity in any language with only two agreement classes.
Come to that, I’m not convinced by Lakoff’s celebrated “women, fire and dangerous things” example, even in a language with four “genders.” Once your language has a “gender” system, it will of itself seduce you into making retrospective just-so stories about why “fire” is “female”, even if the truth is that historically this all came about from processes that had nothing to do with meaning at all. A kind of folk semantics, rather like folk etymology. Just because your informants tell you that “fire” is “female” because of some elaborate mythological association, it doesn’t actually necessarily mean that that is how it really came about historically.
In a similar way, it seems reasonable to me to call the Farefare singular -a, plural -ba noun class pairing “human gender” (morphologically, it’s the same as Kusaal, but Farefare still has an actual class-based agreement system, so it’s not such an abuse of language to call the class pairing a “gender.”) Every member of this “gender” has human reference, and all productively formed agent nouns belong to it. The personal pronouns specific to this gender are also the personal pronouns which are used by default for “he/she/they” when there is no specific antecedent with a different grammatical “gender.”
Lots of human-reference nouns belong to other genders (including Gʋrŋa “Farefare person” and bia “child”), but that doesn’t stop “human gender” being a perfectly useful label based on an actual true fact about the language. The mischief only comes if you start mistaking a handy label for some deep existential insight, and waxing all philosophical about it.
L1 speakers (especially, but not always, those without much general linguistic background) sometimes are very keen to supply rationalisations for the unexpected noun-class membership of nouns.
I’ve seen this with speakers of Algonquian languages, trying to make out that it is perfectly logical that knees and raspberries are animate whereas elbows and strawberries are inanimate; and I’ve seen a number of papers by Swahili speakers apparently unable to countenance the idea that noun-class membership in Swahili is sometimes just plain arbitrary.
Lameen, absolutely this can devolve into circularity. I am just exploring.
To get back to the WALS classification, I chose to correct Corbett because I get the impression that social gender is a better match for the linguistic phenomenon that he describes. Ultimately we are talking about three different classifications, all imperfectly matched.
(This is one example of why the much-maligned discipline of gender studies should be supported.)
Speaking of “ox”, I wonder if in any language, the terms for castrated animals are consistently different from those for the uncastrated males.
I doubt it; male/female is usually represented as an intrinsic property of the referent, and having been castrated is more of an, erm, contingent thing.
Mind you, Tamasheq seems to have a distinct lexeme for practically everything to do with animal husbandry …
Kusaal rises effortlessly above all this by having no sex-specific basic nouns for any animals at all, except for human beings; and fewer of those than you might expect, too. The three words for “sibling” do not directly reflect the sex of the referent, “son” and “daughter” are not distinguished by default (there are specific words. but they are compound nouns) and the words for “grandchild” and “grandparent” are unisex too.
The abovementioned roosters are an example in the WALS article:
Also interesting: most kinds of Nepali combine good old IE gender agreement with good old East Asian classifiers.
I see that the pretty WALS map lumps together e.g. English and French as having “sex-based gender.”
This seems unfortunate. I’d say that the distinction between a system like English, where “gender” is entirely determined by the properties of the actual referent, and French, where it is mostly arbitrary, and only follows the properties of the referent in a few specific domains, is much more fundamental typologically than that between, say, the English and Persian gender systems.
It is the more unfortunate, as a language can have both “natural gender” and “grammatical gender”, which need not coincide at all.
Swahili is a clear example: the “natural” animate versus inanimate distinction cross-cuts the arbitrary “grammatical” gender system constituted by the noun classes. You could in perfect justice classify English and Swahili together as both having “natural gender.” Kusaal goes with them, as does Persian.
Mooré, on the other hand, does not grammaticalise the animate/inanimate distinction at all, and thus belongs with the Algonquian languages, which have a formal animate/inanimate distinction, but one that does not correspond to the actual properties of the nouns referred to, so both Mooré and the Algonquian languages lack “natural gender.” French obviously belongs here too …
Basically, what I mean is that the extent to which noun agreement classes are arbitrary, in the sense of not being predicable from the real-life properties of the noun referents, is of much more significance than what particular set of real-life properties may count in class membership. It is in this sense that the English gender system is much more like Persian than French.
(Incidentally, masculine/feminine in many African languages is tied up with size and shape: there are quite a few languages in which big things are masculine and little things are feminine. And some in which it’s the other way round …)
@Alon: Thanks, I was not expecting San la Muerte.
@ktschwarz: Thanks for linking those interesting threads.