Gender (again)

My latest discovery in the podcast world...

<parenthesis>
(so many podcasts, so little time😉)
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... is The Allusionist, which the BBC has recently  (apparently belatedly) adopted.

<confession subject="podcast neophyte, guilty  yer 'Onner">
I'm afraid I still  have a very BBC-centric view of the podiverse. I'm aware that there's a lot more Out There, but podcasts are enough of a time-sink just seen through the BBC's very smoky spectacles, so I rarely let go of Auntie's hand. But the latest I have heard –  No Title –is number 121 on The Allusionist website, while it's only the 4th of the ones  that have the BBC's imprimatur...

<tangent>
(or should that be audiatur? Nobody prints (imprimit)  a podcast. They listen to it.)
</tangent>

...Perhaps the BBC didn't wake up to The Allusionist until Susie Dent got involved (The Allusionist all-time issue number 182, but BBC number 18). 

Most of the whois record for the allusionist.org is redacted, but the first few lines show that it's been around for nearly ten years – not quite as long as some blogs I could mention; but the selection available on BBC Sounds dates from only a few months ago. 

</confession>

Anyway, where was I? –  No Title. She says many illuminating and interesting things abou titles, pronouns, gender... and loads more. Here's a taste:

I've been trying to see if there any particular patterns in the ways that gendered language is ...

<sic-but-AIs-pretty-good> I imagine this should be "languages", with "gender" in the next line being a verb meaning 'assign gender to'. </sic-but-AIs-pretty-good>

...gender things. So at the moment, I've got a spreadsheet and - yes, don't get jealous, you can all have one - I've got columns along the top for different languages: so far, I've got Spanish, German, Hindi, Portuguese, Italian, and Greek. And then in the rows, I've got nouns in different categories. And I've just been trying to see if I can deduce anything from the ways that they gender different words. And so far I have learned that dog is male in all of them. bears are always male except female in Greek, lions are also male except neuter in Greek, and whales are always female except male in German - but in German a baby is neuter. But a spoon is masculine, a fork is feminine, a knife is neuter - which is not how I would have gendered the cutlery, if forced to do so.

But this is a tiny sample of the natural languages still spoken in the world, and all Indo-European – spoken where the founding fathers...

<tangent>
(the founding mothers don't get a look-in, of course)
</tangent>

... had mother-tongues ...

<tangent>
(oh there they are)
</tangent>

...that confused sex (a biological fact) with gender ( a grammatical construct). The early grammarians who first described the Indo-European languages co-opted (dragooned?) the word "gender" so setting in stone their own prejudices. But some languages apply grammatical rules of a gender-like nature without the remotest whiff of sex; the word  "gender" is just a confusing shorthand version of <arbitrary-classification-device>. I wrote here about one such case mentioned in a Guy Deutscher book:

<prescript>

<tangentially-relevant-preamble>
English students of foreign languages that have gender markings have to get used to the fact that the English possessives are marked for the sex of the possessor; many other languages are marked for the gender of the thing possessed. This gender versus sex distinction was one pointed out to me by Joe Cremona (see this blog, passim [that's Latin for 'So often that I can't be bothered to check a reference']). "Concrete things have sex; words have gender." In English, we put a further restriction on the first part of that rule – "Concrete things have sex only if they're animate"; and we don't have the second part (about gender, with a few arguable  exceptions, like ships and old cars; the few words that look as if they are gendered – mostly pronouns and possessives – in fact denote sex... 

<2023-addition> 

A neat example has just come to me. Son stylo and sa plume don't change with the sex of the owner in the way "his/her ballpoint" and "his/her fountain pen" do.

</2023-addition>

...) Isn‘t "only if they're animate" an improbably arbitrary restriction? Hardly. 
</tangentially-relevant-preamble>

In The Unfolding of Language  Guy Deutscher writes of  an Aboriginal language that assigns the gender "edible vegetable" to an aeroplane. He sums up his point:

In linguistic jargon...'gender' has nothing to do with sex  and can refer to any kind of classification that a language imposes on nouns. While sex-based gender is an extremely common type of classification, some languages have special genders not only for 'male' and 'female' but also for classes of nouns such as 'long objects', 'dangerous things', or 'edible parts of plants'.

When there‘s a correspondence between sex and gender (une fille, for example, is both feminine and female, but ein Mädchen is neuter) a phonological rule can interfere; you don't say ma amie because of the initial vowel in amie.

<tangentially-relevant-postlude> 

<harebrained_notion>
Did Bizet make use of this rule in Carmen's claim to be going chez mon ami(e?) Lillas Pastia? Does she toy with Don José's jealousy with doubts about the sex of Lillas Pastia? Lilas is a girl's name; certainly, when I first heard the Seguidilla I assumed Carmen was referring to a woman; I couldn't hear the -ll- that Bizet gave it. Does this make it male, I wonder.... Bizet's only clue (well, I haven‘t read the libretto in detail)  is to write that Lillas is an aubergiste – and I think Mistress Quickly was one of those.
</harebrained_notion> 

</tangentially-relevant-postlude> 

</prescript>

I wouldn't be surprised if I find in due course that this calls for an update (but don't hold your breath) . That's enough for today though.

b

Update: 2023.10.19.14:10 – Added PS

PS

No Title gives some examples of problems thrown up by gendered languages,

[I]n Germany they have Frau and Fräulein - well, they had them. Fräulein was the equivalent to Miss, literally translates to ‘little woman’, but it has been banned from official use since 1972. And in France, their version of Miss - or young woman flirt word - ‘mademoiselle’, has been banned from official documents since 2012, and a female person of any age will be Madame. And this might not sound like much, but in France, the whole language is binary gendered: every noun, every adjective, every pronoun. So if like me you want to get away from a binary-gendered system of everything, France is not going to let you forget it. And also, the language is controlled by the Académie Française, an official body which gets to decide what new grammar is allowed, what new words are allowed in, and when people have campaigned for gender neutral options, the Académie Française has just been like, “Non.”

So this Mademoiselle thing was at least some progress, with that backdrop. But the problem wasn’t so much why do the female titles change whereas the male ones don’t because they just use Monsieur - the male equivalent, Mondamoiseau, fell out of use - it’s so hard to say, that’s probably why. My mouth was exhausted after just one go-through. The problem was actually the etymology of Mademoiselle: it is kind of a diminutive form of ‘Madame’, which breaks down to ‘my lady’, but the problem in particular was this suffix, ‘oiselle’, which means ‘virgin’ or ‘simpleton’.

So this flirt word means ‘my lady virgin simpleton’.

There seems to me to be a whiff of confimation bias here: "The Académie is in charge, so everything sucks". But people in France have  done something about this.

<prescript>
The Académie Française takes a dim view of écriture inclusive – the proposed script reform that attempts to make French gender-neutral in spite of itself. The Times last week [HD 2023: I wrote this almost exactly six years ago: if you want to trace the article, it was published on the Saturday before 17 Oct 2017] referred to a "mid punctuation  point", a glyph that French keyboards are soon to include. And they gave as an example cher⋅e⋅s ami⋅e⋅s [HD: their impoverished fonts presumably don't go as far as an è]. You can sidestep the Infernal Firewall by looking at this Indie article.

Their one English academician, Sir Michael Edwards, calls the result "gibberish"  – missing the point rather  (écriture – the clue's in the name); I don't think the words with the mid punctuation point are supposed to be read aloud – any more than the solidus is supposed to be read aloud in our "his/her". It just lets the reader's mind skip over the gender variation without missing a beat. So when the university of Nancy addressed imminent graduates as Futur⋅e⋅s diplômé⋅e⋅s it was simply doing them the courtesy of accepting that they might be of either gender, rather than, as heretofore, even in a class of 99 diplômées and a single diplômé, addressing them all as men....

One sententious self-important windbag, the philosopher Raphaël Enthoven, speaking on Europe 1 Radio, denounced it as "an attack on syntax by egalitarianism". 

<observation>
Generally, I've noticed that people who complain about "an attack on <abstract_noun>" tend to be blowhards.
</observation>

</prescript>