Gender Bender
Spanish. More particularly, Latin American Spanish. One of my ongoing, enduring, adversaries. You see, there I go, immediately anthropomorphizing an inanimate object, or concept. Maybe that is one of many clues as to my abysmal Spanish attention and retention. Or not.
In my typical, oblique effort to conquer more of the “romance” language I thought I’d fool around with the gender of nouns – as opposed to fooling around with genders – see if I could associate words with some qualities of the gender for which they are named. Kind of a word association technique. Like, familia is feminine – which makes sense – family, nurturing, kids, etc. Dios is masculine – reminiscent of the patricidal societies that decided God was a “male.” Maybe an ancient guy on a throne wearing a white robe with a long white beard – roly-poly cherubs perched on the arms of his cathedra. El hambre – masculine – the underworld ruled by the devil, typically, historically, a male. La cara – feminine – face; which may make some sense. I’d rather look at a feminine face than a masculine one.
My theory began to make sense. I was on a roll. La celulitas – cellulite – feminine. (Sorry ladies. I’m just the messenger.) Vida – feminine – life. Feminine gives life – begets life. El plátano – masculine – banana. I get that. I careened down that road for a short while then, hopes dashed on the dashboard of my rickety training vehicle, I came, inexorably, to the potholes and detours so very familiar to Spanish students.
Most of the gender language rules make no sense at all. Many of you, obviously, already know this. Yet I was curious as to how the whole assigning a gender to a noun may help me with my abysmal Spanish assimilation. What was the reasoning? How did this nonsensical (in my thinking) evolution come about? I figured if I could get to the bottom of it all I could uncover some kind of a pattern and avoid that dreaded aspect of learning – memorization.
Whenever I can, I look for a way to expedite processes. If I don’t have to memorize stuff that is unnecessary, I won’t. If I can find a logical thread to a conclusion I will follow it. I don’t need to memorize the 12,000 phytonutrients in an apple (after reading a nutritional study) to know that an (organic) apple is really good for me. I don’t have to read every word in my insurance policy with Juan Ghong to trust that it is what he says it is.
Not that I can’t or won’t grind through memorization. I learned (memorized), among a few other gazillion things, that a “sheet” is a rope on a sailboat, the terms and symbols in a pilot’s Flight Service Station’s Sequence Report, that there is compass deviation and declination, uncountable terms and laws to obtain and maintain my real estate brokers license and the fact that a woman always knows what is in his mind and heart way before a guy does. That last one may be the most valuable bit of memorized knowledge in my mind’s cache of data.
But these can all be important life or death issues – or possibly an ugly lawsuit – absolutely worthy of grueling memorization. On the other hand, so what if I mis-gender my request for huevos, or the ingredients in my quesadilla; or can’t figure out if the palm tree or brake fluid or ticket for the water taxi to Isla de la Piedra I want to buy is masculine or feminine? So what? (Oh, there is that notation in Carl Franz’s Peoples Guide to Mexico where he cautions about asking the woman in the mercado if she has eggs because you may be referring to her eggs – but I don’t think that is the sort of syntax in question and how often is that going to be an issue?) Aw hell, it does matter. It matters to everyone in Mexico with whom I speak. And it matters to me. With that irritating awareness I continued my quest for an understanding of feminine and masculine in language.
This is some of what I found out. And it was not one shred of help.
“Gender is a grammatical feature that was present in Proto-Indo-European, that is, the common ancestor of a diverse group of languages including both English and Spanish, as well as Greek and Hindi. Grammatical gender is really just a special type of noun-classing, which is common in many other languages. Zulu has fifteen genders/classes! Most languages derived from Latin lost use of the neuter gender except under highly specific situations. Romanian has a neuter, but it means that nouns function as masculine in singular, and feminine in plural.”
How’s that for common sense? In Romania, masculine in singular and feminine in plural.
“Asturian likewise has neuter, but primarily uses neuter for uncountable/mass nouns, though it does have its own ending. If you’re more curious about how a given new word in Spanish acquires its gender, that’s a pretty complicated topic.”
Complicated topic. No kidding. I didn’t even go there. (There are links below if you want to go down that rabbit hole.) There is more nonsensical rhetoric.
“Most imported words are masculine, unless the language the word came from has M/F gender and then it tends to preserve that gender, but not always. Sometimes, a word will be imported and obtain two different genders based on region (el/la Internet, el/la computador (a)), so there’s no single rule.”
No single rule. Oh, yeah, that helped. Who decides a computer is feminine? And why? Then…
“Grammatical gender is a way of categorizing nouns; it doesn’t necessarily match up with the “natural gender” of the person or object being described.”
Gee, no kidding? I used valuable broadband width on the internet to learn that?
“In some languages, grammatical gender is more than just “male” or “female.” Some languages have a “neuter” class, while others have different genders for animate versus inanimate objects. In Portuguese, the word mulherão means “voluptuous woman.” However, the word itself is masculine. In the Ket language of Siberia, “those [nouns] of no importance to the Kets are feminine, whereas objects of importance (e.g. fish, wood) are masculine.” This is probably an indicator of women’s status in Ket society. The word for “manliness”is feminine in the following languages: Spanish, Latin, German, Polish, Russian and Hindi.”
The word for manliness is feminine. Is that crazy, or what?! Then, halleluiah, a little morsel shows up that quasi-validates my logic.
“Some languages go by the physical characteristics of the object in question. Often, mythology and cultural views on gender come in to play, too. For example, in the Alamblak language of Papua New Guinea, the masculine gender “includes things which are tall or long and slender, or narrow (e.g. fish, snakes, arrows and slender trees).” Hmmm. I wonder why?”
Then, the holy grail of insight that spoke to me like a bolt of lightning, or, maybe a religious experience. “It’s an inheritance from our distant past.” Great, residual effects form our distant past. Like my big Russian nose and aggressively receding hairline. Some things from our distant past I can do without – gendered nouns being one of them. Arbitrary, useless exercises in understanding impractical complications. Then I found this: “Don’t be too hard on yourself.
One study found that even native French speakers had a hard time agreeing on which gender goes with which word. When asked to assign gender to 93 masculine words, study participants were only able to agree on 17 of them. Even worse, out of a set of 50 feminine words, the group only agreed on one.”
So, even those persnickety French have a problem with this stuff.
How is a key like a woman?
“One study found that if you speak Spanish (or another language where the word “key” is feminine), you might describe keys as “intricate,” “little” and “lovely.” Meanwhile, if you speak German (or another language in which “key” is masculine), you might use words like “heavy,” “metal” and “jagged.”
Isn’t that like playing golf and putting the ball wherever you want to?
And the coup de grâce in my revelatory investigatory project was this: “Another study looked at languages around the world and found that “on average, countries where gendered languages are spoken ranked lowest on the scale of gender equality.” Eventually, some languages may shed their pesky nonsensical gender distinctions as the countries that speak them pursue equality between men and women.” (Bold added by me.)
Yes! My research led me back to my original belief. It’s nonsensical. And, I am an adamant believer in equality between men and women. Now I have much better excuses for my language laziness.
By David Kindopp August 31, 2016 14:57
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