Grammatical gender: it's just a noun class
Hi, and welcome back!
Here we are, once again at the end of the month and I haven’t written my newsletter yet. Fortunately I have an idea.
News
Amplitudes got a great starred review in Library Journal, and Aiki Mira’s story “Ein Schritt ins Leere” (which will be appearing in Amplitudes as “A Step into Emptiness”) has been nominated for the Kurd Laßwitz Prize for best German-language short story. (Yes, the site design is very 2000s retro.) (And the wonderful folks at Otherland Bookshop have been nominated for the service award. Best of luck to them!)
As far as news about me goes, I’ll be attending 4th St. Fantasy again, and maybe I’ll see some of you there!
Grammatical gender: a brief introduction
Grammatical gender is one of those things that people outside the field can have a weird understanding of (and, honestly, within the field, too). People see “noun gender” when they learn German and go “what, the table is a man, and the couch is a woman? How does that make sense? lol German so silly.” You also get people who did the very-often-cited study that German speakers describe a bridge (feminine) as beautiful and other “feminine” adjectives and a key (masculine) as strong and other “masculine” adjectives, while Spanish speakers, for whom a key is feminine and a bridge is masculine, do it the other way around. This study, however, was unable to be replicated by two different groups of researchers.
In medias rec
This month’s Lingthusiasm talks about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and you should go listen to it. It’s about an hour. (Their sources list helpfully provided me with the previous references.) If you only have five minutes, Tom Scott has a good video.
Back to the story
Grammatical gender is more accurately called a noun class. It is a reflection of some inherent property of a noun (and some special cases of nouns, like pronouns and deictic markers). In Russian, grammatical gender depends on what the noun ends in: if it ends in a consonant, it’s masculine; if it ends in a or ya, it’s feminine; and if it ends in o or yo, it’s neuter. (If it ends in the soft sign, you just have to memorize which it is.) In German, the rule isn’t that straightforward. There are some suffixes that are always one gender (-heit and -keit are feminine, -ismus is masculine), and there are some patterns, but if you learn German in school, you just have to memorize the noun with its gender.
Grammatical gender allows you to predict how a noun will change its form (inflect) for case and number. In German, the noun itself doesn’t change (except for one special set of nouns, but that’s not important here); the article does. So you have der Tisch (nominative), dem Tisch (dative), des Tisches (genitive), and den Tisch (accusative), or die Couch (nominative & accusative) and der Couch (dative & genitive), or das Buch (nominative & accusative), dem Buch (dative), and des Buchs (genitive). (This is where all the tiresome “jokes” about how many words for the German has vs. English come from.)
In Russian, there are no articles, and the word itself changes. I only had two years of Russian, and my Russian is basically non-existent at this point, so if you want examples, you can go over to the Wiki. Latin also changes the word form, like alumnus - alumni, or alumna - alumnae.
Why is it called gender, then?
Good question! I always assumed it was because all the grammarians in the 19th century decided it should be called that for sexism reasons, but the history of terminology was never really part of my classes. So I hit up the search engine and found a citation. Indeed, some philologists argued that “natural” gender was the inherent property and carried over to semantics and grammar, but others argued that the grammatical properties are inherent and any correlation with “natural” gender is coincidental.
When I took various dead Germanic languages in grad school, we learned inflectional paradigms for nouns by what stem they had. The stems were named for what they were reconstructed to have been in Proto-Germanic, so frequently the words didn’t actually have that stem visible in them anymore. Like the Old Norse masculine a-stems, exemplified by himinn ‘sky, heaven,’ which contains no A (except in the accusative & genitive plural himna, but that’s an inflectional ending, not part of the stem).
Backing up a second
A noun is composed of two parts: the stem and the ending. In himinn, the stem is himin-, and -n is the nominative singular ending. Or, for a more typical a-stem morphology, hamarr is composed of hamar- and -r.
An inflectional paradigm is basically the chart you memorize to know which endings to put on the noun in which situation.
As we were
The Germanic a-stems and their subclasses of -ja, -ija, and -wa stems can be either masculine or neuter, and the neuter ones have a different inflectional paradigm. The -o stems are usually feminine, and the -i stems can be masculine or feminine. The -u stems are only masculine; the -r stems denote family relations and can be masculine or feminine.
My favorite are the -nd (or “consonant”) stems, because they do a really cool thing: They turn a verb into a noun. It’s still visible in modern German as the nounified present participle (die Studierenden, the people who study (a non-gendered way to say college student)) and in English in the words friend and fiend.
So why are they divided into masculine, feminine, and neuter? See above, with the historical sexists. Sometimes words in one paradigm aligned with masculine or feminine creatures (bulls or cows, say), and the grammarians of the era liked classifying things, so they decided to call them masculine and feminine based on “this class contains a masculine thing, so it’s called masculine now.” (Or so I imagine; I don’t actually have access to any of the papers in the bibliography above.)
But it isn’t immutable
One of the things that constantly trips me up when I’m learning Norwegian (and when I learned dead Germanic languages) is that the gender doesn’t always match what it is in modern German. Usually, yeah, but there are some differences.
Remember das Buch from earlier? In Norwegian it’s feminine boka, or masculine boken, depending on your dialect. (Norwegian sticks the definite article to the end of the noun, which is also something that Old Norse did. The definite paradigm of the noun bani ‘bane’ made everyone in my class giggle.) You might have heard of the newsmagazine Der Spiegel (the mirror). In Norwegian it’s neuter speilet (with a fun and exciting difference in the vowel!)
Then there’s the Great Nutella Strife, where some people argue it’s feminine die Nutella because it looks like a feminine word/ -ella is a feminine suffix. Other people argue it’s neuter das Nutella because it’s das Glas Nutella (the jar of Nutella) or because it’s a brand name or (the most compelling, but it’s not enough to seal the deal) because on the official website for Nutella Germany, Ferrero calls it dein (your) Nutella. (Dein could be masculine or neuter, but most everyone is in agreement that it’s not masculine.) Duden, the most authoritative dictionary-makers, doesn’t even weigh in with a definitive answer, only that both feminine and neuter forms are in use. The Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache had it in one of their first questionnaires, and there is no clear regional delineation (scroll down). (I can spend way too much time looking at maps on this site.)
So, to sum up, noun gender is just a way of classifying things that doesn’t actually relate to any conceptions of gender regarding living things, and different languages, even if they’re related, sometimes classify the same noun with a different gender. There’s no reason to call it “gender” other than it’s the term people have been using for a really long time, so unless we change the entirety of a well-established field, we’re stuck with it. (If someone wants to blaze that trail, I support your effort and wish you the best of luck.)
Things I didn’t have time for
Whether using gendered suffixes for occupational nouns (actor/actress, etc.) has an effect on perceptions of inclusivity (i.e., in languages like German where these nouns have to be gendered, do little girls see themselves becoming an Astronautin when they only see things about an Astronaut in books?; what do nonbinary people do in these kinds of languages?) and how much of that is influenced by culture. That could be a future newsletter topic, but it’s one for which I’m going to have to find some research newer than the 2015 study I read in grad school.
Until next time!
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