Bantaar

Grammatical gender

Hello. Thank you for your kind message. I see you've made substantial contributions to the reflexive verb page. Mine were pretty minor, I think; just some changes to the presentation, and an attempt to make the translations more idiomatic. :-)

With respect to the issue of grammatical gender, I suppose that, this being Wikipedia, what we really should do is find some sources and stick to their definitions. However, there may be some interest in exchanging some points of view informally. The best way to explain mine is perhaps to do a retrospect:

1. When I first started to work on the article, it was because I was a little appalled at some of the misguided ideas that it expressed about grammatical gender. My native language has grammatical gender (masculine + feminine classes), so it was grating to read statements like "The ancient Romans thought the moon was masculine, while the Germans believed it to be masculine" (or something very similar to this). It seems to be a temptation, for people whose language does not have grammatical gender, to think of it as some kind of personification that is taken a little too literally. This I felt was nonsense. The fact that one word for "moon" is grammatically feminine in Latin (and there could be others that were not!) does not mean that Latin speakers thought of the moon as an actual female! I'm sure they would have laughed at such a notion, just as I'm sure any German speaker today will laugh at the suggestion that they think of the moon as a man, or some kind of male living being or personality.
2. In reaction to these ideas which I felt were misunderstandings, I set out to do a substantial rewrite of the article, emphasizing the morphological aspects of gender, in other words what you wrote in your message to me, that what makes grammatical gender is the existence of agreement between related parts of speech. If we accept this point of view, that the essential characteristic of grammatical gender is agreement, then this opens the door quite easily to non-traditional "gender" oppositions, such as common/neuter, or animate/inanimate, or even those complicated word classes that the Bantu languages have (though apparently it's not customary to treat Bantu noun classes as genders).
3. Later, though (after a rather unpleasant exchange with a rude and dogmatic editor, which eventually led to the split of the article into two, Grammatical gender and Noun class), a doubt began to creep into my mind. Defining grammatical gender merely as a form of agreement is too vague. There are many other forms (or criteria) of agreement, such as number, or case. How can we distinguish grammatical gender from these? Another thing that started to bother me was that I realised some non-natives made another claim I could not agree with: that only words that do not refer to humans or other sexed living beings have true "grammatical gender", while words that do refer to humans or other sexed living beings have a different kind of gender, "real gender". In other words, that grammatical gender is some kind of fake imitation of real gender. This led me to think that something was missing from the "agreement" definition of grammatical gender. We don't call the singular and the plural, or the accusative and the nominative, grammatical genders. The reason is obvious. Grammatical gender has to do with morphology, certainly, but that's only one of its aspects. It has also a semantic component, which should not be ignored. While not all grammatically feminine words refer to females, most words that refer to females are feminine; while not all grammatically masculine words refer to males, most words that refer to males are masculine; and while some grammatically neuter words may refer to males or females, most neuter words do not. The Spanish noun luna (moon) is just as feminine, grammatically speaking, as Spanish mujer (woman). So, there is the agreement aspect, but there's also an imperfect correlation between the class of all words that are masculine, for instance, and masculinity in the real world.

These were the considerations that led to the current form of the article, and to its current definitions. I ask that you take them into consideration. But I'm not opposed at all to the idea of making changes to the Grammatical gender article, perhaps even substantial changes. I've spent a lot of time on it, but somehow I'm still not completely satisfied with the result. It feels heavy, not easy to read. If you're thinking of reworking the article, and you speak some French, I suggest you take a look at the French version, which is also interesting, though less systematic (but then again perhaps one of the problems that the English version currently has is that it tries to be too systematic). Let me know if I can be of any assistance. FilipeS (talk) 20:13, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

- Hey Filipe! It's been a while (well over two years, I can see), and I do owe you lots of thanks for your detailed and extremely interesting comments. In the meantime, things have happened that made me stay away from contributing to Wiki -- to sidetrack, they were things about their general policies that, I admit, sent me into a flap and provoked some very sarcastic comments from me which a moderator took personally, and which I probably should have worded better. My basic complaint, however, now seems to have been resolved to my complete satisfaction. Furthermore, I see no sign that Wiki holds any grudge against me, so I'm now ready to move on and contribute again. All of which, of course, has nothing to do with you, but is just my feeble excuse for my own extreme tardiness in replying.

The split of the gender/noun class article seems to me to be extremely unfortunate. Not for my own sake, as I'm already deep into it myself and aware of its pitfalls, but for the casual reader. It seems to me that the Wiki's presentation may induce in the reader a notion that noun "genders" are something completely different from noun "classes". They aren't. Structurally, they work exactly the same way. And it's not just a matter of linguistic nit-picking to point that out, it pertains directly to such claims as "Language itself is sexist" of the feminist movement, and therefore to questions about human nature itself.

Noun "gender", obviously, is just one particular example of noun "class". The only quibble I have about your comments is comparing classes to number and case -- a noun may be declined in different numbers and cases, but its class is inherent (ie. constant -- Latin "somnus" is "somno" in abl.sing., and "somnorum" in gen.plur., but it's always masculine; you can't decline it for feminine or neuter) for a particular language or dialect. It's certainly worth pursuing a line of inquiry into the question of why one culture incorporates a sexual distinction to noun classes, and other cultures other distinctions -- but seperating "genders" from other "classes", in my point of view, is not only over-complicating matters (stomping on Occam's razor, if you will), but also an open invitation to bias and cultural chauvinism.

Shortly put, I think that article split forced upon you was an unfortunate one, and that Wiki seems to have lost a valuable contributor in you. Thanks again, Filipe, if you read this, and all best wishes. Bantaar (talk) 01:05, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

PS: The fact that gender distinctions seem to deteriorate rapidly (why is the moon masculine in some languages and feminine in others? why are all German words ending in -ung feminine whatever their references? etc.), doesn't make "gender" structurally different from other "classes", of course. Bantaar (talk) 01:46, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Edit Request

Hallo,

    I've started to add articles in Danish that don't yet exist,
and I'm looking for someone to check the grammar in them.  If you
have a moment, please consider reading over the danish article for
the Pure Holocaust record by Immortal to check for mistakes.
DenAntikristen (talk) 01:35, 16 February 2010 (UTC)