Grammatical gender: Encyclopedia II - Grammatical gender - Natural Gender and Grammatical Gender

Grammatical gender - Natural Gender and Grammatical Gender

The use of gender-based classification of nouns (as is common in Indo-European and Semitic) languages can sometimes be confusing, because the mere fact that a language distinguishes between men and women in some way does not mean it uses gender to grammatically classify nouns. All languages represent natural gender - the biological distinction between men and women - in some way. These distinctions can exist at various levels. e.g., male and female, man and woman, uncle and aunt Even Finnish, which never had any grammatical gender and has only one third person singular pronoun hän (which means both "he" and "she"), uses different nouns for "man" and "woman". Similarly, languages may also differentiate between people of different biological or social gender, , or use different noun endings to distinguish between biologically male and biologically female individuals.

This does not mean they have genders in the grammatical sense. Languages which classify nouns according to grammatical gender distinguish themselves from languages which merely recognition of natural gender principally through the the existence of a system of gender agreement, which languages which merely recognise natural gender do not have. In addition, they may also lack perfect correlation between grammatical gender and natural gender. These principles also apply to the variety of gender-describing common names some tribal languages have for intersexual or transgender individuals, which do not necessarily reflect grammatical gender or form a noun class.

Grammatical gender - Gender agreement and marking of natural gender

Languages that have no grammatical gender can have quite pervasive lexical marking of natural gender. This should not be confused with grammatical gender. A notable example is the Esperanto suffix -in, which can be used to change, for example patro, "father" into patrino, "mother." This particular suffix is extremely productive (there is no atomic term for "mother" in Esperanto), leading some people to the erroneous assumption that it is a grammatical rather than a lexical gender marker.

Similarly, personal pronouns often have different forms based on the natural gender of the reference; this is also not the same concept as grammatical gender. Gendered pronouns and their corresponding inflections vary considerably across languages: there are languages that have different pronouns and inflections in the third person only to differentiate between humans and inanimate objects, like Hungarian and Finnish. Even this distinction is commonly waived in spoken Finnish. Modern Japanese has particular distinction of verbs between animate and inanimate in existential sentences; aru is for inanimate, iru is for animate. In negative sentences, nai (adjective) and inai is used respectively.

The distinction between marking of natural gender and genuine grammatical gender can be illustrated with reference to changes from Old English to modern English. Curzan illustrates gender agreement in Old English with a “highly contrived” example:

The noun lind (shield) is grammatically feminine, which forces the pronoun seo (the, that) and the adjectives brade (broad) and tilu (good) to appear in their feminine forms, as well as the pronoun hire (her), referring back to lind, which adopts the grammatical gender of the referent.

By comparison, in Modern English the sentence would be:

Here, the shield is understood as a sexless object, and therefore designated by the neuter pronoun it. Old English had three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, but gender inflections (as well as number inflections) were greatly simplified, and then merged with one another. The only trace of grammatical gender left in modern English are some pronouns, such as he, she, it, which tend to represent natural gender. The forms of modifiers used with the nouns, and of verbs, do not change according to gender in modern English: the word man is naturally masculine, and the word girl naturally feminine, but the form of the adjective tall used with both is still tall. From a linguistic perspective, therefore, English and other similar languages lack grammatical gender.

Grammatical gender - The role of convention

A second characteristic that distinguishes grammatical gender from natural gender is that it is largely a matter of convention. This is very clear when one considers the application of grammatical gender to objects - there is nothing intrinsic in a table that makes it masculine (as in the German word "Tisch" is) or neuter (as the Norwegian word "bord" is). However, grammatical gender is equally a matter of convention even when it concerns human beings, as the overlap between grammatical gender and natural gender is not perfect. Persons who are biologically male or female may be assigned a different grammatical gender in some contexts. The most-often cited example of this the German word Mädchen, which means "girl", but grammatically has neuter gender, not feminine. Similarly, the Spanish noun miembro (member) is always masculine, even if it refers to a woman, but persona (person) is always feminine, even when it refers to a man.

Grammatical gender - Animals

The relationship between natural gender and grammatical gender for animals is often different from the relationship for human beings. In Spanish, a cheetah is always un guepardo (masculine) and a zebra is always una cebra (feminine), regardless of their biological sex. If it becomes necessary to specify the sex of the animal, an adjective is added, as in un guepardo hembra (a female cheetah). Individualized names for the male and the female of a species are more frequent when they refer to common pets or farm animals. E.g., English horse and mare, French chat (male cat) and chatte (female cat).

Grammatical gender - Personal names

Personal names often have characteristic culture-specific forms that identify the gender of the bearer. For example, in an English-speaking culture, John (masculine) and Joan or Jane (feminine) are gendered variants on the Hebrew name of John the Evangelist. Again, this is natural gender, and not necessarily grammatical gender.

For Russian gender-related tradition of personal naming, see Names in Russian Empire, Soviet Union and CIS countries.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Natural Gender and Grammatical Gender", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki