Loss of Gender in English
13 May 2010
Unlike most other Indo-European languages, English, for the most part, doesn’t have grammatical genders (i.e., inflecting nouns, pronouns, and adjectives as either masculine, feminine, or neuter). French, for example, has two genders (m. and f.); German has three. But the only English words that are inflected for gender are the third-person, singular pronouns (he, she, it), and the gender of these, with a few exceptions, corresponds to biological gender of the referent. (The primary exceptions are personification of inanimate objects, such as referring to ships or one’s country as she, and the use of it to refer to animals where the sex is not known or immaterial.) But English was not always like this.
Old English had grammatical genders (m., f., and n.), like the modern continental languages. And like its modern counterparts, Old English sometimes exhibited a disparity between grammatical and biological gender. Hence þæt wif, “the woman” (n.), se stan, “the stone” (m.), or seo giefu, “the gift” (f.). In compound nouns, the second element provided the grammatical gender, hence þæt wif (n.) + se mann (m.) yielded the masculine se wifmann, “the woman. Other than this, there was little logic in the assignment of grammatical gender in Old English, and you have to learn a noun’s gender through rote memorization.
But starting in the tenth century, we begin to see the loss of grammatical gender in Old English. This loss begins in the north of England and over the next few centuries spreads south, until grammatical gender is completely gone from the language by the middle of the fourteenth century. For example, the Lindisfarne Gospels, a late-seventh/early-eighth century Latin illuminated manuscript (London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero D.IV) that had an interlinear Old English gloss inserted in the tenth century, assigns a masculine gender to the usually feminine endung, “ending, conclusion.” The same gloss also assigns both masculine and neuter genders to stan, “stone,” at different points.
The loss of grammatical gender is pretty much complete in Northumbria by the beginning of the eleventh century. By the middle of that century the loss becomes apparent in texts from the Midlands and is largely complete there by the beginning of the thirteenth century, although some Midlands dialects retain vestiges of grammatical gender until the end of the thirteenth century. The south of England loses grammatical gender over the course of the late-eleventh through thirteenth centuries, and Kent is the last holdout, maintaining grammatical gender into the middle of the fourteenth century.
As one might expect, during this period of transition the situation with grammatical gender becomes messy, but there are some general trends. Feminine and neuter animate nouns tend to become masculine, and masculine and feminine inanimate nouns tend to become neuter in early Middle English. With the Norman Conquest, some English words begin to adopt the gender of their French counterparts. Hence the masculine Old English mona, “moon” becomes feminine under the influence of the feminine French lune. Eventually, of course, all the genders would be dropped.
The factors behind the disappearance of the English gender system aren’t known. Although the process was influenced by French, the disappearance was underway prior to the Norman Conquest, so that was not a root cause. Instead, the loss of grammatical gender is part of the general disintegration of the Old English inflectional system. In modern English, the accusative and dative cases have collapsed into a single objective case that only applies to pronouns. Nouns are only inflected for the plural and genitive. And adjectives aren’t declined at all.
Huddleston, Rodney, and Geoffrey Pullum. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 484-99.
Mitchell, Bruce, and Fred C. Robinson. A Guide to Old English. Fifth edition (with corrections and revisions). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1994. 17.
Mustanoja, Tauno F. A Middle English Syntax. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique, 1960. 43-54.
Aromatherapy and the Benefits of Jargon
10 May 2010
Jargon often gets a bad rap. It can be obfuscatory and difficult for laypeople to understand. But it can also be marvelously precise and aid in clarity of thinking.
Steven Novella over at NeuroLogica Blog has a post on the topic, using aromatherapy as an example of how word choice can impact our uncritical opinions about a topic.
Loyal Wordorigins readers may note that I have sort of argued the opposite in the past, that language does not impact how we think, but this example is dead on. We use words to uncritically classify and stereotype concepts. Hence, aromatherapy sounds like it should have some type of medical efficacy. And death tax sounds bad, but estate tax is more reasonable—after all, the heir has done nothing to deserve the money and it does not affect all all equally, as death does, but only those rich enough to have “estates.” But this is just uncritical stereotyping. We can break free of the constraints of language and think critically about topics for which we don’t have words; it’s just more difficult.
Bad Bilingualism: Canada v. US
26 April 2010
Update (7 May 2010): the bill passed the Canadian House of Commons and is likely to become law. Language Log has more.
Original post:
I’m always amazed at the differences between Canada and the US (and in coming months I suspect I’ll be discovering more of them). The two countries and cultures, so alike in many ways, can also be starkly different.
Take the case of bilingualism as a political issue. In the US, the (utterly unfounded) fear is that the country will be ripped asunder if we dare to teach schoolchildren in their own language or if voice mail systems offer the option to hear instructions in Spanish. Yet, just north of the border, Canada is considering requiring its supreme court justices to be fluent in both English and French—and not just conversationally, but in the arcane legalese of the two languages as well. The Canadian idea sounds reasonable on its face, but as the Edmonton Journal points out, it is just as bad an idea as its US counterpart:
In practical terms, the bill will restrict appointment to a very small number of bilingual legal scholars and lower-court judges. It will make it difficult for Canadians outside a narrow strip from Ottawa, through Montreal and Quebec City, and into Moncton, to ever be appointed to the court that has the final say over how the Charter will be interpreted and what rights we may have.
It will make it difficult for Englishspeaking [sic] Canadians to sit on the Supreme Court and almost impossible for Western Canadians.
It’s comforting to know, however, that bad political ideas are not restricted to one’s own country.
(Hat tip: The Lousy Linguist)
Google Books Settlement
20 April 2010
A lengthy, but excellent and informative, summary of what the impact of the Google Books settlement may be on the future of reading:
1. It may become harder to get information online about books from writers you love.
2. You will find yourself reading free books online, by authors who have disappeared. And Google will make money when you do.
3. Google will be competing with Apple and Amazon and everybody else to be your favorite online bookseller.
4. Libraries and bookstores will be the same thing.
5. Pulp science fiction will make a comeback in ways you might not expect.
(Hat tip: languagehat)
