‘the kitchen, the moon, and dangerous things,’ or, ‘genders.’

Most people who have studied French or Spanish in high school think of ‘gender’ in terms of male and female.

But how do languages decide what is male and what is female?

Spanish has ‘decided’ that ‘kitchen’ (la cochina) is feminine for reasons I should not have to explain.

Spanish has ‘decided’ that ‘bull’ (el torro) is masculine for reasons ” “.

Yes, assignment to masculinity and femininity is not random. And, sometimes, different languages disagree what’s male and what’s female.

In Russian (and many other languages), ‘moon’ is feminine. If you don’t get why, ask the nearest female.

In Polish, ‘moon’ is masculine. It comes from the word for ‘prince,’ since the moon was supposed to be the son of the Old Moon ‘king’ in the traditional Slavic lunar calendar. (Thanks to Patrycja Antuszewska on this one).

So, this assignment is never random, but it’s never widely systematic across languages, either.

And it gets stranger. The Alamblak language of Papua New Guinea has a feminine gender that includes: females OR things which are short, squat or wide (get it?). ‘Masculine’ gender includes: males OR things which are tall or long and slender, or narrow (you should really be getting it at this point).

Australian Dyirbal (which has just around five speakers) has the following genders:

1. men, children & animals (though, arguably, the first two categories fall into the last).
2. women, fire & dangerous things (see above).
3. edible things.
   
4. everything else.
   

(No, I’m not making this up.)

Of course, my judgments on these categories are largely satirical, and I have no reason to believe that there is an actual semantic logic behind this quirky categorical reasoning (though Lakoff certainly implies that there is).

In fact, Dyirbal is often cited by linguists to show that even languages unrelated to our traditional masculine/feminine Romantic systems have some sort of gender-based categorical system.

But Dyirbal is more the exception than the rule. Linguists who make this argument tend to avoid languages like Yanyuwa, another Australian language with no less than 16 classes of nouns. Masculine & feminine do appear on this list, but so do classes like:

• food (non-meat).
• arboreal (that means ‘pertaining to trees,’ guys).
• familiar kinship (not to be confused with ‘familiar kinship on a grandparent level,’ which is a different class).

It turns out that masculine vs. feminine is a very common way for languages to divide words into categories, but it’s hardly the only way.

Remember: the word ‘gender’ does not necessarily mean ‘male vs. female.’ it means ‘kind’ or ‘type.’ (Think about the word ‘genre’). A male is a gender of person, and a table is (technically speaking) a gender of furniture.

Different languages are sensitive to different genders.

Tamil distinguishes between rational and non-rational objects. (Can anyone tell me how Tamil classifies computers?)

People generally tell you that Japanese has no genders. But its horribly complex counter system reveals an unbelievable sensitivity to different kinds of objects.

In Japanese, one uses different counter words when talking about quantities of different types of objects. These counters reveal various categories that Japanese words can fall into. Among these categories:

• Magazines, newspapers, or other packets of paper.
• Small animals, insects.
• Long, thin objects.
• Mirrors, stages of a computer game, walls of a room.
• Thin, flat objects.
• Tatami mats.
• Things that contain objects (glasses, spoons), OR, octopuses, crabs, squid, abalone.

Note that none of these classes distinguishes between male and female.

So, how do languages divide up words into classes?

Masculine vs. feminine is an obvious way. Humans are likely to notice that about half of us have penises and the other have vaginas and take it from there.

(In fact, this observation can account for much of human behavior. Anyway.)

A few observations that some languages draw into classes:

Certain languages note that some things can move and other things can’t. That’s a good one.

Yunyuwa notes that some things are trees.

Tamil notes that some things are capable of rational thought and others are not.

Dyirbal notes that some things are dangerous/female/all of the above.

Some languages hardly divide words up at all. Look at English. Some loanwords have gender (actor/actress), but even these distinctions are starting to disappear (since about 2006, I’ve heard ‘actor’ used as a unisex noun on American television).

What is gender, anyway? How does it fit into language?

Let’s talk about Dante.

Around 1995, an Italian man named Dante developed a condition called anomia. Essentially, after some sort of brain trauma, Dante’s brain was damaged, and he could no longer remember the names for most objects.

If you were to show Dante a picture of a cat, and ask, “Is this a cat?” he would say “yes” with great confidence. If you show him a picture of a wrench and ask “Is this a screwdriver?” he would tell you with great certainty that it is not. If you show him a picture of a wrench and ask him what it is, however, he won’t be able to tell you.

Here’s where it gets really interesting, though: If you show Dante a picture of an object and ask him if it’s a masculine or feminine noun, he’ll get the answer right 97% of the time. He just won’t be able to tell you what the noun is, exactly.

What does this mean, exactly? In The Psychology of Language, Trevor Harley sums up the significance of this finding nicely: Gender and phonological information are stored in different places in the brain.

And what does that mean?

It means that gender is more than how a word is pronounced. It’s how a word is used in our internal grammatical structures. Gender is grammar.

And if gender is grammar, then it must vary from language to language, following certain general guidelines.

One last question: If two people speak languages that categorize the world differently, do they perceive the world differently? I don’t have an answer for that question.

And, that does hit on one of the major points of sociolinguistics, and maybe even of language in general. How do our languages affect the way we perceive the world?