Gender in Language

The Regis Polyglot April Issue - Ed. 7

Gender in Language

Disambiguation and Recognition—The Advantages of Grammatical Gender Grammatical gender—the process of assigning genders to nouns in language—can be found in thousands of languages worldwide, but its use has nevertheless been criticized as pointless and complicated. Gender however does have some advantages in language especially regarding ambiguity and word recognition. In languages without gender, referring back to nouns using pronouns can result in some ambiguity. For example, consider the following two sentences, which mean the same: English: He takes the battery out of the calculator and throws it away.

German: Er nimmt die Batterie aus dem Taschenrechner heraus und wirft die weg.

In the English sentence, “it”, underlined, is ambiguous, since we don’t know if the battery or the calculator is being thrown away. However, in the German version of the sentence, that ambiguity is clarified through the use of grammatical gender, since the “die” in the second half corresponds to “die Batterie”, and therefore we know it’s the battery being thrown away.

Secondly, the presence of grammatical gender can help with recognizing words more quickly. In 2007, two linguists performed a study in which young children, whose native language was Spanish, were shown two images side-by-side. The researchers then told the child to specifically identify one of those two images, and to point to it as quickly as possible.

These researchers found that, when presented with two objects that had different grammatical genders (for example, la pelota (“the ball”) and el zapato (“the shoe”)), the children were able to identify the requested object faster than if the objects were of the same gender. This shows a clear positive advantage to the use of grammatical gender, especially for children learning their native language. Overall, languages with gender have distinct advantages over languages without it when considering ambiguity and word recognition.

Gender In Language Il genere nella lingua Italiana è estremamente importante. Per nomi e pronomi, il genere può determinare il suffisso di una parola. Ma, diverso dal maggior parte delle lingue del mondo, l’Italiano non ha una preferenza verso il genere maschile rispetto al genere femminile. In molte altre lingue invece, quando c’è un maschio in un gruppo con tante femmine, il pronome usato per descrivere il gruppo è grammaticalmente maschile.

Questo non succede nella lingua Italiana perché il genere del pronome “loro” (il pronome utilizzato per descrivere tutti i tipi diversi di gruppi) è grammaticalmente neutro. Infatti, si potrebbe anche dire che l’Italiano è una lingua che favorisce il genere femminile! Quando parli con persone che non conosci, è formale usare il pronome “lei” per riferirsi alla persona.

Inoltre, è anche formale parlare utilizzando la terza persona (come se stessi parlando con la Regina Elisabetta d’Inghilterra). Allo stesso modo, “lei” è anche il pronome usato per rivolgersi ad una donna utilizzando la terza persona (il pronome per un uomo invece è “lui”)! Il ruolo del genere nella lingua Italiana è ovviamente molto interessante.

Gender is extremely important in the Italian language. For nouns and pronouns, the gender can determine the suffix of a word. But, unlike most languages of the world, Italian does not have a preference towards the masculine gender compared to the feminine gender. In many other languages, when there is at least one male in a group with many females, the pronoun used to describe the group is grammatically masculine. This is does not happen in the Italian language because the gender of the pronoun “loro” (the pronoun utilized to describe all the different kinds of groups) is grammatically neutral. In fact, one could even say that Italian is a language that favors the feminine gender! When you speak to people that you do not know, it is formal to use the pronoun “lei” to refer to the person. Additionally, it is also formal to speak using third person (like you were talking to the Queen of England). At the same time, “lei” is also the pronoun used to refer to a female using the third person (the pronoun for a male, on the other hand, is “lui”)! Obviously, the role of gender in the Italian language is very interesting.

The Sensibility of Chinese Words Chinese is much more reasonable and logical than European languages.

Many nouns in European languages have genders. This is useless and needlessly complicated. Gendered words add a considerable amount of difficulty to sentence structure and memorization of vocabulary. Chinese doesn’t have these random, useless grammatical rules. For example, the genders of German nouns are completely arbitrary. When learning German vocabulary, you must also learn the words’ genders, which is very difficult. Memorizing Chinese characters doesn’t involve this obstacle. The style of Chinese characters is very beautiful, and they are not burdened with the disadvantage of meaningless genders.

Equality. As simple a concept as such a word may seem to propose, we likely find that as equality’s legislative and cultural significance grows, it can become easy to lose oneself in the intricacies of the notion. Complexities which, in the last century, may have seemed entirely inconsequential, now cause us to conversationally tread carefully around topics of race, sexuality and gender. As we struggle to maintain a tone of so-called political correctness, we might say that in our language, we can find what is currently the greatest trove of equality-grounded taboos. I recently found myself in one of those quintessentially Regian arguments, it pertaining to the use of gender-specific nouns. Awkwardly, my fellow conversationalist and I stood center-stage before rehearsal for the Regis Rep’s production of Dial M For Murder, where we discussed whether it was correct that he refer to a young woman in the play as an “actress.” After a good three minutes, the actor whose title had sparked the conversation told us that it simply didn’t matter at the moment. Abruptly, we brought the conversation to a close, yet I couldn’t help but wonder if it had mattered. I certainly won’t be answering such a complex query within this article, but I would like to address the concerns that I faced during my contemplation. I asked myself: Why do we address political correctness if not because it matters? Is it only out of a fear that we could somehow offend a nearby proponent of language reform? The issue feminists have found with the aforementioned term “actress” is that it establishes some sort of difference between women and men in theater. All gender-associated nouns are guilty of creating the illusion that men and women are not meant to behave in the same way within the field the noun addresses. I would further posit that this issue of language-assisted differentiation becomes ever more crucial as culture argues that it is important that we define ourselves in whatever way we see fit. When someone identifies as neither male nor female, the issue is not as much the perception of their gender-derived equality within an activity or profession, but how they can be expected to fit in one of the traditional categories.

Philosopher Judith Butler would have us view gender as merely performative. She believes that we find correlation between traits and then label people with such traits as being members of a particular gender. Male and female, she argues, are nothing more than sets of characterizations into which many people happen to fall. If we are to accept ideas such as Butler’s, and if we are to decide that nothing should act as cultural boundary between any type of people, then surely language should not espouse an idea that people of different sexes are inherently different. Even if we are, though, to reject the beliefs of Ms. Butler and her fellow philosophers, and instead argue that people are made different by their gender alone, it may be in our best interest to simply avoid antagonization.

Many languages differentiate words as masculine and feminine, which plays a role in grammar and language use. For example, when using pronouns in French, “elle” replaces the feminine “la chambre”, which if translated literally is like replacing “the bedroom” in English with “she.” Many languages make distinctions between professional occupations for men and women.

Other languages, however, have neither masculine nor feminine words, like Chinese for example. What are the practical advantages to these systems of communication and how does the need to refer to people and objects based on gender consistently relate to modernized cultures in which those languages are spoken? These aspects are weighed.

Authors in order of Articles John P. Lorenzo M. Jerome B. Seamus Wiseman Visuals Miso D.