Talk:Gender in English

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[edit] A couple of thoughts

  • OE Inflections
  • OE pronouns didn't inflect for gender in the plural, nor did weak nouns; but strong nouns in nominative and adjectives did.
  • Is antecedent the usual word for referent of an interogative pronoun?

I don't want to come across as fussy, I'm actually more interested in understanding the big picture. Interogative and relative pronouns are different uses of the same word in several languages, modern English being one of them. Although who / whom is inflection, I'm uncertain whether who / which is generally understood as inflection, or more likely it is a form of conventional lexical selection.

If that's not clear, a clearer example is I / me / mine / my being inflections of the same lexeme, where choice of I or you is semantically determined. I know this distinction is significant in producing dictionaries of highly inflected languages. In Greek, nouns and verbs from the same root get separate entries, however, in Hebrew and Arabic, because of a peculiarity of Semitic languages, some dictionaries provide roots as the main entries, with verb and/or noun forms specified as particular uses of roots.

These things are relevant to this article, because the gender distinctions in modern English are not cases of inflection, i.e. morphological adaptation of a lexeme. Rather, gender distinctions are made by lexical choice. In Old English, third person pronouns could be conceived of as being inflected for gender; however, they was later imported from Scandinavia and she was taken from the demonstrative pronouns. According to some of the articles I read, these are presumed to have developed to address considerable ambiguities in the OE pronoun system, even more pronounced when dialectic variations are considered. Ironically, it is much more closely related etymologically to he than she is. Oblique case forms of it (hit in OE) were identical to those for he during a large part of the Middle English period.

To further clarify what I'm getting at, the Classical Greek third person pronoun inflected for both gender and number but only has one dictionary entry, because the inflections are regular on a single root:

  • Nominative Singular M: aut-os, F: aut-e, N: aut-o; Plural M: aut-oi, F: aut-ai, N: aut-a

I'm sure I'm not the only one to see this as very different to modern English: he, she, it, they. It is lexical selection rather than inflection. Does anyone know sources that make this point and derive some helpful conclusions? Alastair Haines 17:57, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

PS I'm also nervous about isolating agreement from consideration of verbs. Clearly, verbs inflect to agree with subject for number but not for gender. However, in Hebrew, verbs agree with subject for gender also, and even in the second person. Because English requires an explicit subject, very frequently a pronoun, and these convey gender in the third person, arguably modern English use of verbs entails gender marking as well as number marking in the third person singular. This would explain the complaints some make regarding English being a "gendered" language. Again, I'd love to interact with anyone regarding this, especially if there are sources that discuss related issues. Alastair Haines 18:13, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

I don't see any reason to say that English verbs show gender agreement.
The distinction between inflection and lexical choice is not clear-cut. In this article, perhaps we can get away with saying "choice of pronoun", and people can interpret this as choosing the appropriate lexical item, or choosing the appropriate inflectional realization of an abstract pronominal lexeme.
I will remove the statement about "no gender distinction in the plural".
We can change "antecedent" to "referent", it is more general and slightly less technical. And do you know if "hwā/hwæt" reflects grammatical gender agreement (seems unlikely to me) or a human/non-human distinction (as in ME)? CapnPrep 18:45, 4 May 2007 (UTC)
Thank you! You understood my foibles perfectly, and I agree whole-heartedly that English verbs and gender agreement is not an idea worth raising in this article.
Interogative and relative pronouns in Old English are very interesting. Yes human/non-human is the distinction.
Interogatives inflect to include an additional instrumental case, meaning why? -- hwȳ and hwon.
Relatives are formed in different ways. There is an indeclinable particle that sometimes does the job -- þe. Altneratively, demonstratives are used, with or without the particle. They are used differently depending on whether the particle is present.
Interogatives may also be used as indefinite pronouns, and can take a prefix ġe that marks distributive use.
I will try to throw up more substantial draft text tomorrow. I'm looking forward to learning a lot as we progress. Knowing you are around is very motivational. Thank you! :D Alastair Haines 12:16, 5 May 2007 (UTC)
Odd, other languages also have different interrogative pronouns for humans and non-humans (examples from Portuguese: Quem? — "Who?", O quê? — "What?"), yet they don't call that a gender. Or anything special, for that matter. After all, it just happens to a handful of words... FilipeS
Sumerian inflects all nouns for human / non-human, and is not alone in having a system like this. It looks like a gender system, which is why it has traditionally been called that. Pronouns and adjectives agree with the nouns. The grammatical system matches a "natural" system, so there is a lot of redundant grammatical marking. Alastair Haines 12:17, 7 May 2007 (UTC)