# Natural Gender: Old English > Modern English



## Linguistic Sunlight

Hi

As I understand it, in the change from old English to middle English, grammatical gender was replaced by natural gender, and this in turn meant that gender is determined by the gender of the referent. Thus feminine nouns such as justice, police and nation that were imported from France circa 1200-1500AD dropped their grammatical gender and adopted a neuter gender in the case of justice as abstract constructs do not have a gender, or common gender in the case of police and nation as both nouns refer to both men and women. In the case of wisdom and wiseness, wisdom was masculine and wiseness was feminine in old English, although with the advent of the natural gendered system they should both now be in the neuter gender. Same with business which was feminine in old English, it should now be in the neuter gender as a business is not masculine or feminine. Is this how to interpret the natural gender system?

Same with intelligence, although imported from France as a feminine noun, under the common gendered system it should now be considered a neuter gendered noun according to the natural gender system. Although what about nouns such as digit and brain should they be considered neuter or common gendered?


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## Le Penseur

Some loanwords do change (eg, actor - actress, although this particular example may have been changed simply to 'actor' for PC reasons) gender. We have gender-specific pronouns in the third person, singular form (his vs hers, he vs she). In these cases, they take the gender of the initial subject.

Obviously, a cow is different to a bull in its sex, but animals in general are referred to as 'it' until gender is known (that is, in many parts of the English-speaking world; sometimes this differs).

I really wouldn't worry about gender, to be honest. Gender doesn't play such a prominent role in at least day to day grammar.


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## owlman5

Linguistic Sunlight said:


> Same with intelligence, although imported from France as a feminine noun, under the common gendered system it should now be considered a neuter gendered noun according to the natural gender system.  Although what about nouns such as digit and brain should they be considered neuter or common gendered?


Hello, LS.  "Digit" and "brain" have "neuter gender" if I understand your post correctly.  It's been a long time since English speakers have referred to objects that have no natural gender with either masculine or feminine pronouns.  All such objects are generally called "it".  This is certainly true for both "brain" and "digit":  I heard they have Einstein's brain in a jar somewhere.  Yes, they say *it's* unusual.

Unless you are researching the history of the English language , I don't think you really need to worry about grammatical gender.  All abstract nouns are referred to as "it".  All objects that have no biological gender are referred to as "it".  Animals and humans are generally the only things that we refer to as "he" or "she".  Many times we also use "it" for animals if we don't know its gender or don't care about it.  Do you see that horse?  Yes, *it's* standing on the ridge. 

In some special cases, a speaker might refer to a ship, plane, or car as  "she" or "he".  Native speakers understand that such references are  unusual.  I remember that aircraft carrier.  *She* was a fine ship.  Giving that ship a "feminine" gender personalizes it for the speaker.  Once again, this sort of thing is unusual.  Ordinarily, we'd refer to that ship as "it".


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## Linguistic Sunlight

Le Penseur said:


> Some loanwords do change (eg, actor - actress, although this particular example may have been changed simply to 'actor' for PC reasons) gender. We have gender-specific pronouns in the third person, singular form (his vs hers, he vs she). In these cases, they take the gender of the initial subject.
> 
> Obviously, a cow is different to a bull in its sex, but animals in general are referred to as 'it' until gender is known (that is, in many parts of the English-speaking world; sometimes this differs).
> 
> I really wouldn't worry about gender, to be honest. Gender doesn't play such a prominent role in at least day to day grammar.



It is interesting to note that actor and actress are masculine and feminine respectively according to both the grammatical and natural gender systems and that actor can still function as a masculine epicene noun in modern day usage, although wisdom and wiseness as they refer to an abstract construct entirely lost all sense of biological gender and can now essentially be seen as equivalent, in meaning and gender, to each other.  So while concrete nouns carrying the -ness suffix in the case of actress or lioness can signify the feminine gender in modern English, abstract nouns carrying the same suffix such as wiseness and justness are in the neuter gender and cannot be interpreted as feminine.


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## suzi br

Are you sure that -ness and -ess are the same affix?  They look different to me, regardless of gender issues.


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## Le Penseur

Different. Wisdom and wiseness do not compare gender-wise, unlike actor and actress, which directly do. 

It's not even really treated nowadays as so much of a gender change as something instinctive, or like a completely different reference (sheep vs ram, etc.).


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## Linguistic Sunlight

You are right Suzi br -ess does seem only to be used in the construction of concrete nouns, while -ness is typically used to form abstract nouns in English, although in French -esse can be used for both eg justesse and tigresse.


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## Linguistic Sunlight

owlman5 said:


> Hello, LS.  "Digit" and "brain" have "neuter gender" if I understand your post correctly.  It's been a long time since English speakers have referred to objects that have no natural gender with either masculine or feminine pronouns.  All such objects are generally called "it".  This is certainly true for both "brain" and "digit":  I heard they have Einstein's brain in a jar somewhere.  Yes, they say *it's* unusual.
> 
> Unless you are researching the history of the English language , I don't think you really need to worry about grammatical gender.  All abstract nouns are referred to as "it".  All objects that have no biological gender are referred to as "it".  Animals and humans are generally the only things that we refer to as "he" or "she".  Many times we also use "it" for animals if we don't know its gender or don't care about it.  Do you see that horse?  Yes, *it's* standing on the ridge.
> 
> In some special cases, a speaker might refer to a ship, plane, or car as  "she" or "he".  Native speakers understand that such references are  unusual.  I remember that aircraft carrier.  *She* was a fine ship.  Giving that ship a "feminine" gender personalizes it for the speaker.  Once again, this sort of thing is unusual.  Ordinarily, we'd refer to that ship as "it".



Hi OM

I did not know that about Einstein's brain and when I looked it up and sure enough it was true.  I wasn't sure about brain and digit as both men and women have both brains and digits, so could they also not be in the common gender?  Also the grammatical gender of brain was neuter in old English while digit appears to have been masculine from the Latin digitus.

I have to say that I am interested in looking at the impact of the change created by introduction of the natural gender system.  For example most people associate nature with mother, as the grammatical gender of nature is feminine (from the French), and liberty with she due to its grammatical gender and the statue of liberty both of which came from France, nevertheless, it seems to me that this is a mistake as both words lose their feminine gender under the natural gender system.

There seems to be some journalists who still want to cling to the old system of calling countries, ships, and a few other categories as her, although such usage seems to be incorrect under the natural gender system.  That said I would be tempted to call a ship called Mr Portland he rather than it or she.


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## Alxmrphi

Linguistic Sunlight said:


> It is interesting to note that actor and actress are masculine and feminine respectively according to both the grammatical and natural gender systems and that actor can still function as a masculine epicene noun in modern day usage, although wisdom and wiseness as they refer to an abstract construct entirely lost all sense of biological gender and can now essentially be seen as equivalent, in meaning and gender, to each other.  So while concrete nouns carrying the -ness suffix in the case of actress or lioness can signify the feminine gender in modern English, abstract nouns carrying the same suffix such as wiseness and justness are in the neuter gender and cannot be interpreted as feminine.



I think you need to be careful here.
'actor' and 'actress' are *not* masculine and feminine.

They are words that strictly link to ideas of both sexes, but gender in language is not a representative of women/men, it's an* abstract* system used to chategorise the ordering / groupings of nouns in a language.

"-ess" is certainly used as an affix in English to denote femininity, but it doesn't make it a feminine word. Having natural gender means you cannot have feminine gender.

Your posts use 'neuter' gender a lot for descriptions of inanimate things, this again is unadvisable. It makes sense to suggest they would belong to the neuter gender because it is closely linked with how we refer to things with the subject pronoun 'it', which used to represent subjects that belonged to the neuter gender. Having natural gender means you can't have neuter gender either. It's a lot better to call it abstract gender, or something different to how you talk about grammatical gender. When talking about natural gender, it's only okay to use these terms when they refer to animate beings.

In this sense 'man' and 'woman' are masculine and feminine respectively, but extending this out to words for occupations that happen to be representative of biological gender is a bit missing the point. We can have words used for both professions like 'lawyer', if let's say in the future we start separating out names of this profession for males and females, it doesn't mean all of a sudden 'lawyeress' is feminine and 'lawyer' is masculine, because that would imply 'lawyer' is masculine now. It is still just abstract gender, and remains so even when you can have a distinction between these two words.

At least that's my opinion.
Obviously some people find it easier to use these labels, but I believe it leads to confusion when you say that grammatical gender was lost, yet carry on using all the terms to describe modern English.

Things that are animate and relate directly to living beings (fox/vixen/man/woman) can be said to be masc. and fem., but 'actor/actress' is one step out. Adding an additional term doesn't mean they are suddenly assigned back into the old style of word classification.

There are no traits about these groupings that define them as belonging to different types, they behave exactly the same, following all the same rules. If they did behave differently then you can argue they should belong to different grammatical genders, but they don't, not like other languages that have gender and need specific morphemes to be placed on them. English doesn't have that, these things have abstract gender.

Maybe others disagree with me, I'm open to consider anyone else's views.
I can understand how 'Here is an actress, her name is Jane' looks a lot like a case that you can argue that it does belong to the feminine gender.

The grammatical gender system is to group words that function differently, without this you don't have a gender system anymore. We are able to take the knowledge it is referring to a feminine person by understanding it's one half of a concept, where there is a different name for the masculine version, not because it holds inherent grammatical gender.

By the way I'm not claiming to be right here, this is just my personal view on the topic.


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## Linguistic Sunlight

Hi Alxmrphi

As I understand it when grammatical gender was replaced by natural gender the gender classes such as masculine, feminine, common and neuter did not disappear, instead the nouns were placed into these same classes according to their biological gender.  Thus the feminine abstract noun liberty becomes a neuter abstract noun, the feminine noun police becomes common gendered, and the old English masculine noun wiffman (woman) becomes a feminine noun, etc.  According to this system if one uses the terms actors and actresses in the same sentence, then actor is masculine while actress is feminine, although if the word actors is used in context to refer to both men and women then the noun is being used as a common gendered noun.


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## CapnPrep

As Alxmrphi suggested, you are running into problems because you are not carefully distinguishing between grammatical gender classes and natural gender classes (sexes). Old English had grammatical gender as well as  natural gender. Modern German has more or less the same system. There are three gender classes: *masculine*, *feminine*, and *neuter*. Every noun belongs to one of these. Then there are three sexes: *male*, *female*, and *inanimate*. Every time you talk about something or someone, you (try to) put them in one of these three classes.



Linguistic Sunlight said:


> As I understand it when grammatical gender was replaced by natural  gender the gender classes such as masculine, feminine, common and neuter  did not disappear, instead the nouns were placed into these same  classes according to their biological gender.


The system of grammatical gender was not "replaced by" natural gender. The classes *masculine*, *feminine*, and *neuter* _did_ disappear, without a trace, and natural gender is simply what was left over. So instead of having to keep track of both gender and sex (as in German), English speakers now only care about *male*, *female*, or *inanimate*.

There are, of course, some interesting complications and exceptions in Modern English, many of which have already been mentioned above. But I don't think that any of them represent remnants from Old English (or Latin, or Norman French), so they may not be appropriate topics for discussion here in EHL. Anyway, there is already _plenty_ of information to be found in existing threads in English Only, starting with:
*Grammatical gender*
*Grammatical gender of nouns [pronouns] *
*Gender of nouns, exceptions in English*

How do animals fit into the natural gender system of Modern English (i.e. are they *male/female* or *inanimate*?):
*use of he/she speaking of animals*
*Are animals referred to as "she" or "he"?
**Cats and genders 

*_She_ (and sometimes _he_) exceptionally referring to *inanimate* entities like ships, countries, celestial bodies, abstract concepts, etc.:
*The ship = he, she, it *
*countries that can be referred to with "her"*
*what pronouns do we use to say a country?*
*Is The Sun Feminine?**
Is the Moon she? Is the Sun he? *
*Sun male? *
*'Death': He, She or It?*

The usage and status in ModE of suffixes like -_o_/-_a_, -_esse_, -_ette_, etc. in loanwords referring to *males* and *females*:*
actor or actress ? *
*waiter, waitress, or server*
*Latino vs. latina*
*Gender specific nationalities*
*blonde and blond*
*Brunete*


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## suzi br

Aye aye cap'n, excellent set of links!


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## Linguistic Sunlight

CapnPrep, when you say that old English had grammatical gender and natural gender I think what you mean is that natural gender gradually replaced grammatical gender from the 10th to the 14th centuries. Again gender did not disappear from the English language for example the pronouns he, she, one and it are masculine, feminine, common, and neuter respectively, likewise the nouns man, woman, lawyer and house are masculine, feminine, common, and neuter respectively.  Thus pronoun inflection is still determined by the the gender of the noun it represents although the gender of the noun is now founded entirely on its biological sex.  In the case of grammatical gender the gender of the noun was not always the same as the biological gender and thus had to be explicitly provided, although in the case of natural gender this is no longer necessary as it can always be deduced.


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## berndf

CapnPrep said:


> As Alxmrphi suggested, you are running into problems because you are not carefully distinguishing between grammatical gender classes and natural gender classes (sexes). Old English had grammatical gender as well as natural gender. Modern German has more or less the same system. There are three gender classes: *masculine*, *feminine*, and *neuter*. Every noun belongs to one of these. Then there are three sexes: *male*, *female*, and *inanimate*. Every time you talk about something or someone, you (try to) put them in one of these three classes.
> 
> The system of grammatical gender was not "replaced by" natural gender. The classes *masculine*, *feminine*, and *neuter* _did_ disappear, without a trace, and natural gender is simply what was left over. So instead of having to keep track of both gender and sex (as in German), English speakers now only care about *male*, *female*, or *inanimate*.


I have to partly disagree with your here. In languages with grammatical gender the distinction between grammatical and biological gender is all but insignificant. As you mentioned German, there is not the slightest trace of a systematical differentiation between animate and inanimate and in cases where grammatical and biological gender differ, the grammatical gender dominates entirely: Traditionally, you refer to a _Weib_ (_woman _or_ wife_) as _es_ (_it_) and not as _sie _(_she_) and if you use for the same person the word _Frau_ (originally meaning _woman of nobility_ but today the preferred word for _woman _or_ wife_) instead of _Weib_ you refer to her as _sie_. Deviations from these rules are very recent phenomena and mainly due to modern ideological influences (_Women's Lib_ and _PC_). 

The point where grammatical and biological genders interact is that you have many more words referring to persons which are specific to biological gender. In English you have some words, like _policeman_ and _midwife_ which imply biological gender. In German this is much more wide-spread. The vast majority of nouns designating occupations of humans are constructed with gender-specific suffixes, _Bäck*er*_ (_male baker_) and _Bäck*erin*_ (_female baker_). But then there is no disagreement between grammatical and biological gender here.

Where I agree with you and Alex is that the current system in English should not be understood as words changing gender but rather as a loss of the entire gender system with the only exception that the gender specific third person singular pronouns were retained which lost their binding to grammatical gender and became free to be used for an entirely new concept, namely that of what is called "natural gender", though it might not be that "natural" after all, considering that a _tom-cat_ is often referred to as _it._ Though it is much more closely tied to biological gender than the lost grammatical gender system, "natural gender" still remains a formal system.


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## CapnPrep

berndf said:


> As you mentioned German, there is not the slightest trace of a systematical differentiation between animate and inanimate


What about the distinction between _damit_, _dafür_, etc. (generally inanimate) and _mit ihm_, _für sie_, etc. (generally animate)?
* damit vs. mit ihr/ihm etc (bei Gegenständen) *



berndf said:


> In languages with grammatical gender the distinction between grammatical and biological gender is all but insignificant. … and in cases where grammatical and biological gender differ, the grammatical gender dominates entirely


In cases of severe mismatch, the noun exerts its grammatical influence over some limited syntactic distance, but the grammatical gender does not "dominate entirely", because sooner or later this becomes too awkward and speakers will revert to natural gender.

This problem comes up periodically in the French forums. The following thread discusses what happens when, for example, _une personne_ is used to refer to a man (*feminine* *male* mismatch):
*FR: Attributing opposite gender pronouns / titles to people*

I suspect that something similar happens with _eine Person_ in German. And of course there is_ Mädchen_ (*neuter* *female* mismatch):
*das Mädchen - Pronomen (sie vs. es)*

These cases of mismatch may be "insignificant" in terms of frequency, but I think they are significant because they show that even in grammatical gender languages like French and German, natural gender still plays a big part in the pronominal system.


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## berndf

CapnPrep said:


> What about the distinction between _damit_, _dafür_, etc. (generally inanimate) and _mit ihm_, _für sie_, etc. (generally animate)?


You got me there, "not the slightest trace" is an unexcusable exaggeration. You would never use _dafür_ referring to a person or animal or plant, though you might for body parts. But I think the more important distinction here is between referrals to physical objects, including living being and nouns for actions or conditions.

In addition, the pronouns _wer_ and _was_ differentiated the same way as their English cognates, _who_ and _what_, did.



CapnPrep said:


> In cases of severe mismatch, the noun exerts its grammatical influence over some limited syntactic distance, but the grammatical gender does not "dominate entirely", because sooner or later this becomes too awkward and speakers will revert to natural gender.
> ...
> I suspect that something similar happens with _eine Person_ in German. And of course there is_ Mädchen_ (*neuter* *female* mismatch):
> *das Mädchen - Pronomen (sie vs. es)*


This phenomenon exists but, to repeat myself, a very recent one.

The fact that all diminutives are neuter changes the interpretation of the neuter pronoun. Referring to a child as _es (it) _is completely natural (which is true even today) and not as all awkward and can be maintained over pages in a text. If you ask kids who for the first time learn about grammar and its concepts to come up with names for genders, you often hear _Männlich_ (_Manly_), _Weiblich_ (_Womanly_) and _Kindlich_ (_childly_). The association of _neuter_ with _objects without biological gender_ is not as strong as it might be in other languages with a three-gender system.


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## Linguistic Sunlight

berndf said:


> Where I agree with you and Alex is that the current system in English should not be understood as words changing gender but rather as a loss of the entire gender system with the only exception that the gender specific third person singular pronouns were retained which lost their binding to grammatical gender and became free to be used for an entirely new concept, namely that of what is called "natural gender", though it might not be that "natural" after all, considering that a _tom-cat_ is often referred to as _it._ Though it is much more closely tied to biological gender than the lost grammatical gender system, "natural gender" still remains a formal system.



Hi Berndf

I not sure if I quite follow, it seems to me that gender is a necessary feature of any language in order to be able to distinguish between masculine, feminine and neuter objects, therefore it seems strange to me to say that English lost its entire gender system except with respect to pronoun inflection.  For me the issue is not if any given language has a gender system, but how gender is implemented.  For example one could implement gender exclusively via adjectives such as male and female rather than via nouns, or one could force a gender directly onto nouns as in the case of grammatical gender or allow the biological gender to be derived from the nouns as in the case of natural gender.  Modern English seems to implement a natural gendered system which involves minimal gender inflection.  

While it would have been possible to force other parts of speech such as adjectives or articles to inflect according to the natural gender of the noun they describe, for example one could force men to be blond and women to be blonde, without this degree of gender inflection English has become more intuitive, easier and more enjoyable to learn.

In the move from grammatical gender to natural gender some writers continued to use some of the grammatical gender rules such as giving countries and ships the feminine gender, although strictly speaking I don't think such rules are enforceable under natural gender.  Thus Australia and America should probably be referred to by using the pronoun it rather than she.  I think pets including cats are referred to as he or she according to their biological sex.

In the case of abstract nouns such as liberty and wiseness I think they have to lose their feminine grammatical gender and become neuter or common gendered nouns, although I am not totally sure about masculinity and femaleness, can they be referred to as he and she respectively?


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## JuanEscritor

> LS in Message 17:
> 
> I not sure if I quite follow, it seems to me that gender is a necessary  feature of any language in order to be able to distinguish between  masculine, feminine and neuter objects...


Not exactly.  There are languages which do not encode biological gender in their system (aside from it being a semantic feature of various nouns).



> therefore it seems strange to me to say that English lost its entire gender system except with respect to pronoun inflection.


English no longer uses _grammatical _gender.  The pronoun system once used for referencing things of different _grammatical _gender has changed its function to reference things of different _biological _gender. 



> For me the issue is not if any given language has a gender system, but  how gender is implemented.  For example one could implement gender  exclusively via adjectives such as male and female rather than via  nouns, or one could force a gender directly onto nouns as in the case of  grammatical gender or allow the biological gender to be derived from  the nouns as in the case of natural gender.  Modern English seems to  implement a natural gendered system which involves minimal gender  inflection.


I think you are confusing _biological _gender with _grammatical_ gender.  The term 'gender' as used in grammar is completely unrelated to the notions of biological gender.  Linguists could have just as well called them 'groupings' instead of 'genders'—and I wish they would have!  What we have here is a problem of equivocation: the same word has two different meanings, and so cannot be treated as having the same meaning in all contexts.



> without this degree of gender inflection English has become more intuitive, easier and more enjoyable to learn.


That's, of course, an entirely opinionated statement.



> While it would have been possible to force other parts of speech such as  adjectives or articles to inflect according to the natural gender of  the noun they describe, for example one could force men to be blond and  women to be blonde


The blond/blonde distinction is really not a distinction any English speaker maintains, and its distribution in English would be conditioned on the _biological_ gender of the noun, so it is really not an example of _grammatical_ gender, which, of course, does not exist in English.



> In the move from grammatical gender to natural gender some writers  continued to use some of the grammatical gender rules such as giving  countries and ships the feminine gender, although strictly speaking I  don't think such rules are enforceable under natural gender.  Thus  Australia and America should probably be referred to by using the  pronoun it rather than she.  I think pets including cats are referred to  as he or she according to their biological sex.


I don't think you'll find much of an historical connection between the usage of 'she' for various objects and the past grammatical gender of the nouns associated with those objects.  _Ship_, for example, was neuter in OE.  This modern tendency appears more an anthropomorphization than a case of grammatical gender.



> In the case of abstract nouns such as liberty and wiseness I think they  have to lose their feminine grammatical gender and become neuter or  common gendered nouns


I am not certain what you mean here; these words have no 'feminine grammatical gender', so there is nothing for them to lose.  In fact, no words in English have grammatical gender.



> I am not totally sure about masculinity and femaleness, can they be referred to as he and she respectively?


No, not without employing poetic license.

JE


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## berndf

Linguistic Sunlight,

I basically agree with Juan's reply, so I won't add one of myself. I would just like to add that I would phrase this



JuanEscritor said:


> English no longer uses _grammatical _gender. The pronoun system once used for referencing things of different _grammatical _gender has changed its function to reference things of different _biological _gender.


a bit differently: English lost most of its gender markers and as a consequence its _old grammatical gender system_ replacing it with a new one which manifests itself in the way personal pronouns are used.

CapnPrep argued that the two systems are already competing in strongly gendered languages like French or German and he has a point there. A possible compromise view could be that both systems exist but in French and German the rules governing the use of pronouns is dominated by the "grammatical" gender system.

But I hesitate to call one _grammatical_ and one _natural_. The usage of the pronouns _he, she_ and _it_ still follows conventional rules and cannot be used freely express statements (like "For me the _femininity_ is a _she_, not an _it_"). I would therefore regard both systems as _formal_ or _grammatical_ ones.


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## Linguistic Sunlight

Hi JuanEscritor

In relation to grammatical gender, it is still a gender system, it is just that it also allows unnatural genders to be directly placed onto nouns, thus the majority of the nouns follow natural gender although there are some that do not, and this ability to be able to place unnatural genders directly onto nouns is what defines the system known as grammatical gender.

In relation to ships and countries, the feminine grammatical gender is likely to originate from Latin where countries and ships were always feminine.

In relation to liberty it was adopted into English from the French word liberté which is a grammatically feminine noun, while wiseness was an old English word with a grammatically feminine gender.  In a natural gender system they both have to lose their feminine grammatical gender.  Likewise the old English masculine noun wisdom has to lose its masculine grammatical gender as the construct does not exclusively refer to men.  Thus I do not think it is correct to use the pronoun he in relation to wisdom and she in relation to wiseness under a system of natural gender.


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## berndf

Linguistic Sunlight said:


> In relation to ships and countries, the feminine grammatical gender is likely to originate from Latin where countries and ships were always feminine.
> 
> ... wiseness ... feminine
> ... wisdom ... ... masculine


The Gender of constructed words depends on the gender of the last part. In German e.g., which still has the same gender system as OE, _England_ is neuter because _Land_ is neuter and _Türkei_ (Turkey) feminine because the (Latin derived) suffix -_ei_ (<_-ia_) is feminine. In OE. _wisdom_ is masculine because the word _dom _(_judgement_) is masculine and the OE suffix _-nis_ or _-nes_ produced feminine (I think sometimes also neuter, but I am not sure) nouns.


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## JuanEscritor

Linguistic Sunlight said:


> In relation to grammatical gender, it is still a gender system, it is just that it also allows unnatural genders to be directly placed onto nouns, thus the majority of the nouns follow natural gender although there are some that do not, and this ability to be able to place unnatural genders directly onto nouns is what defines the system known as grammatical gender.



False.



> In relation to liberty it was adopted into English from the French word liberté which is a grammatically feminine noun, while wiseness was an old English word with a grammatically feminine gender.  In a natural gender system they both have to lose their feminine grammatical gender. Likewise the old English masculine noun wisdom has to lose its masculine  grammatical gender as the construct does not exclusively refer to men.


Of course; grammatical gender does not exist in languages without grammatical gender.



> Thus I do not think it is correct to use the pronoun he in relation to wisdom and she in relation to wiseness under a system of natural gender.


Indeed, it is not correct.  But what are you driving at?

JE


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## Linguistic Sunlight

Berndf, and wisdom/wiseness seems to have some ancestry in the German word wissen which is a neuter noun meaning knowledge, while in the construction of wissenschaft meaning science the suffix -schaft makes the noun feminine (die), although I am not sure if there is an equivalent masculine noun meaning science in German.

JE, Another way of looking at grammatical gender is to separate the nouns that accord with natural gender from those that do not.  With these two groups of nouns it then becomes easy to see that grammatical gender is still a gender system that involves masculine, feminine, common and neuter gendered words.  The presence of non natural gendered nouns does not preclude such a system from being regarded or interpreted as a gender system, it merely reveals that such a system also allows artificial gender classifications.

The reason that I am looking at wisdom and wiseness is that the presence of two nouns to refer to the same abstract construct can be difficult to interpret at first glance.  The suffixes -dom and -ness were used in old English to create masculine and feminine grammatically gendered abstract nouns.  Thus wisdom and wiseness allowed old English writers to choose between two nouns with identical meaning differing only in gender in order to create differing connotations.  In modern English both nouns lose their grammatical gender and instead attract the pronoun it, unless it can be shown that wiseness is an abstract construct that can be used to specifically refer only to females in the same way actress can be used to specifically refer only to females.


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## berndf

Linguistic Sunlight said:


> Berndf, and wisdom/wiseness seems to have some ancestry in the German word wissen which is a neuter noun meaning knowledge, while in the construction of wissenschaft meaning science the suffix -schaft makes the noun feminine (die), although I am not sure if there is an equivalent masculine noun meaning science in German.


All infinitives are neuter. Words ending in _-schaft_ are indeed feminine, as are all nouns ending in _-ung_, cognate to the English gerund (_-ing_). Off my head I can't think of a masculine word meaning science. There are other abstract nouns with the ending _-tum_, cognate to English _-dom_, which are masculine as in OE, i.e. _Reichtum_ (_richness, riches_).


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## CapnPrep

JuanEscritor said:


> But what are you driving at?


I'm wondering the same thing. Is there actually a question here? In Linguistic Sunlight's posts, all I can see is a recurring prescriptivist recommendation (journalists and other English speakers should not use _she_ for countries and ships or for anything else that isn't actually female), and a recurring misunderstanding of how natural gender is determined, and in particular a fundamental confusion about what "common gender" means:


common gender in the case of police and nation as both nouns refer to both men and women (#1)
 I wasn't sure about brain and digit as both men and women have both  brains and digits, so could they also not be in the common gender? (#8)
In the case of abstract nouns such as liberty and wiseness I think they  have to lose their feminine grammatical gender and become neuter or  common gendered nouns, although I am not totally sure about masculinity  and femaleness, can they be referred to as he and she respectively? (#17)
the old English masculine noun wisdom has to lose its masculine  grammatical gender as the construct does not exclusively refer to men (#20)
unless it can be shown that wiseness is an abstract construct that can  be used to specifically refer only to females in the same way actress  can be used to specifically refer only to females (#23)
Insofar as "common gender" is a useful concept in English, the only words that are correctly identified as common gender nouns so far in this thread are _lawyer_ and _actor_ (for those speakers who avoid using _actress_). That is because these words can be used to refer to a person of either sex, and when we need to choose a pronoun to replace them, we sometimes run into problems. [Here again, there are already many existing threads about this topic in English Only.] None of the other words that Linguistic Sunlight wonders about denotes a person, so none of them can be common gender. 

For collective nouns like _nation_ and _police_, we sometimes have a choice between _it_ and _they_, but the fact that the nouns may refer to a group of males and females has zero grammatical significance. For body parts like _digit_ and _brain_, the sex of the person they belong to has zero grammatical significance. 

Finally, for abstract nouns, the normal pronoun is also _it_. The fact that _masculinity_ and _femaleness_ are associated with males and females has zero grammatical significance. We use _it_ for _wisdom_ because it is *inanimate*, not because using _he_ would imply that only men can be wise.


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## JuanEscritor

> LS in Message 23:
> 
> Another way of looking at grammatical gender is to separate the nouns that accord with natural gender from those that do not.  With these two groups of nouns it then becomes easy to see that grammatical gender is still a gender system that involves masculine, feminine, common and neuter gendered words.


Yes, the same terminology is used to describe these things; but they are _not the same thing._  Grammatical gender, and all of this idea's associated terminology, is nothing more than a classification system of nouns; the labels could have been anything else (and I wish they would have been!).



> The presence of non natural gendered nouns does not preclude such a system from being regarded or interpreted as a gender system


Of course not; and it would be very interesting to discuss why such systems have, in the present day, moved to align biological and grammatical genders.  I'd hazard to guess it is the result of a mass public confusion on the understanding of linguistic's concept of grammatical gender.



> it merely reveals that such a system also allows artificial gender classifications.


But of course, any such link and/or association between biological and grammatical gender would be entirely artificial.



> unless it can be shown that wiseness is an abstract construct that can be used to specifically refer only to females in the same way actress can be used to specifically refer only to females.


It cannot so be shown, because it is simply not possible without invoking poetic license.

JE


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## CapnPrep

JuanEscritor said:


> Grammatical gender, and all of this idea's associated terminology, is nothing more than a classification system of nouns; the labels could have been anything else (and I wish they would have been!).


I agree that there is a terminological confusion in this thread; this has been pointed out several times already (in vain…). On the other hand, it is not correct to claim that grammatical gender (in IE languages, for example) is simply a formal classification of nouns with no association to semantic categories like male/female or animate/inanimate. Grammatical gender and natural gender are intimately linked, and this is not a recent development found only in certain modern languages.

Here are some other threads where the semantic motivation of grammatical gender and the alignment with natural gender have been discussed:
*Evolution of word gender in languages
**Gender of words
*We are starting to repeat a lot of the information (and misinformation) found in those discussions. And I have to say that the first thread actually contains much more information about Old and Middle English than this one does, even though that is supposedly our specific topic here.


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## JuanEscritor

CapnPrep said:


> Grammatical gender and natural gender are intimately linked, and this is not a recent development found only in certain modern languages.



Perhaps they are; if so, though, the issue would then be: _why_ are they intimately linked and does such a link between natural classification and lexical classification exist for _other_ grammatical classes (animacy, etc.)?

I think a discussion on these issues would be extremely interesting.  I may start one. 

JE


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## Linguistic Sunlight

CP, it seems to me that the natural gender system is founded on biological gender and therefore the natural gender of any given construct is determined by its biological gender or genders.  It therefore seems strange perhaps even painful to place constructs such as phallus and testicles in the neuter gender and to refer to them using the pronoun it rather than he.  I would be more inclined to classify phallus and testicles as naturally masculine nouns, and womanly parts as naturally feminine nouns. By extension body parts that are common to both genders such as digit or brain might therefore belong to the common gender.

It also seems unnatural to use the pronoun it in relation to abstract constructs that refer exclusively to males or females as the biological gender underlying each construct is masculine and feminine respectively.  Furthermore as constructs including nation, police, and society refer to groups of humans of both genders they seem to be naturally common gendered nouns, unlike mountain range or fleet of ships which seems to be naturally neuter gendered nouns.


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## Alxmrphi

Linguistic Sunlight said:


> It also seems unnatural to use the pronoun it in relation to abstract constructs that refer exclusively to males or females as the biological gender underlying each construct is masculine and feminine respectively.



What would an _abstract construct that refers specifically to males or females_ be?


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## Linguistic Sunlight

Alxmrphi, for example manhood, womanhood, fatherhood and motherhood are typically considered abstract.


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## Alxmrphi

Linguistic Sunlight said:


> Alxmrphi, for example manhood, womanhood, fatherhood and motherhood are typically considered abstract.



So, going along with:



			
				Linguistic Sunlight said:
			
		

> It also seems unnatural to use the pronoun_* it*_ in relation to abstract  constructs that refer exclusively to males or females as the biological  gender underlying each construct is masculine and feminine respectively.



You would say it makes more sense to say, "_*Fatherhood*, *he* is not easy sometimes_", or maybe for the feminine counterpart "_The trouble with *motherhood* is, well *she*'s such a b**ch_" ?
This is where I am losing you... (I hope you can understand my confusion).


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## berndf

Linguistic Sunlight said:


> It also seems unnatural to use the pronoun it in relation to abstract constructs that refer exclusively to males or females as the biological gender underlying each construct is masculine and feminine respectively. Furthermore as constructs including nation, police, and society refer to groups of humans of both genders they seem to be naturally common gendered nouns, unlike mountain range or fleet of ships which seems to be naturally neuter gendered nouns.


I think you got the answer before:


CapnPrep said:


> Finally, for abstract nouns, the normal pronoun is also _it_. The fact that _masculinity_ and _femaleness_ are associated with males and females has zero grammatical significance. We use _it_ for _wisdom_ because it is *inanimate*, not because using _he_ would imply that only men can be wise.


There is nothing more to add, except maybe a word of caution: The term _natural gender_ may have misled you. It doesn't mean you can use the pronoun the way you _feel_ them to be "natural". It still is a formal concept with formal rules. It is called _natural_ because it follows biological, i.e. _natural,_ gender (well, to a certain extend; most animals have a biological gender, yet are referred to as _it_) and not because it had to follow a speaker's personal intuition. According to this system all abstracts are considered _inanimate_ and all _inanimates_ are referred to as _it_.


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## clevermizo

I read a paper awhile ago(sorry, I've misplaced the reference) in which the loss of grammatical gender in English is discussed. In it was posited that this has in great part to do with a lack of support in the pronoun system and adjective system. I.e. - that at some point the pronounce _he, heo/seo/'she' _and _(h_)_it_ started to come to stand for natural gender categories, regardless of a noun's grammatical gender. Furthermore, certain agreements in the adjective system started to collapse where different forms began to sound the same (and actually looking here it appears even in Old English many of the nominative forms were the same across genders). The combination of the lack of support for the grammatical gender by way of pronoun and adjective agreement led to its loss.

The greater implications of the paper were I think the generalized hypothesis that it is through support of pronouns, demonstrative and adjective concordance that grammatical gender of nouns is maintained in a system and that it is very difficult to maintain such a classification scheme without this support.

I was hoping someone with more knowledge could comment on this.


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## Linguistic Sunlight

Alxmrphi, your use of the pronoun he in relation to fatherhood and she in relations to motherhood seems naturally accurate to me.

All, I indicated earlier that liberty and justice were grammatically feminine, as liberty was imported into English from the French word liberté f which was derived from the Latin lībertās f, and justice was imported from the old French word justise f which was derived from the Latin word iustitia f.  

Now as there are also Roman goddesses known by the names of Liberty and Justice I was wondering if the goddesses were named according to their ambit of responsibility, or if the the nouns were derived from the names of these goddesses?


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