The wild world of grammatical gender

Beyond masculine, feminine, and neuter

Ernst Haecker, Kunstformen der Natür (1904)

Have you ever played the game Twenty Questions?

If you haven’t, I’ll explain it briefly: it’s a guessing game in which one player has a thing in mind, and the other players are tasked with figuring out what that thing is.

The players who are guessing are allowed to ask questions to the player who knows the answer, but these questions must be yes-no questions, such as Is it bigger than a breadbox?, which is a popular early question. If the guessing players don’t figure out what the thing is after twenty questions, the player answering the questions wins. It’s great fun.

One popular variant takes pity on the guessers and allows them to begin with a single question that doesn’t evoke a yes or a no: Animal, vegetable, or mineral? This helps limit the universe of possibilities for the guessers.

Anyone who plays Twenty Questions will realize how hard it is to come up with a useful way of classifying things. Given a set of objects, you could, in principle, come up with any number of rules for dividing them into categories.

The “animal, vegetable, mineral” classification happens to have an illustrious pedigree, namely the three “kingdoms” at the root of Linnaean taxonomy: the Regnum Animale ‘Animal Kingdom,’ Regnum Vegetabile ‘Vegetable Kingdom,’ and Regnum Lapideum ‘Mineral Kingdom.’

Lower down in the Linnaean taxonomy are the two levels which make up the modern scientific name in biology, consisting of genus (from a Latin word meaning ‘type’) and species (Latin again, for ‘external appearance’):¹ for example, in this system, human beings are given the name Homo sapiens, genus Homo ‘person‘ and species sapiens ‘wise.’

But many other classifications are possible, as any veteran player of Twenty Questions knows.

One system of classification you might find useful when you’re hungry is “food vs not food.” In fact, if you’re starving, your perception of the world might narrow such that this categorization is all that you care about.

Systems of classification are like lenses through which you can view the world. In other words, how you classify things depends on what you’re interested in.

This brings us to the case of the English philosopher John Wilkins (1614–1672), who made a proposal for an artificial language based on a system of classification,² wherein the first syllable of a word corresponded to the genus (there’s that word again) of the thing the word referred to: all birds begin with ze-, herbs all with ga-, and the elements with de-.

Names for specific (from the Latin species) examples of these larger genera (the plural of genus) are created by appending further sounds to this first syllable: deb is ‘fire’ (a species of the genus “element”), and flame is debɑ (a subtype of ‘fire’).

Wilkins’ goal was to introduce some correspondence between the structure of the world as he saw it and the structure of language. But, as we know, there is more than one way to classify the world.

If you are a fan of Jorge Luis Borges, you might have read about another classification, this one taken from a (fictitious) Chinese encyclopaedia The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge:

(a) those belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) trained ones, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) mythical ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) ones included in this classification, (i) ones that tremble as if they were insane, (j) innumerable ones, (k) one drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) ones that have just broken the vase, (n) ones that look like flies from afar. (my translation)

This example comes from Borges’ (1942) essay El idioma analítico de John Wilkins ‘The analytic language of John Wilkins,’ in which he critiques Wilkins’ Real Character, noting how Wilkins’ ostensibly universal system is actually entirely arbitrary:

Let us consider the… category… of minerals. Wilkins divides these into common (silica, gravel, slate), useful (marble, amber, coral), precious (pearls, opals), transparent (amethyst, sapphire) and insoluble (coal, chalk and arsenic). (tr. Fitzgerald)

Can a mineral not be both insoluble and useful? Coal seems to have been fairly useful during the Industrial Revolution, not to mention the use my high school science teacher got out of chalk.

Borges concludes:

it is clear that there is no classification of the Universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what thing the universe is. (tr. Fitzgerald)

And yet our languages seem intent on making us classify the world.

Even the English language forces us to specify the grammatical number of a noun, that is, to say whether we’re talking about one thing (singular) or a group of things (plural). More frustratingly, it does not let us remain neutral on the point! Whenever we say a noun, say country, we’re forced to say whether we are talking about one country or many countries.

Not all languages do this: in (Mandarin) Chinese, for example, 國家 guójiā could correspond to the English ‘country’ or ‘countries.’ Chinese doesn’t force you to specify.

If you’re a native English speaker, you may not find this requirement, that every noun be marked for grammatical number, particularly frustrating. In fact, it may seem like the most natural thing in the world to you. But if you’re a native speaker of a language (such as Chinese) which doesn’t force this issue, you may perceive the requirement to specify grammatical number as a kind of imposition.

But native English speakers can learn how it feels when language imposes its categories on its speakers simply by learning French, Spanish, German, or any of the countless languages that have the dreaded grammatical gender.

Grammatical gender is a category that makes little sense to the native speaker of English. Every day in some Spanish classroom somewhere in the world, a student encounters the fact that mesa ‘table’ is grammatically feminine and asks the teacher, “Why is a table a girl?”

It seems slightly preposterous to the native speaker of English that, stepping into the Spanish classroom, we should be forced to consider tables and chairs feminine, while looking on desks and ballpoint pens as masculine. In what sense are these classroom objects masculine or feminine?

The situation gets worse when we try to learn another language with grammatical gender, because the genders we took such pains to learn for Spanish don’t transfer to German!

Spanish compels us to divide the world into feminine tables (la mesa) and masculine bridges (el puente), while German foists upon us masculine tables (der Tisch) and feminine bridges (die Brücke), not to mention neuter girls (das Mädchen)!

What is going on here?

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You’re reading The Dead Language Society. I’m Colin Gorrie, linguist, ancient language teacher, and your guide through the history of the English language and its relatives.

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What is grammatical gender?

In the words of the linguist Ranki Matasović, “gender is perhaps the only grammatical category that ever evoked passion.”³

And the reason is not merely down to the woes of the Spanish student. It’s that the grammatical concept of gender interacts with another concept we call gender, one much more socially relevant. And, as we learned from German, the relationship is often paradoxical. A bridge is feminine but a girl is neuter? What?