In many Indo-European languages [1], all nouns, even those representing inanimate objects like pieces of furniture, even words like "person" that could refer to both males and females, can be described as masculine, feminine, or neuter. A group of linguists recently did an experiment to determine if speakers are influenced by grammatical gender.
They took groups of native German and Spanish speakers and asked them to describe sets of objects. Interestingly, when the Germans were asked to describe a key, for which they have a masculine word, they tended to use adjectives like "hard", "metallic", "jagged", and "useful". The Spanish-speakers, who have a feminine word for the same object, tended to describe it as "tiny", "shiny", or "delicate". This is quite clearly a reflection of lingual links to gender schemas.
Speakers of these languages cannot run from the genderdized connections their distant ancestors made when, for example, they gave most abstract nouns an aura of femininity.
[1] Including Romance languages descended from Latin, the mother of hard-wired sexism.
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That's quite intriguing, which kind of explains a few irritating gender rules in latin grammar for me. I wonder, where did you find this information out? Quite interesting, thanks for posting this.
ReplyDeleteYou know, blogs like these make my day. :)
ReplyDeleteI love looking at how languages affect their speakers, thinkers, writers, etc, so this was very interesting. I enjoyed the example with German and Italian a lot too, since studying perception through language = awesome, lol. And, yes, Latin is crazy sexist at times. However, even with our gender-deprived English, I think there's still plenty of room to discriminate. I mean, jeez, even the word "ethnic" is racist... Sad, but at least it makes it an interesting area to study.
Yay Geekery!