I don't think you understand. It's not what they are calling it nowadays, it's what it has always been called. There is nothing involved in grammatical gender about squeamishness or pudery, I assure you. In language gender is an abstract concept with often no relation to reality, which is something most sane involved in languages (teaching or studying) people acknowledge.Quote:
Originally Posted by SummerSolstice
In linguistics the gender of a word often has no correspondance to actual (natural) gender and the only reason we call it gender is because that is the traditional Euro-centric view of language (i.e. that Indo-European languages have three genders which can be roughly catagorized in masculine, feminine, and neuter). A noun's grammatical gender is often at dissonance with its actual gender, an example in German has been cited already, the same example holds true in Old English, and in Arabic there are many examples where things have non-natural genders, for example EVERY non-animate plural is Arabic is feminine, even if it is a boy doll, and some masculine plurals become feminine when pluralized. This DOES NOT mean that the Arabs have a tendancy for being transgendered, or that students in Arabic (an example of such a word) do.
As I said before, in some languages there can be up to fourteen genders, few of which are based on natural gender, for example; certain Australian languages have a gender for men and animate objects, women fire and dangerous things (the title of a relatively famous book on linguistics), edible fruits and vegetables, and miscellania (perhaps a note should be written to them about the political incorrectness of their grammatical catagories); there is a Caucasian language with a gender for insects, regardless of whether the insect is male or female; and as mentioned above Swahili has fourteen genders, and I would challenge you to find fifteen genders in the natural world. In short, grammatical gender has no relation to actual (natural) gender, never has, and the reason has nothing to do with squeamishness, fairness, or social commentary. Just because the Germans use a neuter for the word 'girl' does not mean they don't think girls are people, and just because I use 'men' when referring to humanity in general does not mean I discount women as being important. These are just linguistic trends, trends which, in my opinion, are better left alone, but that is another conversation.
