Last time we were talking about grammatical cases, and whilst Slavic languages are not lacking in those, they fall far behind the Finno-Ugric ones in this gregard. But what Slavic languages lack in cases, they more than make up in genders.
Lets talk a bit about gender then.
Czech language does not have a distinction between the words “sex” and “gender” the way English does. Our ID’s have a category “pohlaví” which means “sex” in the biological sense and is therefore sex assigned at birth. For trans people it is their chosen sex assigned after transition, but sex assigned at birth before transition (the legislative process has a lot to be desired, but since I am not trans, I leave the discussion about how to improve it to trans people).
This property of my native language has caused me some trouble in understanding articles written in English, because I have seen words “sex” and “gender” as synonyms and it took me awhile to understand that this is not the case.
However what helped me finally in understanding is the fact that the only way Czech language has gender in it, it is very, very obviously a social construct, specifically a linguistic one. It translates as “rod” and means grammatical gender (in one context).
Czech has four genders, or three with one of them being split into two distinct categories, depending on the specific linguist’s opinion. I was taught in school that there are four:
masculine animate – refers to humans and some animals
masculine inanimate – refers to some inanimate objects and some plants
feminine – refers to humans, some animals, some inanimate objects and some plants
neuter – refers to some animals, some inanimate objects and some plants
The gender of a noun defines not only how the noun itself inflects depending on the case, it also defines conjugaton and declension of verbs and adjectives. For example a sentence “black bear climbed a tree”, can be “černý medvěd vylezl na strom” for a male bear or “černá medvědice vylezla na strom” for a female one (word order in the CZ is identical to the EN version, only difference is “a” which does not translate – “na” means “on”). Each of the four genders has multiple groups defining said declensions and conjugations and learning it all is a nightmare for Czechs and literally impossible for any but the most dedicated foreigner.
Czech is also very strongly gendered with regard to people and there is no universal gender neutral way to refer to a person. The language is built around gender binary, even simplest sentences like “I woke up.” are mostly gendered – “Probudil jsem se” for masculine and “Probudila jsem se” for feminine. There are some simple phrases (mostly present tense) that can be expressed in gender neutral way, but to be honest I cannot imagine a whole story being written in a gender neutral way in Czech language. It might be possible, but likely not in a way that will seem natural and not forced, and definitively not easy to do.
This feature of our language has one unfortunate consequence – Czech transphobes, sexists and gender-essentialists (which includes unfortunately both most prominent czech sexologists) have much easier job defending status quo. Language very strongly influences how we think and because everyone is since childhood forced to choose from the binary for every single statement they make about what they have done or plan to do, everyone thinks that this linguistic binary reflects accurately the reality. And people who think that because we have only x words categorizing something that there are only x neatly distinct categories of said something are unfortunately everywhere.
On the other hand understanding that gender is a social construct and not something set in stone was made easy for me when I learned German, where the genders of different words do not allign with Czech at all and a thing that is masculine in Czech can easily be feminine or neuter in German. There is no logic or sense to it – why is “hrnec” (pot) masculine, but “konev” (kettle) feminine? Why is “klacek” (stick, staff) masculine, but “hůl” (cane, staff) feminine? Etc. And there are languages that lack grammatical genders altogether.
To me this illustrates that languages are but very poor and imperfect tools for communicating about the infinitely rich reality surrounding us. They are not perfect or complete descriptions of said reality and argumentum ad dictionarium is a very silly logical fallacy.
I have been exposed to Latin & Russian. They seem positively simple after reading this post.
If the Czhech grammatical gender system had any more genders, calling it a noun class system like in Bantu languages would be quite reasonable.
Grammatical gender seems to be something that can change as languages evolve. For example the North Germanic languages have both two- and three-gender systems. In Swedish, Danish and Norwegian Bokmål standard, there are two genders, common and neuter but the Nynorsk standard of Norwegian, and many Norwegian and Swedish dialects retain the Old Norse three-gender system, masculine, feminine and neuter. And this all in a dialect continuum.
3rd person pronouns in Scandinavian languages do have three genders like in English. I’m happy that Finnish didn’t loan the concept of grammatical gender. We do have separate 3rd person pronouns for humans and non-humans, but in spoken language, the “human” pronoun hän (he/she) isn’t used often. Instead the word for it, se, is used for humans, animals and things.
In Latvian, the only main difference with genders is the absence of a neuter but in its place we have the inanimate feminine. But you still have the same difficulties separating gender from sex in ordinary language. There’s been some attempts lately, some better-sounding than others, but overall I hope something emerges. Language is, after all, always changing.
Anyway, I wanted to comment on this part, because I had the same experience in a slightly different collection of languages. I learned Latvian at home, started school knowing next to no English, and learned that… it didn’t matter if it is masculine or feminine! In fact, what does that mean in English? I didn’t have to know different endings! (Obviously English has a whole lot of other complications.) And then there was French, which I learned more or less parallel to English -- that one had genders, but just the two, oh wait no, there’s a neuter gender there, too, in the third person! (The strange little ‘on’.) But then genders between words didn’t agree (the word for sun, for example, is feminine in Latvian, masculine in French; it’s the opposite for the moon). So it really brought home the fact (not at that time, of course) that the attribution of gender is a very arbitrary thing that somehow just… happened at some point in language development. Reinforced by learning German in university, then moving over here after. I mean, I grew up thinking ‘banana’ was feminine, but turns out, over here, it’s “officially” masculine -- and that’s within the same language. And there’s a group of s-ending nouns that are historically feminine (99% of the time, nouns ending in -s are masculine…), but are slowly making the shift to masculine, just because people are bad at grammar. Not static at all, it seems to me.
So yeah -- language cannot and never will 100% reflect actual reality, and should never be used as a fundamental reason for why there are only two sexes and therefore two genders.
I would be careful with saying that everyone thinks that it accurately reflects reality. In my experience most people think that it somewhat reflects reality and almost nobody bothers to think about that “somewhat“. That’s a priori neither good nor bad. The best way to battle bias is exposure to another cultures/worldviews. Courses, that combine languague development (grammar, vocabulary etc.) with some culture & history of countries where that languague is used, can be effective.
Nice article (sadly, only in Czech) is O jazycích obtížných a neobtížných (“About difficult and not-difficult languagues”). Here is my favorite part:
It can be interesting to translate “psí ocas” into other languagues: “dog’s tail” in English, “dogtail” in German, on the other side of the globe “tail of/from dog” in Japanese, even “köpek kuyrugi = dog of tail” in Turkish. In Chinese and other non-grammatical languagues it’s simple: “dog tail”. It is as if dog’s tail opened window to the soul of a nation.
The ‘languague being a social construct’ also reminded me of the movie “Arrival”. The premise is simple: aliens came to Earth and people want to communicate with them. And this scene nicely shows that even asking these aliens a simple question can be impossible. Go linguists!
When I began learning English in school, I was perhaps too young to appreciate the novel linguistic concepts such as articles, prepositions, gendered pronouns or non-phonetic spelling. By the time I got a hang of those, they seemed entirely natural.
Much later, it has been revelatory to hear about extensively gendered languages, or languages that grammatically distinguish between animate/inanimate as well as human/nonhuman.
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Generally, I agree with this, but people seem to have far more definite ideas when you get into discussions of sex and gender.
So mastering a gendered language is a matter of memorization, then. Of knowing that a specific thing is masculine or feminine, not that an entire category of things (like plants) is masculine or feminine. But a table isn’t really masculine or feminine, that’s just a method of categorization isn’t it. Or do you really think of masculine words as somehow male and feminine words as female?
I remember very well that when I first started learning English one of my biggest problems was forgetting about the existence of “it” and using gendered pronouns to refer to inanimate objects and animals. With animals of unknown sex I still have a tendency to use gendered pronouns according to the grammatical gender of the Portuguese name for the animal. A random jay is intuitively “he” (gaio) and a random magpie is “she” (pêga). Just because that’s how my brain was trained to think.
voyager,
I certainly think of words (names) as being gendered, some more strongly than others and particularly those ending in -a (feminine) or in -o (masculine). Specific things, the objects those names refer to, obviously aren’t gendered given that synonymous words often don’t have the same gender. Say, “forest” is feminine, “woods” is masculine. And the sun is a star, but “sun” is masculine and “star” is feminine.