Tag: german

I’ve wanted to write a post on gender as it relates to language for a while. It will be longer still. I was researching PIE (proto-indo-european) language formation to understand the why of grammatical gender—not the social corollary to biological sex.

Gender and genre both derive from Latin (genus) via French (gendre) and mean type or kind. Genre is somehow reserved for the Arts whilst gender feels more applicable to biology and grammar.

Given Feminist trends, it seems that the arbitrary gendering of nouns and adjectives could be reassigned to dedicated genders to avoid confusion with human gender roles.

As an English as a first language speaker, it’s always felt awkward for me to label a table female (la table) and a sun male (le soleil). It’s even worse when German designates these the opposite, respectively der Tisch (feminine) and die Sonne (masculine).

The fact that these are designated male and female is arbitrary. Just as we designate films as drama, comedy, romance, and action, we could redesignate male and female as two different category names—I dunno, frick and frack.

Grammatical genders themselves are necessarily offensive, but it feels patriarchal to have a rule that if males and females are subjects of a sentence, then the verb has a masculine conjugation. If instead we retained the same rule but said the verb has a frick conjugation, no offence, no foul.

I know this would be a lot of work, and I am just overthinking, but this is what I do.