Re: OT: Gender Bending Moro

On Apr 2, 2005 2:17 PM, Pascal A. Kramm <pkramm@...> wrote:
> I think it's that way in Spansih and other languages (e.g. Italian), because
> thoese are primarily male-dominated societies where the womens don't have
> much influence, which reflects in the language.
> If women were to have more influence in the society (or if it would even be
> a female-dominated society), I could very well imagine that mixed-gender
> groups would be based on the female form then - not just in Moro, but
> probably also in other languages in which women have some influence in the
> society (female amazon tribes, for example).
This has been on the back-burner of my mind for some time.  I've heard
quite often that things like "ninos" and the generic "man" are
artifacts of male domination, but I've always been a bit skeptical.
(Anyway, "man" was *originally* a generic term, wasn't it?  Like
"anthropos" and "homo", right?)

This is just a subjective perception on my part, based on knowledge of
only a handful of languages, but I don't see a great deal of
correlation between the two.  Chinese is completely neutral in the
(spoken) 3rd person, and for professional terms, but I seriously doubt
this is either the effect or cause of a sexually egalitarian society.
Same with Turkish.  (Actually, I can only think of examples of
gender-neutrality in societies that are *more* male-dominated than
European ones :-P)

Since someone is going to bring it up eventually, I figure I'll do it:
Proto-Semitic polarity.  The plurals of masculine nouns being feminine
and plurals of feminine nouns being masculine.  (Scads weirder than
Moro, in my opinion, although probably not indicative of any sort of
excessive gender-bending among ancient Semitic peoples.)  There's
still bits of this in Arabic, mostly of the masculine singular =>
feminine plural variety.  I can't say I understand the details, so
I'll leave it to one of our resident Semiticists to fill me in.  Did
this also work with explicitly sexed groups?  I think it doesn't with
modern "walad" (boy); "awlad" (boys) is still masculine (right?), even
though most of the nouns I know in that plural-class go through
polarity.

This issue -- gender in language and its relationship with sexual
politics -- is one I've always wondered about, but I've never managed
to find much cross-linguistic data about it.  Or really any data at
all; usually I just hear it asserted as a truism.  Does anyone have
any pointers to studies about this?  Especially about, as Pascal
mentioned, societies that are more female-dominant?

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Patrick Littell
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