judy@epistemi.UUCP (Judy Delin) (10/31/86)
It seems that some of the discussion here is confusing "gender" with "sex".
"Gender" is a grammatical feature of nouns, rather than a feature of noun
referents. Sexless, inanimate things have gender in languages that use it.
This is what results in distinctions like "la table bleue" versus "le sac
bleu". It is entirely independent of the sex of the referent (you can't turn
a table upside down to find out what sex it is!) and that is backed up by
the fact that in German, for example, the linguistic gender of "Madchen"
(young girl) is neuter, not feminine. I don't think this is an isolated
example: there seems to be a fairly arbitrary relationship between gender
and referent, possibly because only animate things can be said to have
inherent gender (where gender = sex) and there are a lot of things to talk
about that aren't animate. It therefore appears to be up to the individual
language to categorise its nouns into genders the way it likes.
It is for this reason that I think the writer (I'm sorry, I didn't save the
original posting) whose German friend called the dog "he" automatically is
confusing the two issues. For speakers of gender-using languages, there are
too few words whose gender matches a visible gender of the referent for this
match to be relevant: gender is simply a fact about the way a noun and the
things that agree with it behave grammatically. I think therefore that the
German friend was just displaying a normal tendency to call all dogs "he",
in the same way as cats tend to be "she".
Judy Delin University of Edinburgh, Centre for Cognitive Science,
2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9LW, Scotland.
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