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However note that the Latin homo-, 'man' is not related to the Greek homo-, 'same'. Also, OE wīfman was masculine gender but wīf was neuter. We still have the actual word wīfman in a reversed version: manwijf, a woman looking and acting like a man.
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It wasn't till we basically dumped the concept of gender as a grammatical concept and transfered the word over to the biological realm that we lost track of its original meaning. Are you suggesting that humans recognized gender in language before they recognized it in the biological world, or are you refering specifically to the word, "gender?"
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are you refering specifically to the word, "gender?"
All I was saying is that grammatical gender sometimes has little to do with biological sex.
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@ z: I understand what you were saying. Sometimes the articles and nouns don't even match in gender, as in Spanish: el cura, la mano, el agua, etc.
I was questioning Faldage's post concerning the word "gender"
Last edited by beck123; 03/22/10 02:52 AM.
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It wasn't till we basically dumped the concept of gender as a grammatical concept and transfered the word over to the biological realm that we lost track of its original meaning. Let me rephrase my question: Concerning gender, what was the original meaning to which you refer in your post, if not its meaning in the biological realm? I always assumed it had a biological sense first, which was borrowed at some point by students of language.
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Sometimes the articles and nouns don't even match in gender, as in Spanish: el cura, la mano, el agua, etc.
Latin manus, though it ended with a -us, and therefore "looks" masculine, was actually a fourth declension feminine noun. The normal historical development was a loss of final -s and a change of then final [i]u to o. Spanish agua is a feminine noun, but begins with an a, and for reasons of the use of the masculine article has to do with pronunciation. It only happens with words beginning with a that are stressed on the first syllable, like hacha, alma, etc.. If stressed on a different syllable, like amiga the article is la. There are a bunch of nouns that end in -a but which are masculine, and they all have homonyms which are feminine, e.g., el cura 'priest' but la cura 'healing'. El guía 'guide (person)', but la guía 'guidebook'.
In Latin, gender is a grammatical category of lexical items more so than one of morphological endings. Latin agricola 'farmer' is masculine, manus 'hand', is feminine, and corpus is neuter.
I was questioning Faldage's post concerning the word "gender"
Yes, I know. I was just making my position more certain.
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Nuncle has pretty much explicated what I meant be gender in my "dumped the concept of gender as a grammatical concept" post. What I was saying is that we didn't connect the concept of gender to the concept of sex back in the day. The modern English use of the word gender to refer to sex is, in my opinion, a relatively recent development made possible by the total loss of gender markings in nouns, adjectives, and articles. We knew all about sex (or at least all we needed to to keep making babies and directing the baby making in our domesticated animals) long before there was any notion that gender and sex could be conflated.
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The modern English use of the word gender to refer to sex is, in my opinion, a relatively recent development made possible by the total loss of gender markings in nouns, adjectives, and articles.
There are examples of gender being used to mean sex in English going back to the 14th century. Of course, Middle English had pretty much gotten rid of grammatical gender by then. In Greek γενος (genos) and Latin genus, generis, both meant primarily 'birth, stock', extending to 'kind, species', and finally in the grammatical sense gender. Of course, the fact that two of the three genders (in Greek and Latin) were called masculine and feminine, no doubt, lead to a metaphorical (?) use of gender for sex. There is an example of this in Aristotle's Rhetoric 1407b7. (I am still chasing down the citation.)
[Addendum: I have found the citation in Aristotle which I cited above, and it refers not to biological sex, but to grammatical gender. Not sure what LSJ was on about.]
Last edited by zmjezhd; 03/22/10 12:35 PM.
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That's all very enlightening, and I thank you both for the time you took to address my remarks.
Last edited by beck123; 03/22/10 06:48 PM.
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In the 2 cents department... la guía is guidebook, but it also is a female guide. Context provides meaning.
Another instance of "mismatch" is when a noun is shortened. la fotografía is often shortened to "la foto", just as "la moto" is short for la motocicleta.
Thanks for the "mano" explanation. Does it work the same way for "la modelo"?
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