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A correspondent asked me about the gender of the Russian word for ‘coffee,’ and having copied out the very enlightening discussion on pp. 109-10 of The Russian Language in the Twentieth Century by Bernard Comrie, Gerald Stone, and Maria Polinsky (see these earlier LH posts: 1, 2, 3) I thought I’d share it here:
All the deficiencies of the neuter group notwithstanding, at least one word, and a very common one, has almost completed its shift from masculine to neuter; it is the word ко́фе ‘coffee’. Borrowed from English or from Dutch (koffie) in the beginning of the eighteenth century, the word originally had the form ко́фий or ко́фей, which allowed one to identify it as a masculine noun, by analogy with other nouns in -й. The form in -й is commonly found in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century language; SAR (1806-22) lists only the form кофей. The analogy with чай ‘tea’ was probably a contributing factor that added to the stability of кофей (кофий) in nineteenth-century language; the two words were sometimes juxtaposed in folklore (чаю-кофию). The form кофе, the rise of which is due to pronunciation reduction of the unstressed final segment, is cited as primary in SRJa (1895-1927); the word кофей (кофий) is explained by reference to кофе. In SSRLJa (1948-65), кофей (кофий) is still cited but as prostorečno [nonstandard colloquial]; other dictionaries (e.g. Ožegov (1972)) do not even mention it. The spread of the form кофе, which resembles other nouns in the neuter, created a conflict between the form and the earlier masculine gender of the word. As an attempt to resolve the conflict, кофе was increasingly used as a neuter noun in spoken Russian. Normative handbooks, however, were very slow and reluctant in acknowledging this change and stubbornly insisted on the masculine; the first mention of neuter, as a permissible variant alongside with masculine, occurs in the Academy Grammar (Русская грамматика 1980: i. 469); see also Zaliznjak (1980) and Borunova et al. (1983).
In this AskMetaFilter question about “What determines the gender of a neologism?” I mentioned the Russian word and told the following joke:
A Georgian goes up to the counter and asks for “один кофе” (odin kofe, ‘one coffee,’ using the masculine form of ‘one’). The woman behind the counter is (like most Russians with any education) a raging prescriptivist, who seethes over the fact that so many people think кофе is a neuter noun because of its ending and say одно кофе (using the neuter form, odno). She is thrilled that this fellow knows the correct gender, and compliments him effusively as she pours his cup. He then says “и один булочка” (i odin bulochka, ‘and one bun,’ again using the masculine form of ‘one’ but this time with the glaringly feminine noun булочка, proving that he simply uses один with every noun).
And while we’re talking about gender, I wasn’t going to post these depressing links because I dreaded the boring discussion of how feminism is out of date and we shouldn’t pay attention to gender but to what is said and yadda yadda yadda, but I think they’re important and I’m hoping that by sticking them at the end of a post about coffee and expressing my hope that comments will steer clear of that slough of boredom, I can magically avert it:
And the two people that I know of, not spammers, who are no longer welcome to post here are both women. Feminism is by no means out of date.
@John Cowan: Unsettling. On the other hand, for the one I know of, I didn’t picture her as a female until well after the affair is over.
It looks like an early commenter is waving everyone toward an even more miserable swamp. There aren’t enough hilariously bad jokes in the world to cheer that place up.
If you’re implying that their not being welcome has anything to do with their gender, you are insulting and wrong, and I’m surprised at you. Also, thanks a heap for starting the thread off that way.
Now I can’t help but wonder what sorta dramadramadramadramadrama I’ve missed by not being a regular.
So I don’t have to go and track down the references in C, S & Polinsky, what are the dictionary abbreviations SAR, SRJa and SSRLJa?
Annoying behavior is attributable to persons, not to gender. But only grammarians attribute “gender” to parts of speech. Today’s “grammatical gender” is a misnomer, to which the expression “grammatical genus” would be preferable. Some Romans may have been oversexed, but not the grammarians.
German men and women on the street don’t think of der and die as having anything to do with genitals, nor of das as being castrated. In fact they don’t think of der, die and das at all, except when, as they speak, they are briefly uncertain as to which case-marker to use with a particular word they’re about to utter.
I am not, at all, implying that they’re unwelcome because they’re women. It’s obvious that there are women who are welcome here. But I do wonder if the community (unconsciously) held the two in question to a higher standard. “Equality is not when a female Einstein gets made assistant professor, but when a female shlemiel advances as a fast [if at all] as a male shlemiel.” There are obviously-male commenters here who express the same mixture of ignorance and intolerance and have it passed off as a joke, even a habitual joke, or simply ignored. Nor do I know if there were other deportees who were before my time here.
However, repeatedly being at the bottom of a conversational pigpile, however justified by the facts, helps no one’s decorum. People at the bottom of the pile (and I very much include myself here) get defensive precisely when they see the need to defend themselves. Now as a tactic, defensiveness sucks, because it tends to lash out at people who weren’t part of the assault, and brings on universal condemnation. Humility is much better both tactically and strategically, but it’s damned hard to do for anyone. And I have been disturbed on a few occasions to see our host not breaking up the pigpile but adding himself to it.
Anyway, I concede that I have derailed the thread, and I promise immediate amendment. My point, at least, is made.
Grumbly: That’s plainly true with der, die, das, but the story with er, sie, es is not nearly so clear: there is plainly tension in the minds of German-speakers between grammatical and natural gender there.
And language marches on! Not fifty years ago Theodore Bernstein in The Careful Writer was saying that “gender” was strictly a grammatical term and that your usage (and everyone else’s) was a barbarism. (I’d link to Google Books, but for some reason Google has been taking forever.)
And I have been disturbed on a few occasions to see our host not breaking up the pigpile but adding himself to it.
On the last occasion, I assumed that you had merely succumbed to genteel dismay, as a few others had. I remember your reproachful remark very clearly. Thing is, though, I have NEVER seen Steve adding himself to the pigpile. I myself have jumped on often enough, but he never has. It may help to recall that this is his blogsite, not a jackass reality show.
I myself never hold women to a higher standard, because I don’t care one way or the other what “women” do. They are a matter of indifference to me. However, I do expect them as persons to maintain par when it comes to acceptable behavior.
John Cowan: the story with er, sie, es is not nearly so clear: there is plainly tension in the minds of German-speakers between grammatical and natural gender there
Only in linguistically reflective persons who have not reflected on their literal-mindedness with regard to terms such as grammatikalisches Geschlecht. To give only one simple example, no unreflective person I know (I know a lot of them) worries that das Mädchen has had a mastectomy.
My wife and I went into one of the restaurants frequented more by the locals than by the tourists. On the menu was tomato soup, so I went up to the counter. “Dva pomidorowi” I said. “DVE pomidorowi” responded the woman behind the counter.
Sorry, I didn’t make myself clear. Nobody worries about using the pronoun es to refer back to an occurrence of das Mädchen in a sentence. In Kölsch, dat is used to designate a girl even without an explicit prior occurrence of dat Mädche.
Jim: … that “gender” was strictly a grammatical term and that your usage (and everyone else’s) was a barbarism.
Note that I did not myself use “gender” in the way “everyone else” does nowadays, as in “gender studies”. In fact I never use the word “gender” at all except in the context of grammar – because it is a traditional term here. It’s only when folks start going on about this kind of “gender” having something to do with sex (and so “confusing” people) that I regret the very existence of the word “gender”. “Genus” would be less contentious.
I can’t speak for “the community,” but I myself hold everyone to the same standard, that of not repeatedly destroying intelligent and interesting conversation. I have no problem with derails, as everyone here knows, and I’m quite tolerant of occasional outbursts as long as the commenter generally has interesting things to say; furthermore, I am deeply reluctant to tell people to go away and always do my best to amend their behavior first, as I did in the cases in question. You can believe me or not.
Sorry, I should have expanded them; I blame laziness brought on by a winter day and a blazing fire in the wood stove.
In the same sentence, no. After several sentences, sie reasserts itself. The same thing happens in French after les personnes, who can become ils rather than elles (remembering that ils can refer to mixed-sex as well as all-male groups) fairly soon if the context calls for it.
Per contra, English singular they can be used even where the gender of the referent is known from context, provided the referent is indefinite.
I will grudgingly admit that that is often the case – provided we are agreed that there is never any metaphyico-sexual uncertainty involved in any of this. If you insist that there is, then I retract my admission. I don’t want any taint of association with this particular wrong-headed eidolon of the study.
Here in the 21st century, many people, I think, remain fairly unconcerned with the fact that some leisure activities are more preferred by one sex than the other. The subset of the population that likes watching football on television more than some threshold de minimis amount is well over 50% male. The subset of the population that affirmatively enjoys shopping for shoes more than some ditto is well over 50% female. I personally think that devoting lots of time to composing/editing wikipedia articles without getting paid for it is more akin to those sorts of no-accounting-for-taste voluntary interests than to, e.g., being admitted to medical school (reasonably close to 50/50 m/f at present in the U.S.).
The “Gender” entry in the Cambridge Textbooks in LInguistics series (by Greville Corbett) is especially awesome, btw, with lots of interesting cross-linguistic examples of how recurrent tensions between grammatical gender and the gender-or-equivalent of real-world referents get resolved differently in different times and places.
@J.W. Brewer: I agree, but the linked article also makes the point that, as a result of Wikipedia’s gender-skewed contributor-base, it also has gender-skewed coverage: Wikipedia provides much more information on televised football than on shoe shopping. (To make the point, it gives specific examples of distorted coverage. Whether or not all of these are directly due to the gender imbalance, or whether Wikipedia-editing correlates with various interests independently of the interests’ genderedness, I can’t say; but either way, it’s unfortunate. Wikipedia aims to be the sum of the world’s knowledge, and many people already see it as such. Does anyone really want women’s knowledge to be absent?)
Pardon my layman interpretation of this grammarian vs non-grammarian view of gender in language but isn’t it possible that even though grammarians are the only ones who take notice of gender non-grammarians are still subconsciously affected by it? I’m pretty sure Lera Boroditsky, who I know is somewhat controversial among academics, has done experiments showing that people who speak languages that attach a gender to words like ‘chair’ or ‘coffee’ also give those objects the same associations that they give males and females. Of course, that’s completely moot if I’m misunderstanding the argument here.
I personally think that devoting lots of time to composing/editing wikipedia articles without getting paid for it is more akin to those sorts of no-accounting-for-taste voluntary interests
I don’t have such a charitable view. Wikipedia is not just people doing unpaid work. More often than not it’s just a hobby, at times people with an axe to grind finally getting the chance to tell the world how it really is, or otaku who want to inflict their hobby on everyone else, or just delinquents who want to go in and wreck things. That is not to deny that there is a huge amount of good stuff there, but if you go to talk pages to see the amount of time and effort spent arguing about ‘point of view’, and then look at articles so hacked and patched that they are no longer a coherent articles, you realise that there is a price for all that unpaid work. Maybe there are less women because there are fewer female otaku…
I’m sure that’s part of it, but the point is that Wikipedia has to somehow change so that editing is made less otaku-specific. Like it or not, Wikipedia is the go-to source of general knowledge in the early 21st century, and the fact that it skews male is unambiguously a Bad Thing.
Also, why the hell are the accents sitting over an empty space in my post, e.g. in ко́фе? Or do other people not see it that way? I’m running Firefox on Windows.
Lera Boroditsky, who I know is somewhat controversial among academics, has done experiments showing that people who speak languages that attach a gender to words like ‘chair’ or ‘coffee’ also give those objects the same associations that they give males and females.
That is an English sentence by someone who thinks he/she is giving a neutral description of something that, I claim, cannot be adequately described with everyday English sentences. That something can be addressed only with technical English terminology, cautiously deployed – “grammatical gender”, used by the general public, is not an example of such terminology.
The very image of Germans, say, “attaching gender” to “words like ‘chair’ or ‘coffee'” already reveals a English-language bias – and it’s only weaseling to complain in reply that “attaching gender” is an “analogy” or “metaphor”. Assuming a general knowledge of human physiology, I make bold to claim that it would be completely misleading to describe the human body as “a torso to which arms and legs have been attached”.
Fact is, no English native speaker not also a fluent speaker of German or French etc. is in any way qualified to opine about such a question as “what is grammatical gender about ?”. The short answer to that question, from my point of view as a fluent speaker of German, is: “it’s not about anything at all nowadays, it’s just the way things are”.
Maybe historical linguists could tell us surprising things about mythico-sexual ideas having played a role in the development of particular languages. But then biologists tell us surprising things about humans having developed from fish-like creatures, yet that does not mean it would be an adequate description of other people to call them “trout”.
If the sentence quoted at the beginning of this post is a fair representation of what Boroditsky thinks, then I suggest that “ridiculous” is a more precise term than “controversial” for such thought.
A new item of vocabulary, whether coined or borrowed, has to have a gender. Whether you talk of assigning a gender to it or figuring out what gender it should be inherently, the problem is still one of deciding what gender a genderless word should be.
experiments showing that people who speak languages that attach a gender to words like ‘chair’ or ‘coffee’ also give those objects the same associations that they give males and females.
As Grumbly says for German, in a language with grammatical gender, like French or Spanish, speakers don’t think of “chair” or “coffee” as actually male or female (or neither), and don’t even imagine them that way in the normal concrete context. But in a context where those things are somehow humanized (playing roles in a fantasy piece, for instance, as in “The Nutcracker”), then associations suggested by the gender of the noun may come into focus. These potential associations become important when translating between one language and another.
In French (and no doubt in other languages) there are a small number of cases where the same referent can be named by synonyms of opposite gender (for instance, a pumpkin can be la citrouille or le potiron), allowing alternate translations, but this is relatively rare. It is more common that a difference of gender for the same items between one language and the other causes translation problems because of the different cultural connotations of the two genders.
As an example, in French there are two words for “seagull”, la mouette (the word I normally use) and le goéland (a word I know but would not use spontaneously). In the well-known book “Jonathan Livingston Seagull”, the availability of those two words of opposite gender made it easy to choose the appropriate masculine word to translate the title as Jonathan Livingston le Goéland and to continue using the masculine noun for this male character. If only la mouette had been available, the translator would have had a problem, and the adventures of the character might have been more difficult to reconcile with the stereotypical feminine connotations suggested by the gender of the second noun (which, with the ending -ette, also suggests smallness).
Conversely, for the Russian play known as “The Seagull” (a word which is feminine in Russian, as in French) in which the vulnerable, betrayed young woman sees herself as a mortally wounded seagull, the French title preserves the image with “La Mouette”, whereas the alternate designation “Le Goéland” would be quite inappropriate. English seagull is neutral, so that the image of the bird misses the specifically feminine connotations of the Russian and French words.
And, of course, Chekhov would never have used a masculine-default bird such as “грач” or “ворон,” and it would never have occurred to his heroine to compare herself to one.
Also, isn’t das Mädchen sort of a special case, since it’s only neuter because of the diminutive suffix? I certainly have weird gender-associations with all sorts of Russian words that are generally tied to their gender. There’s even a superstition: if you drop your fork while eating, you’ll get a female visitor; if you drop your knife, you’ll get a male. Since there isn’t really anything more feminine about a fork, I think the obvious explanation is that it’s based on the gender of the words.
In German, all nouns are gendriform. When a new noun X enters the language, it enters it as der X, die X or das X. There is no other way for X to become a German noun. It does not first become a genderless German noun, only later to acquire a gender after much discussion. There is no such thing as a genderless German noun.
An English speaker can call this “attaching”, “assigning” or “intuiting” a gender, but he is misunderstanding the process if he thinks it is like attaching a price tag to an article for sale in a department store. The article does not need a price tag, though by (German) law it should carry one.
There are several instances of loan words whose gender has not finalized, such as der/das Primat, die/das Review. But so what ? I am particularly annoyed by die Review (a variété show) when applied to a code review, so I say das Review – and the people I deal with fall into line. There is a leeway of action in German for which English speakers are not prepared.
In a number of languages, nouns are divided into classes which loosely correspond to concrete categories and usually “agree” (or rather “attract agreement”) with other categories such as articles, pronouns, etc. In the Bantu languages of Africa, for instance, there are categories such as humans, plants, round objects, long objects, containers, etc. Each of these categories is marked by specific sets of prefixes which attach to the noun and words that go with it (adjectives, etc). Of course, not everything can be fitted neatly into the major categories, so the category of many nouns seems arbitrary.
In most Indo-European languages, the “gender” categories (originally masculine, feminine and neuter) place humans and domestic animals more or less obviously into the masculine and feminine “genders”, but there are also many exceptions, and inanimate objects or abstractions can also fall into masculine or feminine, otherwise German nouns would all be mostly neuter (as in English). The nouns, etc carry (or used to carry at a more remote period) some signs (usually a set of suffixes) which show which gender the noun belongs to, but with the passage of time (and the influence of another, separate noun-classification) the rationale for placing a noun in one gender category or the other has long been obscured. What often remains is the association of an ending with a gender, regardless of other considerations. For instance, in Latin words of the “1st declension” ended in -a and most of them were “feminine”. As a result, new words adopted or coined which happened to end in -a were considered to be “feminine”, and after a few centuries some plural neuters ending in -ia also became reinterpreted as feminine. Some derivational (word-creating) suffixes were also conventionally “feminine”, for instance the ancestor of the -tion suffix (that’s why similar words in French -tion, Spanish -cion, Italian -zione, etc are all still feminine in those languages). These sorts of things happened over a sequence of thousands of years, so except in clear-cut cases like the suffixes above, it is not usually possible to identify the reasons why a certain word is one gender or the other. As for German Mädchen ‘girl’ or Fräulein ‘miss, young lady’, these words are “neuter” because they include diminutive suffixes which cause whatever noun they attach to to be neuter, regardless of the gender of the basic noun (probably because originally the sex of a very young animal or child was functionally irrelevant).
By the way, you won’t find das Review in Duden. That’s because I made it up: das Codereview. My German code review colleagues now use it that way. It meets a need, namely to distinguish code reviews from variété – even though it’s sometimes hard to tell the two apart.
I suspect this kind of incentive would be inconceivable in French or Spanish. But German gives you a certain leeway, as I said – when you’re bold enough to take advantage of it.
But yeah, the raging prescriptivist virus has totally infected Poland (though language experts in the media are by way of contrast very reasonable and linguistically aware).
While here, IIRC the two female commenters were very welcome but took themselves away after making themselves less welcme with a lot of very intolerant comments. (outright racism has not been the norm here except for those two)
How does the NY Times survey know the sex of all the Wikipedia contributors? They don’t, of course; my sex isn’t evident from either of the names I use there (not Crown). In internet discussions that involve feminism or sexism I have sometimes found it convenient and persuasive to imply that I am a woman. I don’t think it was intellectually dishonest.
Not intellectually, but maybe dishonest in some other respect ? Morally ? Nah. When you think of yourself as an author, then anything goes.
What are the internet, facebook etc. but gigantic no-fee creative writing courses, without editors or agents to suppress the banality and ignorance of most of what is written ? That’s why so many people take part. Vanity publishing for free !
If someone assumes that what I’m saying is okay only if I’m a woman then they are being sexist and deserve to be confused.
Exactly. Whatever is said in the internet can only aspire to be a Modest Proposal. It’s not your fault when people expect you to be genuine and truthful. Banality and naiveté usually go hand in hand.
(sputtering as head comes out of the water of massive amounts of work)… definitely missed some dramatic posts here… very interested in the Wiki question…but first, about kofe. There was a big bru-ha-ha here when the dictionaries started giving neuter and masc. as equally possible variants, mostly because 1)people thought they HAD to use the neuter and 2) if you are used to hearing one thing, it’s almost physically annoying to hear something else and 3) yeah, perscripticism is alive and well in Russia.
And speaking of which… I found a sentence in the NYT that struck me as being wrong/weird/idiomatic usage, but then I wondered if I’ve just missed another sweep of language change. The sentence: “They were people who live in white apartments and people who collect art books by the myriad.”
I expect that J Cowan meant that there is a tendency to use es to refer to inanimate nouns when the referent is physically remote in the stream of speech, whatever its gender is.
Also, I’m surprised that no one has brought up Roman Jakobson, who spent a lot of time writing and lecturing about the effect of gender on the way the referents of nouns are treated in poetry. He did contrastive studies between words like sun whose gender is different in Slavic and Germanic, etc.
mab, my first reaction was: “that’s wrong, it should be myriads”. Then I thought: “but it could be more elegant and novel to use the singular”. Then: “what does myriad mean anyway ?”.
You’re going to have to be more direct in your criticism; otherwise I’m never going to understand what you think I’ve done.
I once met a foreign student (don’t remember his nationality) who was studying Icelandic at the University of Iceland. He found it puzzling that kók (Coke, the soft drink) is variously regarded as a neuter noun or a feminine one. I, a native speaker, had never noticed.
This discrepancy is not something that Icelanders would notice. But it seemed to me, upon reflection, that the word bottle (or can) is implied in the latter example. Both are feminine nouns. Kók, the neuter noun, refers to the black liquid. Kók, the feminine noun, means coke bottle or a can of coke.
Neither kók nor kaffi take a plural ending or form (in any gender). Kaffi is just too unIcelandic a word, it’s impossible to come up with a plural form. But kók is easy: the feminine plural would be kækur. I guess the word kækur is just too weird to be acceptable. Besides, it’s taken, it means tick (the movement disorder).
Gary: I expect that J Cowan meant that there is a tendency to use es to refer to inanimate nouns when the referent is physically remote in the stream of speech, whatever its gender is.
That’s true as regards the way ordinary Germans speak. However, I take the literary style of German philosophers and sociogists as my models, where there is no such tendency. Instead, one obtains here a heightened clarity of back-reference. Here an example from Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft: