Gender theory question

[pozorvlak]

Gender-theory kru, your attention please:

I came across the following recently, and wondered if any of you might have some idea of its source:

Gender is not like some of the other grammatical modes which express precisely a mode of conception without any reality that corresponds to the conceptual mode, and consequently do not express precisely something in reality by which the intellect could be moved to conceive a thing the way it does, even where that motive is not something in the thing as such.

Any thoughts? And can someone tell me what it means?

Comments

[steerpikelet.livejournal.com]

What it's saying is that gender, in grammatical terms, is not an arbitrary inflection -like, for example, the neuter case in Latin - but based on something tangible, ie the binary differences between men and women, and between 'male' things and 'female' things.

This is, of course, bollocks; not just because such binaries are far more complex than that, but because the existence of such grammatical modes prefigures, rather than reflects, the interiorisation of those thought patterns.

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

the existence of such grammatical modes prefigures, rather than reflects, the interiorisation of those thought patterns.

Does it? What evidence do we have for this?

I would have thought that apes could distinguish between male and female, long before they went on to evolve into beings with any concept of grammar.

[totherme.livejournal.com]

I suspect that steerpikelet might distinguish between biological gender and cultural gender. The former is generally pretty clearly binary (though there are exceptions) while the latter is much blurrier, and more likely to be the thing she's talking about in any given comment ;)

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

Granted of course; I took the piece to be refering to the former, in languages such as English, where gender is only assigned to things that actually have it (leading of course to problems, exceptions and woolly lines, but still competely different from the use of gender in languages such as French).

But since its unclear wtf the piece is really saying I may be wrong (though it's clearly untrue to say that the gender that French assigns objects expresses something in reality so would then be baffled as to what its point is).

[totherme.livejournal.com]

It might be trying to talk about language in the abstract - perhaps as a prelude to designing a better language with fewer presumed isms...

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

I think you might be onto something there...

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

There's also the issue that we don't know which language the original piece was in - based on the complexity of the sentence structure, I think it may well have been written in a highly inflected language (which would therefore probably have grammatical gender).

I believe Proto-Indo-European had two genders, active and neuter, which corresponded roughly to things which can act (people, animals, gods, etc) and things which can only be acted upon (rocks, houses, trees, etc). At some point this split further into three genders, then recombined, resplit, and so on.

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

Oh that's interesting.

[neoanjou.livejournal.com]

So the quotation is saying that there are fundamental reasons behind a given word being masculine or feminine, i.e. 'Bridge' is masculine in most Romance languages because it reflects certain attitudes that the Romantic mind associates with masculinity (although that does make one wonder why the Germanic languages perceive the word as feminine).

The entirely contrary perspective would be that masculine and feminine are just labels applied to classes of words describing how they are used, and one may as well label words 'hot' and 'cold', 'red' and 'blue' or 'high' and 'low'.

Your opinion appears that while words don't have an intrinsic nature as being male or female, the suggestion of a gender to a word may alter one's perceptions of the object - i.e. one speaking a Romance language when asked to describe a bridge may talk of robust strength and utility, while a Germanic language speaker may refer first to the elegant curves and smooth lines.

Of course one may theorise that if this is the case one may expect Romance bridges to appear more 'male' and Germanic bridges more 'female', reflecting the preconceptions of the designer, thus somewhat enhancing the impression that gender is indeed intrinsic and not a societal construct.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

So this is essentially about semiotics, yes?

[kake]

> Any thoughts?

"What abominable writing."

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Yeah. In its defence, I suspect it's been badly translated from some other language.

[mi-guida.livejournal.com]

I'm going to go with "I really hope it's been translated from some other language" or at least been written by someone who doesn't have English as their first language (and thus imposes the structures of their own language on English).

Sadly, though, I'm no help on what/why/where/whuh?

[ryani.livejournal.com]

Spoiler Warning

I just saw that as well, on Paul Graham's "On Philosophy" essay.

The footnote says:
This is actually from the Ordinatio of Duns Scotus (ca. 1300), with "number" replaced by "gender." Plus ca change.

Wolter, Allan (trans), Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings, Nelson, 1963, p. 92.

I believe it was to show a point: lots of impressive-sounding words put together in a way that's hard to understand makes it easy to think that there is some underlying meaning that you are missing, as opposed to just being badly written.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Dude, at least include some spoiler space :-)

I'd assumed that was his point (though actually, I think steerpikelet has done a decent job extracting meaning from it, and probably something pretty close to the original meaning), but I wanted to see how the gender-theory crowd would react. Not entirely ethical, and not very scientific, but still potentially interesting. The game may be up now, but I'll screen your comment and let it run for a bit longer.