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

[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.