TIS and grammatical gender (Was Re: [B-Greek] 1 Timothy 5:8
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Fri Jan 16 13:10:31 EST 2004
At 11:52 AM -0500 1/16/04, Polycarp66 at aol.com wrote:
>No, Ann is correct. Also D. Hoxworth is correct. Masc. grammatical gender
>is not a totally reliable indicator that it refers to a male. In English we
>have historically used a similar device in the use of pronouns, i.e. we state
>such things as "he who has ears . . ." knowing that the "he" does not preclude
>the fairer sex. Hoxworth is correct in that one cannot simply pull a theory
>out of thin air which blatantly contradicts ALL evidence. There's enough
>truth
>in the equation of grammatical gender with physical gender to make such an
>assertion positively dangerous.
>
>gfsomsel
I'd go farther than this: it's not simply that there are exceptions to a
putative "rule" that biological gender corresponds to grammatical gender in
ancient Greek; the fact is that the correspondence of biological gender to
grammatical gender is an exception to the disposition of ancient Greek
nouns in terms of grammatical gender: most ancient Greek nouns do NOT refer
to persons or animals that may be characterized in terms of biological
gender at all: a ship is "feminine" (hH NAUS) or it is "neuter" (TO
PLOION); a bridge (hH GEFURA), a road (hH hODOS), a voyage (hO PLOUS), a
tree (TO DENDRON), etc.--these fall into grammatical categories that have
nothing to do with biological gender. Nor can it be said that H/A nouns are
conceived as biologically feminine, OS nouns conceived as biologically
masculine, ON nouns conceived as biologically neuter. There are -A nouns
that are masculine, oodles of -OS nouns that are feminine (almost all the
tree-names are feminines in -OS), and -ON nouns like TEKNON and PAIDION
that obviously refer to persons but are grammatically neuter. As for
adjectives, there are lots of adjectives of first-and-second declensions
that have common gender forms in -OS and most adjectives of the third
declension have common gender forms for masculine and feminine. I'd say
that the use of the grammatical gender forms to represent biological gender
for persons and animals is probably secondary to the distinctions of
grammatical gender. Aristophanes makes a joke of this in his satire on
Socrates, "Clouds," where Socrates explains to the stupid old man
Strepsiades that you turn the noun ALEKTRUWN into a feminine by changing
the ending on it to -AINA --> ALEKTRUAINA to produce a word that means
"roosteress." Greek has three genders, although it might be argued that the
neuter (Greek OUDETERON) is really a form of the noun that lacks
distinctive nominative forms; I'm told that there are some American Indian
languages that have seven or eight different grammatical "genders"--where
gender means "kind" and has no reference to biological distinctions.
The point is that the grammatical genders of Greek may be used secondarily
to designate persons or animals in biologically distinct genders, but those
genders are not fundamentally biological at all.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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