[B-Greek] Gender
frjsilver at optonline.net
frjsilver at optonline.net
Tue May 15 20:15:35 EDT 2007
Dear Friends --
I'm SO behind in my correspondence, I can't believe I'm making time for this response. Of course, Mr Flora will have his own take on this, but -- personally -- I'm not satisfied with the replies posted so far. So let me attempt an answer.
Most importantly -- and please forgive me if I'm 'preaching to the choir' -- GENDER is a purely grammatical concept. It has four possibilities: masculine, feminine, both, neither (neuter). But there are only two sexes: male and female.
So, e.g., IN ENGLISH 'stallion' is masculine, 'mare' is feminine, ''horse' is both, 'barn' is neither.
This is because English, like some other languages, has only NATURAL gender: people and animals of the biologically male sex are of grammatically masculine gender and take appropriate referents, and the same is true for the females of all species. Every THING which is of neither the male or female SEX is grammatically neither (neuter). Words referring to animate creatures, human and animal, without sex-specific characteristics ('horses', 'people', 'they') are grammatically 'both'. Please remember: this is merely grammar, and merely in English, although some other languages also function this way.
Greek, on the other hand, has BOTH natural and grammatical gender, sometimes in spite of what we native speakers of English would perceive as a contradiction or inconsistency between natural and grammatical genders.
Many words describing THINGS have a grammatical, rather than a natural, gender in Greek which is simply not a functional concept in English: hH TRAPEZA, hO LOGOS, TO KRIMA -- all of which require grammatically appropriate adjectives and pronouns as referents.
Then, as in English, there are Greek's natural-gender words: hO PATER, hH MHTHR, TO KRIMA.
But what do we do with TO PAIS? I've noticed that even in English we sometimes refer to a child or a baby as 'it', especially when very young, but I squirm at this. Greek doesn't.
Most of the time, it's understood that PARTHENOS refers to a woman in spite of its second-declension masculine FORM, but it's entirely possible to say/write hO PARTHENOS, describing a virgin male. The same is true of other words in Greek, although it's much more unusual to have first-declension (or otherwise) formally feminine words to be understood as masculine.
The rules of grammatical gender require that masculine, feminine, and neuter FORM nouns take masculine, feminine, and neuter referents accordingly -- unless they're used like hO PARTHENOS. Words such as hH hODOS will always require femine referents.
All of this is just as true in Modern Greek as in older usages. I hope this helps a little.
Peace and blessings to all.
CRISTOS ANESTH! ALHQWS hO KURIOS ANESTH!
Father James
Monk James Silver
Orthodox Church in America
----- Original Message -----
From: Delbert Flora
Date: Sunday, May 13, 2007 9:13 pm
Subject: [B-Greek] Gender
To: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
> Are there other reasons for the Greeks using Gender (Masculine,
> Feminine,
> Neuter) other than to indicate which word modifies which word?
>
> Kindly,
> Delbert Flora
>
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