[B-Greek] Gender

Dr. Don Wilkins drdwilkins at sbcglobal.net
Wed May 16 04:02:53 EDT 2007


I would agree that confusing the two kinds of gender is a bad thing  
and needs to be dealt with, but throwing out gender altogether is  
like throwing the baby out with the bath water. Gender in language  
certainly is not random as a whole, and the persistence of agreement  
of natural gender with grammatical gender for many items is not  
coincidence. Otherwise we would find words like "man" and "woman"  
being of unpredictable gender across languages. Moreover, in many  
cases gender oddities are undoubtedly explicable, e.g. that of  
Madchen in German. As for noun class, it seemed to me that Randall  
was talking about what is traditionally called declension (please  
correct me if I misunderstood). Gender cuts across declensions. And  
for those languages that have no genders or have more than three (I  
am unfamiliar with such languages), does the traditional structure  
need to be thrown out on the grounds that it does not accommodate them?

Don Wilkins

On May 15, 2007, at 10:44 PM, Kevin Riley wrote:

> Someone has already mentioned that grammatical gender is primarily  
> about
> noun class, not natural gender.  Some languages have no gender,  
> some have
> multiple 'genders' - in which case they are usually not referred to as
> genders'.  I think we could save a lot of confusion if we referred  
> to a
> noun class" rather than a 'gender' when teaching as it is  
> inevitable that
> people from a background with a language that has no grammatical  
> gender will
> confuse grammatical gender with natural gender.
>
> Kevin Riley
>
> -------Original Message-------
>
> From: frjsilver at optonline.net
> Date: 16/05/2007 10:15:49 AM
>
> 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
>
> ---
> B-Greek home page: http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek
> B-Greek mailing list
> B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek




More information about the B-Greek mailing list