Guy Deutscher - Through the Language Glass, Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

But with time the gender markers may start being extended to nouns beyond their original remit, and through a series of such extensions a gender system can quickly be brought out of kilter. In Gurr-goni, for example, the vegetable gender came to include the noun “airplane” through a perfectly natural sequence of little steps: the original “vegetable” gender marker must first have been extended to plants more generally, and hence to all kinds of wooden objects. Since canoes are made of wood, another natural step would have included them in the vegetable gender as well. Since canoes happened to be the main means of transport for the speakers of Gurr-goni, the vegetable gender was then widened to include means of transportation more generally. And so, when the borrowed word erriplen entered the language, it was quite naturally assigned to the vegetable gender. Each step in this chain was natural and made perfect sense in its own local context. But the end result seems entirely arbitrary.

The Indo-European languages may also have started with a transparent gender system. But suppose, for instance, that the moon came to be included in the masculine gender because he was personified as a male god. Later, the word “month” developed from the word “moon,” so it was only natural that if the moon was a “he” a “month” would also be a “he.” But if so, then words for other time units, such as “day,” can also come to be included in the masculine gender. While each step in this chain of extensions may be perfectly natural in itself, after two or three steps the original logic has become opaque, and so masculine and feminine genders can find themselves applied to a range of inanimate objects for no intelligible reason.

The worst thing about this loss of transparency is that it is a self-propelling process: the less consistent the system becomes, the easier it is to mess it up even further. Once there are enough nouns with arbitrary genders, children struggling to learn the language may stop expecting to find reliable rules based on the real-world properties of objects, so they may start looking for other types of clues. For example, they can start guessing what gender a noun has on the basis of what it sounds like (if X sounds like Y, and Y is feminine, then maybe X is feminine as well). Incorrect guesses by children may initially be perceived as errors, but with time such errors can stick and so before too long any trace of the original logic can be lost.

Finally, it is ironic that when a language loses one gender out of three the result may actually increase the waywardness of the system rather than decrease it. Spanish, French, and Italian, for instance, lost the original neuter gender of their Latin forebear, when the neuter coalesced with the masculine. But the result only ensured that all inanimate nouns are randomly assigned to the masculine or feminine genders.

Nevertheless, the syndrome of genus erraticum is not always an incurable illness in a language. As the history of English can attest, when a language manages to lose not just one gender but two, the result can be a radical overhaul that eliminates the erratic system altogether. Until the eleventh century, English had a full-blown three-gender system just like German. English speakers from the eleventh century would not have understood what Mark Twain was bemoaning in his “Tale of the Fishwife and Its Sad Fate,” since for them a wife ( w f ) was an “it,” a fish ( fisc ) was a “he,” whereas fate ( wyrd ) was a “she.” But all this changed during the twelfth century.

The collapse of the Old English irregular genders had little to do with improving standards of sex education. The reason was rather that the gender system had critically depended on the doomed system of case endings. Originally, English had a complex case system similar to that of Latin, where nouns and adjectives appeared with different endings depending on their role in the sentence. Nouns of different genders had different sets of such case endings, so one could tell from the endings which gender a noun belonged to. But the system of endings rapidly disintegrated in the century after the Norman Conquest, and once the endings had disappeared, the new generation of speakers hardly had any clues left to tell them which gender each noun was supposed to belong to. These new speakers, who grew up into a language that no longer gave them sufficient information to decide whether a carrot, for example, should be addressed as a “he” or a “she,” fell back on a radical and highly innovative idea, and started to call it an “it” instead. So over a period of just a few generations, the original arbitrary gender system was replaced by a new one with transparent rules, whereby (almost) all inanimate objects came to be referred to simply as “it.”

Still, a few wily nouns, especially feminine ones, managed to escape the mass sterilization. Mark Twain, who was outraged by the bestowal of femininity upon German turnips, would have been surprised to learn that the same custom was still practiced in England only three centuries earlier. A medicinal manual published in London in 1561, The Most Excellent and Perfecte Homish Apothecarye or Homely Physick Booke for all the Grefes and Diseases of the Bodye , offers the following confection against hoarseness: “He that is become hoorse lately, let him roste a rape [turnip] in ashes or upon the fyre till she be all black, then pare her clene and eate her as warm thou canst.”

In dialectal varieties of English, some gendered nouns survived for much longer, but in the standard language a great tide of neuters flooded the inanimate world, leaving only a few isolated nouns bobbing about in their femininity. The slow but sure iticization of English can be said to have come to its final mooring on March 20, 2002. For the maritime world, that particular Wednesday seemed no more eventful than any other Wednesday. Lloyd ’ s List , the newspaper of the shipping industry, published its daily pageful of dispatches on casualties, accidents, and acts of piracy at sea. Among others, it mentioned the ferry Baltic Jet en route from Tallinn to Helsinki, which “had a fire in her port side engine room at 0814, local time”; the tanker Hamilton Energy departed from Port Weller Docks in Canada after “repairs were made to damage suffered when she was in contact with a Saltie. The accident snapped the rudder post and drove her propeller shaft through her gearbox and smashed her engine casting off.” Elsewhere in Canada, a shrimp trawler got stuck in pack ice, but the owner said that “there is a possibility she can be started up and steamed under her own power.” A day, in short, like any other.

The real ocean-shaking news was reported on a different page, stowed away in the editorial column. Kissed by the punning muse, the editor announced under the headline “Her today, gone tomorrow” that “we have taken the simple yet significant decision to change our style from the start of the next month and start referring to ships as neuter rather than female. It brings this paper into line with most other reputable international business titles.” Reactions from the public were stormy, and the paper was overwhelmed by letters to the editor. An irate Greek reader wrote: “Sir, only a bunch of crusty, out of touch, stuck up Englishmen would dream of trying to change the way we’ve spoken of ships for thousands of years as ‘she.’ Get out of there and go tend to your gardens and hunt foxes, you arrogant ass holes. Sincerely yours, Stephen Komianos.” But not even this silver-tongued plea convinced Lloyd ’ s List to change her course, and in April 2002 “she” fell by the quayside.