Why doesn't English have Masculine and Feminine genders?

I think it would be more descriptive

For example: The teacher (we don't know if the teacher is a male or a female)

But if we feminize or masculinize teacher we get a more sophisticated description of that person.


The question is, should English be reform to include genders? I know this would make the language harder to learn because English is a neutral language, but adding genders would enrich the language. maybe only changing the nouns dealing with people, and not things.

The problem I have with a system like that -- other than "if it's not broken, don't fix it" -- is that it makes masculine gender the default; a person is assumed male unless otherwise specified. This is standard practice in Romance languages and others, but since we're talking about how things "should" be, I think it would be much better to have three forms of a word: neuter (i.e., generic), masculine, and feminine. For instance, Spanish has "doctor" (masculine/neuter) and "doctora" (feminine); this could be split into "doctor" (neuter), "doctoro" (masculine), and "doctora" (feminine). And, while we're add it, we'd add neuter personal pronouns, or just change "it" to allow it to refer to people of unspecified gender.

I'm not strongly opposed to so-called "sexist language" as it exists today, but I still think that language reform should ideally move away from it, not toward it. Of course, it's an academic question anyway because, unless you're talking about an artificial language like Esperanto, such language reform never, ever occurs.

- Kef

Kef brings up an interesting point: "sexist language." "Genderizing" a language would, I'm sure, create problems for people when you get to words like "evil" and "deceit." Would those be "masculine" or "feminine" and you can bet if you were to make either feminine there would be uproars in at least Boulder, Berkeley, and Austin... lol

Oh, and as far as the original question, English genders disappeared shortly after its "frenchification" which began in 1066... I'd assume the commoners got tired of trying to keep 3 Germanic genders and 2 Romance genders separate and they just disappeared.

Evil is masculine in Spanish and nobody complaints about that, but some radical feminists argue that in Spanish some masculine words have positive meanings and their feminine equivalents have a strong derogatory meaning, for example:

Zorro (masculine): appart from fox, when applied to men, it means a smart person.

Zorra (feminine): bitch.

There are more cases, but this is a good example.

<<I think it would be more descriptive...adding genders would enrich the language>>

Perhaps, but the pc trend in English (AE) is to move *away* from gender-specific language.

congressman, congresswoman --> congressmember, congressperson
chairman, chairwoman --> chair, chairperson
councilman, councilwoman --> councilmember
waiter, waitress --> food server
policeman, policewoman --> police officer
fireman, firewoman --> fire fighter
mailman, mailwoman --> mail carrier, postal worker
steward, stewardess --> flight attendant
salesman, saleswoman, saleslady --> salesperson, sales associate ("Death of a Sales Associate"! LOL)

<<Oh, and as far as the original question, English genders disappeared shortly after its "frenchification" which began in 1066... I'd assume the commoners got tired of trying to keep 3 Germanic genders and 2 Romance genders separate and they just disappeared. >>

The loss of grammatical gender in English had nothing to do with French or the Norman Conquest of 1066. Your appraisal of the situation is inaccurate at best.

Gender loss was already underway in Old English, where references like "Etath thisne hlaaf (hlaaf = masc.), hit (hit = neut.) is miin liichama" [Eat this loaf (i.e. bread), it is my body] were already being felt.

Movement to a single gender for nouns in the singlular appeared first in the North of England, where French influence was the least felt and latest to arrive. Southern varieties of Middle English preserved gender and inflected forms of adjectives well into the early part of the Middle English period.

Also, this assumed "Frenchification" as you put it, did not begin immediately after the Norman Conquest. It wasn't until centuries later that English began to borrow heavily from the French language. That can hardly be called a "Frenchification" because English is nothing like French.

...cont.

Also, it wasn't because "commoners" couldn't "keep up with" three genders...the situation in English was similar to what is presently occuring in Dutch.

English was already using uninflected 'the' for the relative pronoun, and the Masc. & Fem. descendants of 'see/thee' and 'seeo/theeo' had already fallen together into 'the' in the Nominative, leaving only a distinction in the oblique cases.

Unstressed 'thaet' (neut.)> 'thet' also fell together with 'the' in both the Nominative and Accusative case, thereby strengthening 'the' as the universal article. This left only a differentiation between singular 'the' and plural 'tho'.

'Tho' survives today in "those", but also coalesced into 'the' due to analogy and loss of stress.

...cont.

To get back to the main idea of the thread, I wouldn't mind a distinction of gender in English between male and female, with all other nouns being neuter (there is no need to assign the 'moon' as masculine, the 'earth' as feminine, etc). I have also often toyed with the idea of distinguishing between doctor (male) and doctor (female) without having to use expressions like 'he-doctor' and 'she-doctor' which sound ridiculous.

but as someone pointed out, trying to reform English in this way alone would be futile. Now, if there were a movement to reform English in ALL areas where it needed reform, like for use as a semi-artificial world language of sorts, then this item could be added to the agenda. Alone however it stands no chance.

Ce fil serait plus approprié dans la section monolingue.

<< Perhaps, but the pc trend in English (AE) is to move *away* from gender-specific language.

congressman, congresswoman --> congressmember, congressperson
chairman, chairwoman --> chair, chairperson
[...]

>>

But that's because the default term has always been masculine. There was a time where many of these occupations were rarely held by women. Then when women started working in these areas, the masculine terms were, and largely still are, the default. If one doesn't know the gender of a particular chairman, then he or she is likely to be called "chairman".

But there's also an easier solution there that many people ignore: simply adopting the masculine forms for women as well. I would have no problem with referring to a woman as a "chairman" or "mailman". Some women would find it odd, and some would find it even offensive... but why? Yes, words like "chairman" come from "chair + man", but we often don't really think about it that way... many of us even pronounce the "man" part with a reduced vowel, as if it were a different word. Indeed, part of the reason most of us conjure a mental image of a man when we hear "chairman" is because many people avoid using it to refer to women in the first place!

- Kef

"But there's also an easier solution there that many people ignore: simply adopting the masculine forms for women as well. I would have no problem with referring to a woman as a "chairman" or "mailman". Some women would find it odd, and some would find it even offensive... but why?"

In Spanish speaking countries (well, in Spain as far as I know) it happens to the contrary. When women started working as lawyers, doctors and other jobs which were considered to be done only by men, they wanted and still want to be called doctor instead of doctora, or abocado insted abogada, because accoding to their feminist school of taught, the feminine term stress to much the gender of the person who does the job, and they want to be considered just like men. On the other hand, the masculine term, despite it implies gender too, is seen as more neutral. Sadly to them, people prefer to say "he ido a que me vea la médicA" insted of "he ido a que me vea el médicO" when that doctor is a woman.

I disagree with the proposal to create three genders in Spanish, it would be very complicated for everyone. I believe that the Spanish language may be sexist, but doesn't mean everyone who speaks it is sexist. A curious case is that in English his and her (and he she) make a gender distinction, while Spanish doesn't and in French it depends on the gender of the object not the person. This causes awkward situations where s/he, his/her, he/she are used, in some cases their may be used but in some cases it's harder. In the Declaration of Human Rights, they always use his, which I found weird because in those cases their is more common and I think care was taken when writing the Declaration not to sound sexist.

<< I disagree with the proposal to create three genders in Spanish, it would be very complicated for everyone. >>

I didn't propose creating it in Spanish, I proposed creating it in English. I only used a Spanish word as an example -- there's no reason that "doctor", "doctoro", and "doctora" could all be English words.

By the way, as for my most recent response, I should mention that a lot of stereotypes we have about professions have nothing to do with the gender of the name. "Teacher", "secretary", and "nurse" are all applied equally easily to both men and women, but most people would imagine a female more readily, even though there are many men in those professions as well. I think this further supports the idea that there should be no problem with using the -man forms for women, because this suggests (but doesn't prove) that such gender stereotyping has little to do with the name of the profession.

- Kef

I like English the way it is-somewhat gender free. Ouch! In Hebrew, it seems like you have to know the gender of a pet before you can talk.