This week’s reading, ‘Sex, Syntax, and Semantics’ by Boroditsky, Schmidt, and Phillips is about the effects of language, especially grammatical gender, on the perceived nature of various objects (i.e. description and similarities), and memory capability. Applying the research results broadly, the study concludes that the “private mental lives of people who speak different languages may differ much more than previously thought.” This study examines precise research questions to expand on the discredited and overly broad Saphir-Worf hypothesis, that “thought and action are entirely determined by language.” (Click here to learn more about the Saphir-Worf hypothesis)
The studies in this article focus on the differences between people who speak either Spanish, Russian, and German along with English. This was of particular interest to me because I have been learning German alongside English since infancy. As well, I have been learning Spanish since middle school and continue to here at Capilano. I say that I have been learning German for 23 years because I have never become fluent in the language. My mother is German, my grandparents were German, and I spent much of my child hood in Germany, and yet, whenever I speak German, I find that my grammar is constantly being corrected by native-German speakers. After reading this article and it’s mention of Mark Twain’s ‘A Tramp Abroad’, I went on to read Twain’s essay ‘The Terrible German Language’:
“Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book…To continue with the German genders: a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female — tomcats included, of course; a person’s mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and not according to the sex of the individual who wears it — for in Germany all the women either male heads or sexless ones; a person’s nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience haven’t any sex at all. The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay.”
(Read the rest of Mark Twain’s ‘The Terrible German Language’ here)
The arbitrary nature of gender assignment to otherwise genderless objects (nouns) has always been what I have found most challenging about the German language (that, and the ridiculously long compounded words). To reflect on the correlation between learned gender grammar and the perceived nature of the noun in question, as a child, I remember thinking that all cats were female and all dogs were male. I wonder now, if this is because I learned the German words “die Katze” (the [feminine] cat) and “der Hund” (the [masculine] dog) before learning the English words for these animals, thus translating my German understanding of cats as inherently feminine and dogs as inherently masculine into my English understanding of the two animals. If this is the case, my perception of various nouns was, and perhaps still is, altered because of my learning German grammatical gender as an infant.
Putting a different meaning to “gendered language”, Nu Shu, the disappearing (if not extinct) secret language of oppressed women of 19th century Guilin Hills of China, was a language created by women, unreadable by men, and written in a poetic format and sung aloud rather than read. One wonders what very unique perception of the world that women who created and learned Nu Shu must have shared, given that the studies by Boroditsky et. al show that language influences various thoughts and perceptions.
Did you know?
English used to have a grammatical gender system similar to modern german, classifying nouns as feminine, masculine, and neuter. ” For example, “woman” in Old English is a neuter noun, so referring to a woman, you’d call her “it.” To learn more about the grammatical system of Old English click here.