Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

by Guy Deutscher

  Whether or not the poem is really about Heine’s despair at reconciling his roots in the Germanic North with the distant homeland of his Jewish soul is a mystery that may never be resolved. But there is no doubt that the poem cannot be unlocked without the genders of the two protagonists. Emma Lazarus’s translation transfers this sexual basis into English, by employing the pronouns “he” for the pine tree and “her” for the palm. The price Lazarus pays for this faithfulness is that her translation sounds somewhat arch, or at least artificially poetic, since in English it is not natural to speak of trees in this way. But unlike English, which treats inanimate objects uniformly as “it,” German assigns thousands of objects to the masculine or feminine gender as a matter of course. In fact, in German there is nothing the slightest bit poetic about calling inanimate objects “he” or “she.” You would simply refer to a Palme as “she” whenever you spoke of her, even in the most mundane chitchat. You’d explain to your neighbors how you got her half price in the garden center a few years ago and then unfortunately planted her too close to a eucalyptus, how his roots have disturbed her growth, and how she’s given you no end of trouble since, with her fungus and her ganoderma butt rot. And all this would be related without a hint of poetic inspiration, or even of self-consciousness. It’s just how one speaks if one speaks German—or Spanish, or French, or Russian, or a host of other languages with similar gender systems.

  Gender is perhaps the most obvious area where significant otherness is found not just between “us” and exotic tropical languages, but also much closer to home. You may spend nine lives without ever meeting a speaker of Tzeltal or Guugu Yimithirr. But you would have to go to great lengths to avoid meeting speakers of Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, Polish, or Arabic, to name just a few examples. Some of your best friends may even be gendered. Are their thought processes affected by this aspect of their language? Could it be that the feminine gender of the German Palme affects how a German thinks of a palm tree even beyond the artifice of poetry? As surprising as it may seem, we shall soon see that the answer is yes and that there is now solid evidence that gender systems can exert a powerful hold on speakers’ associations.

  “Gender” is a loaded word these days. It may not be quite as risqué as “sex,” but it runs the risk of engendering serious misunderstandings, so it is helpful to start by clarifying how linguists’ rather dry use of this word diverges from that of everyday English and also from that of some of the trendier academic disciplines. The original sense of “gender” had nothing to do with sex: it meant “type,” “kind,” “race”—in fact, “gender” has exactly the same origin as the words “genus” and “genre.” Like most serious problems in life, the latter-day diversity of meanings for “gender” has its roots in ancient Greece. The Greek philosophers started using their noun génos (which meant “race” or “type”) to refer to one particular division of things into three specific “types”: males (humans and animals), females, and inanimate things. And from Greek, this sense passed via Latin to other European languages.

  In English, both senses of “gender”—the general meaning “type” and the more specific grammatical distinction—coexisted happily for a long time. As late as the eighteenth century, “gender” could still be used in an entirely sexless way. When the novelist Robert Bage wrote in 1784, “I also am a man of importance, a public man, Sir, of the patriotic gender,” he meant nothing more than “type.” But later on, this general sense of the word fell into disuse in everyday English, the “neuter” category also beat a retreat, and the masculine-feminine division came to dominate the meaning of the word. In the twentieth century, “gender” became simply a euphemism for “sex,” so if you find on some official form a request to fill in your “gender,” you are unlikely nowadays to write “patriotic.”

  In some academic disciplines, notably “gender studies,” the sexual connotations of “gender” developed an even more specific sense and started being used to denote the social (rather than biological) aspects of the difference between women and men. “Gender studies” are thus concerned with the social roles played by the two sexes rather than with the differences between their anatomies.

  Linguists, on the other hand, veered in exactly the opposite direction: they returned to the original meaning of the word, namely “type” or “kind,” and nowadays use it for any division of nouns according to some essential properties. These essential properties may be based on sex, but they do not have to be. Some languages, for example, have a gender distinction that is based only on “animacy,” the distinction between animate beings (people and animals of both sexes) and inanimate things. Other languages draw the line differently and make a gender distinction between human and non-human (animals and inanimate things). And there are also languages that divide nouns into much more specific genders. The African language Supyire from Mali has five genders: humans, big things, small things, collectives, and liquids. Bantu languages such as Swahili have up to ten genders, and the Australian language Ngan’gityemerri is said to have fifteen different genders, which include, among others, masculine human, feminine human, canines, non-canine animals, vegetables, drinks, and two different genders for spears (depending on size and material).

  In short, when a linguist talks about “gender studies” she is just as likely to mean “animal, mineral, and vegetable” as the difference between men and women. Nevertheless, since the research on the influence of grammatical gender on the mind has so far been conducted exclusively on European languages, in which the distinction between masculine and feminine nouns dominates the gender system, our focus in the following pages will be on the masculine and feminine, and more exotic genders will make only a passing appearance.

  The discussion so far may have given the impression that grammatical gender actually makes sense. The idea of grouping together objects with similar vital properties seems eminently reasonable in itself, so it would be only natural to assume that whatever criteria a language has chosen for making gender distinctions, it will abide by its own rules. We would expect, therefore, that a feminine gender would include all, and only all, female human beings or animals, that an inanimate gender would include all inanimate things, and only them, that a vegetable gender would include, well, vegetables.

  There are in fact a handful of languages that do behave like that. In Tamil, there are three genders—masculine, feminine, and neuter—and you can pretty much tell which gender any noun belongs to given its obvious properties. Nouns denoting men (and male gods) are masculine; those denoting women and goddesses are feminine; everything else—objects, animals (and infants)—is neuter. Another straightforward case was Sumerian, the language spoken on the banks of the Euphrates some five thousand years ago by the people who invented writing and kick-started history. The Sumerian gender system was based not on sex but on the distinction between human and non-human, and nouns were assigned consistently to the appropriate gender. The only point of indecision was with the noun “slave,” which was sometimes deemed human and sometimes assigned to the non-human gender. Another language that can be said to belong to the elite club of logical gender is English. Gender is marked only on pronouns in English (“he,” “she,” “it”), and in general such pronouns are used transparently: “she” refers to women (and occasionally to female animals), “he” to men and to a few male animals, and “it” to everything else. The exceptions, such as “she” for a ship, are few and far between.

  There are also some languages, such as Manambu from Papua New Guinea, where genders might not be entirely consistent, but where one can at least discern some basic threads of rationality in the system. In Manambu, masculine and feminine genders are assigned to inanimate objects, not just to men and women. But apparently there are reasonably transparent rules for the assignment. For instance, small and rounded things are feminine, while big and longish things are masculine. A belly is feminine, for example, but a pregnant woman’s belly is spoken of in the masculine gender o
nce it has become really big. Intense things are masculine, less intense things feminine. Darkness is feminine when it’s not yet completely dark, but when it becomes pitch-black it turns masculine. You don’t have to agree with the logic, but at least you can follow it.

  Finally, there are those languages, such as Turkish, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Indonesian, and Vietnamese, that are entirely consistent about gender simply because they have no grammatical gender at all. In such languages, even pronouns referring to human beings do not bear gender distinctions, so there aren’t separate pronouns for “he” and “she.” When a Hungarian friend of mine is tired, he sometimes lets slip things like “she is Emma’s husband.” This is not because speakers of Hungarian are blind to the difference between men and women, only because they are not in the habit of specifying the sex of a person each and every time the person is mentioned.

  If genders were always as straight as they are in English or Tamil, there would be little point in asking whether a gender system can affect people’s perception of objects. For if the grammatical gender of every object merely reflected its real-world properties (man, woman, inanimate, vegetable, etc.), it could add nothing to anyone’s associations that was not there objectively. But as it happens, languages with a consistent and transparent gender system are very much in the minority. The great majority of languages have wayward genders. Most European languages belong in this degenerate group: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Russian, Polish, Czech, Greek.

  Even in the most erratic gender systems, there is usually a core group of nouns that are assigned grammatical gender in a consistent way. In particular, male human beings almost always have masculine gender. Women, on the other hand, are much more often denied the privilege of belonging to the feminine gender and are relegated to the neuter gender instead. In German, there is a whole range of words for women that are treated as “it”: das Mädchen (girl, the diminutive form of “maid”), das Fräulein (unmarried woman, the diminutive of Frau), das Weib (woman, cognate with English “wife”), or das Frauenzimmer (woman, but literally “lady chamber”: the original meaning referred to the living chambers of the lady, but the word started to be used for the entourage of a noble lady, then for particular members of the entourage, and hence to increasingly less distinguished women).

  The Greeks treat their women a little better: while their word for girl, korítsi, is, just as you would expect, of the neuter gender, if one speaks about a pretty buxom girl, one adds the augmentative suffix -aros, and the resulting noun, korítsaros, “buxom girl,” then belongs to the . . . masculine gender. (Heaven knows what Whorf, or for that matter Freud, would have made of that.) And if this seems the height of madness, consider that back in the days when English still had a real gender system, it assigned the word “woman” not to the feminine gender, not even to the neuter, but, like Greek, to the masculine gender. “Woman” comes from the Old English wf-man, literally “woman-human being.” Since in Old English the gender of a compound noun like wf-man was determined by the gender of the last element, here the masculine man, the correct pronoun to use when referring to a woman was “he.”

  The habit of European languages to misplace human beings—especially from one sex—in the wrong gender may be the most offensive element about the system. But in terms of the number of nouns involved, this quirkiness is rather marginal. It is in the realm of inanimate objects that the party actually gets going. In French, German, Russian, and most other European languages, the masculine and feminine genders extend to thousands of objects that are by no stretch of the imagination male or female. What, for instance, is particularly feminine about a Frenchman’s beard (la barbe)? Why is Russian water a “she,” and why does she become a “he” once you have dipped a tea bag into her? Why does the German feminine sun (die Sonne) light up the masculine day (der Tag), and the masculine moon (der Mond) shine in the feminine night (die Nacht)? After all, in French, he (le jour) is actually illuminated by him (le soleil), whereas she (la nuit) by her (la lune). German cutlery famously spans the whole gamut of gender roles: Das Messer (knife) may be an it, but on the opposite side of the plate lies the spoon (der Löffel) in his resplendent masculinity, and next to him, bursting with sex appeal, the feminine fork (die Gabel). But in Spanish, it’s the fork (el tenedor) that has a hairy chest and gravelly voice, and she, the spoon (la cuchara), a curvaceous figure.

  For native speakers of English, the rampant sexing of inanimate objects and occasional desexing of humans are a cause of frustration and merriment in equal measure. The erratic gender system was the main charge in Mark Twain’s famous indictment of “The Awful German Language”:

  In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print—I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:

  GRETCHEN: Where is the turnip?

  WILHELM: She has gone to the kitchen.

  GRETCHEN: Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?

  WILHELM: It has gone to the opera.

  Twain was inspired by German grammar to write his famous “Tale of the Fishwife and Its Sad Fate,” which he pretended to have translated from German quite literally. It begins like this:

  It is a bleak Day. Hear the Rain, how he pours, and the Hail, how he rattles; and see the Snow, how he drifts along, and of the Mud, how deep he is! Ah the poor Fishwife, it is stuck fast in the Mire; it has dropped its Basket of Fishes; and its Hands have been cut by the Scales as it seized some of the falling Creatures; and one Scale has even got into its Eye, and it cannot get her out. It opens its Mouth to cry for Help; but if any Sound comes out of him, alas he is drowned by the raging of the Storm. And now a Tomcat has got one of the Fishes and she will surely escape with him. No, she bites off a Fin, she holds her in her Mouth—will she swallow her? No, the Fishwife’s brave Mother-dog deserts his Puppies and rescues the Fin—which he eats, himself, as his Reward. O, horror, the Lightning has struck the Fish-basket; he sets him on Fire; see the Flame, how she licks the doomed Utensil with her red and angry Tongue; now she attacks the helpless Fishwife’s Foot–she burns him up, all but the big Toe, and even SHE is partly consumed; and still she spreads, still she waves her fiery Tongues; she attacks the Fishwife’s Leg and destroys IT; she attacks its Hand and destroys HER also; she attacks the Fishwife’s Leg and destroys HER also; she attacks its Body and consumes HIM; she wreathes herself about its Heart and IT is consumed; next about its Breast, and in a Moment SHE is a Cinder; now she reaches its Neck—He goes; now its Chin—IT goes; now its Nose—SHE goes. In another Moment, except Help come, the Fishwife will be no more. . . .

  The thing is, for Germans none of this is even remotely funny. It is so natural, in fact, that German translators struggle to render the passage’s particular brand of humor. One translator solved the problem by substituting the tale with another one, which he called “Sehen Sie den Tisch, es ist grün”—literally “look at the table, it is green.” If you find you are having a sense of humor failure yourself, then remember that what one really ought to say in German is “look at the table, he is green.”

  Twain believed that there was something specially debauched about the German gender system and that among all languages it was unusually and peculiarly irrational. But that belief was based on ignorance, because if anything it is English that is unusual in not having an irrational gender system. And at this point, I ought to declare a conflict of interest, since my mother tongue, Hebrew, assigns inanimate objects to the feminine and masculine genders just as erratically as German or French or Spanish or Russian. When I go into a (masculine) house, the feminine door opens onto a masculine room with a masculine carpet (be he ever so pink), a masculine table, and feminine bookcases full of masculine books. Out of the masculine window I can see the masculine trees and on them the birds, which are fe
minine regardless of the accidents of their anatomy. If I knew more about (feminine) ornithology, I could tell by looking at each bird what biological sex she was. I would point at her and explain to the less initiated: “You can tell she is a male because of that red spot on her chest and also because she is larger than the females.” And I would not feel there was anything remotely strange about that.

  Wayward genders are not confined to Europe and the Mediterranean basin. If anything, languages farther afield, which have a larger number of gender categories, have even more scope for erratic assignments, and hardly any such language fails to make ample use of the opportunity. In the Australian language Dyirbal, water is assigned to the feminine gender, but in another aboriginal language, Mayali, water belongs to the vegetable gender. The vegetable gender of the neighboring Gurr-goni language includes the word erriplen, “airplane.” In the African language Supyire, the gender for “big things” includes, as one would expect, all the big animals: horse, giraffe, hippopotamus, and so on. All? Well, almost: one animal wasn’t considered big enough to be included and was assigned instead to the human gender—the elephant. The problem is not how to find more such examples, it is how to stop.