While I was eating leftover lasagna that my grandma had made with those little precious hands of hers for today’s lunch, I was following the news on the kitchen TV (who doesn’t have one nowadays to wash down your repasts, especially if your watching gory news, which seems to be abundant in today’s world) when I heard a guy refer to a male whale that had stranded on the shore of Rio de Janeiro. He and everybody else called it a she, even though it was male. That can be easily explained, since whale (baleia in Portuguese) is a feminine noun and should use a feminine pronoun.
That made me think for a while. Wait a minute? What’s going on? Our "Portuguese" minds seem to have the tendency to work on the basis of assigning grammatical gender for things and animals even if we know that the real gender can be quite the opposite (for animals, evidently). And that led me to the following ruminations (no pun intended!)
In English a lot of times animals whose sex is unknown (like bumblebees - I remember my former American girlfriend using he for it (that’s worth another thread one of these days) are referred to as "he", I think much more often that "she". What is happening on the subconscious level to explain that "masculinization"?
Dutch, especially in the Netherlands, tends to use hij ("he") for animals like koe ("cow"), although zij wouldn’t be unusual, because of their tendency to use the male pronoun for anything that belongs to the common gender (a de-word, not a het-word).
Swedish and Danish sometimes use han ("he") and hon (Sw.) and hun (Dan.) ("she") to refer to "higher animals instead of den and det. The closer they feel the animal is to them, they’ll more likely use han and hon/hun.
What do the rest of the zoophiles of the Agora have to say about this?
Brazilian dude
P.S. Does anybody know where I can find that list of collective words for animals (monkeys, geese, etc.)? I remember a pride of lions (I hope my memory is serving me right.)
Some of the artificial (constructed) languages have mechanisms by which you can easily distinguish between the male and female of a whale from the original root without having something like the English "bull" and "cow" i.e.
While "whale" has no separate male and female forms in the Romance languages I’m sure in Portuguese you could say balena masculina and balena femenina if you really wanted to distinguish the sex.
That’s more or less how it works, but Spanish would say ballena macho and ballena hembra or el macho de la ballena and la hembra de la ballena, Portuguese baleia macho and baleia fêmea or o macho da baleia and a fêmea da baleia, Italian balena maschio and ballena femmina or il maschio della balena and la femmina della balena, and French baleine mâle and baleine femmelle or le mâle de la baleine and la femmelle de la baleine.
But those cases would really only be used if it’s really necessary to distinguish the genders.
This discussion reminds me of language by or for children. Sometimes jocular forms like formigo (instead of formiga macho "male ant") would be used, maybe to give it that extra personification that children’s stories and games are fond of.
When I taught Swedish to immigrants, I always carried material for a 2x45 mins. lesson on animal family names and their sounds in Swedish (bull-cow-calf-moo: tjur-ko-kalv-mu etc.), in case I should be called to fill in for a colleague or lack other ideas for my own classes. That was always great fun for all of us.
For species not differentiated like most domestic animals or common game animals, our normal way is to differentiate between males and females by prefixing what looks like the personal pronouns, but pronounced with long vowels: hanval, honval for whales ([‘ha:n’va:l, ‘hu:n’va:l]). (The young are kalvar (calves).)
For referencing, the most common choice would be the inanimate pronoun corresponding to the non-differentiated animal. (for han-/honvalen, valen: den). Using a gendered animate pronoun (hanvalen - han, honvalen - hon) would probably sound rather rural or joking.
(In a debate in the municipal council, I once referred to a commissioner as "it", after using his title in the preceding sentence, instead of "him", but I am afraid that nobody noticed the intended sarcasm.)
[quote author=Brazilian_dude link=board=translate;num=1092616082;start=0#0 date=08/15/04 at 20:28:02]
Dutch, especially in the Netherlands, tends to use hij ("he") for animals like koe ("cow"), although zij wouldn’t be unusual, because of their tendency to use the male pronoun for anything that belongs to the common gender (a de-word, not a het-word).
I strongly protest. As far as I can tell, this is purely Dutch, not Flemish. We consider it to be very sloppy language and basically wrong. It’s not really a common gender, there are two distinct genders, masculine and feminine, who just happen to have the same article.
And what about inanimated objects? Why, for example, "moon" is feminine and "sun" is masculine (at least in Spanish, Italian and Portuguese)?
Many cultures equate the sun with active/generative/masculine energy and the moon with passive/reflective/female energy. (This is not a universal rule. A few exceptions include: Canaanites - Shapash and Yerah; Inuit - Malina and her brother, Anningan; Japanese - Amaterasu and Tsuki-yomi.)
Simply because lua (Portuguese) and luna (Italian/Spanish) end in a, just like Latin luna, lunae. Sol (Portuguese/Spanish) and sole (Italian) don’t end in a (they are by default masculine) just like Latin sol, solis.
In comparison, German Sonne "sun" is feminine and Mond "moon" is masculine. Now I don’t know why’s that. Germanic languages (except English) don’t seem to have a very good explanation why they got to the gender that they have now, cf. the German word Buch and Dutch boek, neuter, and Swedish bok and Danish bog, masculine, all meaning book.
BD, you’re wrong on the SweDane book. It is now common gender, but in OSw it was feminine, and still is for older people using West Coast dialects.
The Canaanite Shapash is interesting. I had to check it, because the sun is shams in Arabic, shæmæsh in Bible Hebrew, sh[sup]e[/sup]mash in Aramaic, shamshu in Assyian.
We have the personal pronouns han, hon, den, det (he, she, it, it). In Standard Swedish, han and hon are used only for animates.
There are few survivals of the feeling for gender in grammar. On the West Coast, many people with me react when we see a computer generated letter starting "Bästa Anders!" (bästa = dear; lit. ‘best’) because the -a is feminine to us. We write "Bäste Anders!"
When I was young, it was very common to hear, for example, the StdSW tidningen ‘the newspaper’ pronounced as tin(n)inga - clearly feminine.
The difference between the common gender and the neuter gender (nowadays called utrum and neutrum, resp.) knows no rules. It is at least as great a stumbling block for learners as gender differences in other languages.
I think I understand the principle behind the practice, Katy, but I’m not sure I could explain it in practice itself.
There are 4 genders, to he and she cover the male and female, respectively. The other two genders are common and neuter, so they both get something that translates to it.
What circumstances differentiate common and neuter...? Anders…?
