Grammatical Gender: Its Origin and Development 9783110905397, 9789027924490

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JANUA

LINGUARUM

STUDIA M E M O R I A E N I C O L A I VAN WIJK DEDICATA edetida curat C. H. V A N

SCHOONEVELD

Indiana University

Series Minor,

166

GRAMMATICAL GENDER US ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT

by M U H A M M A D H A S A N IBRAHIM THE UNIVERSITY OF JORDAN

1973 MOUTON THE HAGUE · PARIS

© Copyright 1973 in The Netherlands Mouton & Co. Ν.V., Publishers, The Hague No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers

Published with partial support from the University of Jordan

Printed in the Netherlands

PREFACE

The main aim of this study is to demonstrate that gender, as a grammatical category, did not arise because of any extra-linguistic (e.g., social or psychological) factors. Examination of the origin and development of gender in several (especially Semitic and Indo-European) languages points to the fact that gender seems to have been an accidental outcome of the linguistic development of some languages. The author seeks to support and prove the validity of his thesis from several angles and sources. Thus, after briefly reviewing and refuting some of the early theories of gender which attribute the origin of gender to the creative imagination of the primitive man, he discusses some of the more realistic approaches to the study of gender based on historical linguistic data. The independence of gender is further sought in an investigation of how borrowed nouns are assigned their genders in several gender-possessing languages. The phenomenon of noun classes in some languages (e.g., Bantu)is discussed and found to be similar to the gender phenomenon. Noun classes provide further evidence in support of the thesis stated above. The final source of evidence comes from an examination of the circumstances surrounding the development of gender in English and the Romance languages. The study also contains brief discussions of gender systems and the handling of gender within the framework of generative grammar. I am indebted to Professors David W. Crabb, Albert H. Marckwardt, and Martin G. Silverman, all of Princeton University, for reading the book in manuscript and making valuable suggestions for its improvement. My greatest debt, however, must be acknowledged to Professor William G. Moulton, Director of the Program in Linguistics, Princeton University, who read my manuscript more than once and contributed greatly to the final product. My friend Dr. Mubarak A. Amar of the

6

PREFACE

Beirut College for Women and my colleagues Mrs. Evelyn El-Khairy, Dr. Paul Witherington, and Mr. Derek Hart corrected my English in parts of the manuscript. I want to thank them all. Finally, I am grateful to the University of Jordan for a financial grant which contributed to the publication of this book. Amman June 1972

M. H. IBRAHIM

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

5

Note on Transcription

9

I.

Introduction

11

II.

Speculative Theories of Gender

14

III.

The Nature and Function of Gender

24

IV.

On the Origin of Gender

30

V.

Gender Assignment in Native and Borrowed Words .

VI.

Noun Classes and Gender Systems

63

VII.

The Evolution of Gender

77

VIII.

Gender and Thought

91

IX.

Gender in Grammar

97

X.

Concluding Remarks

102

.

51

Bibliography

105

General Index

110

NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION

The transcription of examples in the text follows the IP A system with the following modifications: /ch/ has been used instead of /c/, /shI instead of /§/, /th/ instead o f / θ / , /dh/ instead of /ö/, /kh/ instead of /x/, and /gh/ instead of /y/. In the transcription of Arabic words, another feature has been introduced, namely, the use of capital letters to represent velarized (or emphatic) consonants. Thus, /T/ is velarized It I, /D/ is velarized Idi, /S/ is velarized /s/, and /Dh/ is velarized /dh/. The symbol /H/, however, has been used to represent the voiceless pharyngeal fricative Arabic sound usually transcribed as /h/.

I INTRODUCTION

The study of gender once flourished among the linguists and anthropologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In more recent times, however, gender has been neglected by linguists and almost forgotten by anthropologists. The category of gender remains a puzzle to many linguists who do not agree on the origin or even on a definition of gender. The absence of a clear formulation of the nature of gender has given rise to misconceptions of and myths about gender and has helped these misconceptions and myths to persist until today. The confusion surrounding grammatical gender has been caused largely by a failure to make the simple distinction between what Jespersen calls syntactic and notional categories,1 the latter being a designation of those categories which exist in nature. Gender, for example, is a syntactic category with sex as the corresponding notional category. In fact, as we shall see in Chapter VI, as a syntactic category gender simply classifies nouns into two or three classes for the purposes of agreement (or concord). In so doing, gender is not essentially different from other systems of noun classification which are known to exist in some language groups such'as Bantu. In the present study, then, we hope to investigate the relation which exists between gender in languages and sex in nature. But apart from throwing some light on this issue, what can a study of gender contribute to our knowledge about language in particular and man in general? Being a linguistic phenomenon, gender should be studied for its own sake. As linguists, we should be concerned with every aspect of human language. Among the questions one should ask when studying gender and other grammatical categories is: How and where do obser1

In The Philosophy of Grammar (New York: Norton & Co., 1965), p. 55.

12

INTRODUCTION

vations about such categories in language fit in a certain linguistic theory? In this respect, Hjelmslev writes concerning gender: La catégorie du genre pose un des problèmes les plus critiques de notre discipline: celui de la définition de la substance sémantique des morphèmes. La question est de savoir s'il faut reconnaître ou non l'existence de purs opérateurs syntaxiques, de purs indices de construction dénués de signification, donc dépourvus de substance.2 Consider another problem which has caused much debate and controversy in linguistics, namely, the problem of the nature of the linguistic sign. Saussure taught us that the linguistic sign has an arbitrary character. But it is not clear yet how 'arbitrary' should be interpreted: Can a choice which has historical, geographical, and sociological connotations, as well as strictly linguistic ones, really be considered arbitrary? 3 With regard to gender, it is not uncommon to encounter statements which assert that gender assignment is arbitrary, meaning that gender distinctions in language do not coincide with sex divisions in nature. But this is too narrow an interpretation of the term 'arbitrary' as we shall see later in the study. Gender can be totally arbitrary only if it is "not controlled by immediately recognizable grammatical safeguards",4 which is never the case. To take another area where gender might be relevant, consider language universals. Gender is uniquely interesting in this respect because, although it is by no means a universal category, yet gender seems to exhibit universal tendencies in those languages which possess it. These tendencies concern the circumstances surrounding the rise and fall of gender in various languages, the criteria for the assignment of gender to nouns, and the evolution and development of the gender system itself. The far-reaching implications of linguistic universals

L. Hjelmslev, "Animé et inanimé, personnel et non-personnel", in his Essais linguistiques (=TCLC, vol. 12) (Copenhagen, 1959), p. 213. 3 C. Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1963), p. 90. 4 Y. Malkiel, "Diachronic Hypercharacterization in Romance", Part 2, Archivum Linguisticum vol. 10 (1958). p. 21.

INTRODUCTION

13

were stated by Boas long before the term even existed and long before any universale were investigated: . . . it seems well worth while to subject the whole range of linguistic concepts to a searching analysis, and to seek in the peculiarities of the grouping of ideas in different languages an important characteristic in the history of the mental development of the various branches of mankind. From this point of view, the occurrence of the most fundamental grammatical concepts in all languages must be considered as proof of the unity of fundamental psychological processes. 5 Immediately following this introduction, we shall survey (in Chapter II) some of the old theories of gender which are mostly of a speculative nature. Before discussing recent theories of gender and how gender itself originated in Chapter IV, we shall briefly discuss the nature of gender and its function in Chapter III. In Chapter V, it is attempted to provide some support for the ideas presented in Chapter IV on the origin of gender. This support comes from an examination of how nouns, both native and borrowed, are assigned to their respective gender classes in languages that have grammatical gender. Noun classes, which are similar to gender systems, are discussed in Chapter VI. In this chapter, we also survey briefly the different kinds of gender systems and discuss concord or agreement, which is essential for the existence of both class and gender systems. The historical development of gender is discussed in Chapter VII, and the history of Romance and English genders is reviewed there. The two short chapters VIII and IX contain discussions of 'gender and thought' and 'gender in grammar' respectively.

5

F. Boas, "Introduction", Handbook of American Indian Languages, Part 1 (Washington, D.C., 1911), p. 21.

II SPECULATIVE THEORIES OF GENDER

Interest in gender is no new phenomenon. Approaches to the study of gender have varied from the purely speculative, as often in philosophy and traditional philology, to the more empirical, based for the most part on the study of available linguistic data. In reviewing the treatment of gender through the ages, one can well conclude that our knowledge on this topic has advanced surpisingly little since GrecoRoman antiquity. Indeed, the speculations on gender of many nineteenth-century linguists seem less perceptive than those of the ancients. As early as the fifth century B.C., the Sophists had discovered two principles of gender which modern linguistics has shown to be sound. They noticed, first, the "formal character of gender as a marker of agreement between words in certain syntactic groupings" and, second, they observed that the correspondence between linguistic gender and natural sex was only partial.1 Protagoras, an influential fifth-century Sophist, is credited with being the first to distinguish three genders in Greek.2 Aristophanes' satirical portrait of Socrates in The Clouds indicates that the historical Socrates (469-399 B.C.) may have been interested in gender and may even have attempted to introduce some reforms for the purpose of systematizing Greek gender. Aristophanes' Socrates sought to introduce the new feminine (in form) word alektryaina for 'hen' instead of alektryón used for both 'cock' and 'hen*. In The Clouds, Socrates is also reported to have worried about words like ι R. H. Robins, Ancient and Mediaeval Grammatical Theory in Europe (London, 1951), p. 15. 2 John Lyons, Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 10.

SPECULATIVE THEORIES OF GENDER

15

kárdopos, a feminine word with an unusual ending for Greek feminine nouns. 3 As part of his discussion of nouns, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), like Protagoras, recognized three genders. But he went one step further: he listed the typical endings for each gender by classifying nouns according to their gender-marking terminations.4 It is probably to the Stoics that we owe the term 'neuter'. 5 With the Stoics, originality and innovation in grammar came to an end. Henceforth, grammar came to be treated by professional grammarians whose main task was to assemble the grammatical ideas of the philosophers "as a finished body of doctrine". 6 Dionysius Thrax (first century B.C.) is an outstanding example of this new class of grammarians. The Romans added little to Greek linguistics. Occasionally, however, a Roman author tried to explain or justify certain observations about language. The grammarian Varrò (first century B.C.), for instance, explained that Latin had the two different forms equus 'horse' and equa 'mare' because the sex of the animal was important to the speakers. Whereas, when the sex difference is of no interest to the speakers, the language has only one form for both masculine and feminine, e.g., corvus 'raven'. 7 Another Roman, Sextus Empiricus (late second century A.D.), could observe that the gender of some nouns differed from one dialect to another. 8 The preceding paragraphs are meant not as a detailed history of linguistic treatments of gender but as a background for the achievements of linguists in the study of gender from the eighteenth century to the present. In the remainder of this chapter, I shall sketch the fanciful-in some cases, even whimsical—ideas of some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century linguists concerning gender. The following chapter will trace the development and accomplishments of a more empirical, hence more realistic, approach to language in general and to gender in 3

R. H. Robins, A Short History of Linguistics (London, 1967), pp. 25-26. Robins, Ancient and Mediaeval Grammatical Theory, pp. 23-24, and A Short History of Linguistics, p. 27. 5 Robins, Ancient and Mediaeval Grammatical Theory, p. 31. 6 Robins, Ancient and Mediaeval Grammatical Theory, p. 36. 7 Robins, A Short History of Linguistics, p. 50. 8 Robins, A Short History of Linguistics, p. 21. 4

16

SPECULATIVE THEORIES OF GENDER

particular. The discussion will be confined to writings on the IndoEuropean and Semitic families. It was with the advent of philosophical grammars in the eighteenth century that linguistics started to change from what it had been in classical times. In the area of gender, Herder (1744-1803) and Adelung (1732-1806) were the first to offer an explanation of gender and its origin: 9 They insisted that early man . . . considered everything he looked upon as animated, and treated it as a living being. Grammatical gender is, according to this, the result of the tendency of primitive man to individualize and personify . . . . [Adelung] says that everything which was characterized by activity, liveliness, strength, size, or had anything of the frightful or terrible in its nature was made masculine. Those objects . . . that were felt to be susceptible, fertile, delicate, passive, attractive, became feminine. It is remarkable how commonly accepted this 'explanation' became among successive generations of linguists and how long-lived it has been. Not only did Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) accept this view of the origin of gender, but he also maintained that change in gender occurs because of inflectional change and arbitrary fancy. 1 0 Today, this same explanation is probably still the most widespread of any among laymen and linguists alike. The ideas of Herder and Adelung have been repeated continually in slightly varying forms by a wide range of writers on language. In some cases, these writers gave their own versions of the explanation of gender a dramatic quality by treating the primitive as a child: From this source [i.e., imagination] is derived the whole system of genders for inanimate things, which was perhaps inevitable at that early childish stage of the human intelligence, when the actively work9 Karl Brugmann, The Nature and Origin of the Noun Genders in the Indo-European Languages (New York, 1897); a lecture delivered on the occasion of the sesquicentennial celebration of Princeton University, tr. by Edward Y. Robbins; pp. 7-8. Brugmann does not mention the sources in which Herder and Adelung express these ideas on gender and I have not been able to locate the original source of Herder's and Adelung's ideas. 10 Charles B. Wilson, Review of A. Polzin, Geschlechts-Wandel der Substantiva im Deutschen..., in Journal of English and German Philology, 5.4. (1903-1905), p. 554.

SPECULATIVE THEORIES OF GENDER

17

ing soul attributed to everything around it some portion of its own life . . . . To the quick fancy of the child of nature it seems impossible to regard anything as absolutely without Ufe.11 The similarity between this statement and another one, written more than eighty years later, is striking. Once again, the 'childishness' of the primitive man is the answer to the question. 'How did gender originate? ': Gender

was due originally to the personification

. . . of inanimate

objects . . . or phenomena . . . in the mind of the primitive man. Just as the child hits in revenge the table or the wall that hurt him while he was playing, so does the primitive man attribute soul and life and will to objects or plants . . . . 1 2 While it is easy to refute these arguments and to account for their emergence, it is not clear how they have succeeded in surviving until today. The failures of this purported explanation of the origin of gender are apparent on two accounts: (1) Gender is far from being a universal grammatical category. Whereas some of the so-called primitive languages have certain gender systems, many do not. (2) This argument implies that a conscious 'anthropomorphic conception' of inanimate objects existed in the minds of the speakers of languages with gender before these speakers had words with which to name those objects. 1 3 Apart from being absurd, such a hypothesis cannot be proved by anyone. Theories linking 'primitive' people and their 'primitive' languages have their origin in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anthropology and its theory of a hierarchy of races. In this hierarchy, "Living primitive people . . . were thought to represent the earlier stages in a universal process of social evolution". 1 4 Furthermore, 11

Rev. Frederic W. Farrar, Chapters on Language (London, 1865), p. 212. G. Bonfante, "Semantics, Language" in Encyclopedia of Psychology, ed. by P. L. Harriman (New York, 1946), p. 847. 13 Brugmann, The Nature and Origin of the Noun Genders, p. 20. See also pp. 10-20 for other arguments against the Herder-Adelung theory of gender. 14 G. Lienhardt, Social Anthropology (Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 9. For more on the position of primitive man in nineteenth century anthropology see pp. 3-22. 12

18

SPECULATIVE THEORIES OF GENDER

The 'higher' people were characterized by scientific reasoning and technological power [among other t h i n g s ] . . . . The 'lower' peoples therefore might be supposed to show the opposite of these characteristics—childlike thought—processes, uninventiveness,... , 1S An excellent example illustrating the connection between nineteenthcentury anthropology and gender is the following account from an article by a prominent Africanist of the late nineteenth century in which the author explains the far-reaching implications of the fact that Chinese lacks the category of gender: But the deficiencies of Chinese civilization and their deficiencies of character (apparently arising from a want of the higher imaginative faculty) are to us a new proof how much men need that poetic stimulus which the ancient structure of our languages has given to our minds. The thirst for science must already very strongly have seized upon the spirit of a nation when it can do well without that lever which the sex-denoting form of language affords to the mind. The more logical arrangement which some Northern Teutonic nations (particularly the English) have adopted, by removing all nouns in which sex cannot be distinguished from the masculine and feminine classes (or genders), has its undoubted advantages. But it is, perhaps, well that these nations are in continually increasing intercourse with others, whose languages still supply them (by the almost enforced personification of all objects) with an involuntary mental stimulus, which, although it may frequently lead them into dream-land, as often raises them to higher conceptions. 16 Although such ideas about primitive societies have long ago disappeared from professional anthropological writings, they have persisted in the works of some anthropological amateurs, including linguists and psychologists. But it would not be fair to attribute to obsolete anthropological theory alone any of the failures of nineteenth-century ,s

G. Lienhaidt, Social Anthropology, p. 12. W. H. I. Bleek, "The Concord, the origin of pronouns, and the formation of classes or genders of nouns". Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 1 (1872), p. lxxix. The above statement by Bleek makes him a very good example of the kind of person of whom Lienhardt says (Social Anthropology, p. 21): "There is a type of mind which cultivates the virtues of ethnocentricity, represents a distaste for foreigners as realistic and unsentimental common sense, and attributes to itself all the virtues of the civilization to which it belongs". 16

SPECULATIVE THEORIES OF GENDER

19

linguistics. One obvious reason for fallacious linguistic notions such as those regarding gender is inherent in the linguistics of the times. It should be remembered that the historical and comparative methods in linguistics were not developed until late in the nineteenth century. Today we can reject theories about primitive mentality with confidence, not because we have developed better ways for speculating about the origin of things, but because we have developed a better methodology and have at our disposal large quantities of empirical linguistic data which were unavailable to our predecessors. The absence of a developed field of historical linguistics, combined with popular notions about primitive peoples, made such explanations as offered by Herder and Adelung, and their followers, seem plausible. If only for the sake of its interest, a different theory of the origin of gender should be mentioned briefly here. Significantly, this theory was advanced by an anthropologist, the famed Sir James Frazer. 1 7 Frazer gets the clues for his theory from some American and Australian groups, such as Carib and Arawak, where it is alleged that the linguistic situation among these groups is such that men speak a language different from that spoken by women. The differences in the speech of the two sexes consist chiefly in the different inflections used by men and women on the same words. Regardless of how these differences of inflection originated, Frazer finds in them an explanation of the origin of grammatical gender. Thus, words are masculine or feminine in today's speech because "Sometimes the form which survived in the speech now common to both sexes would be the form originally employed by the men only, and this would give the masculine gender; sometimes it would be the form originally appropriate to the women, and this would give the feminine gender" 18 The discussion so far has revolved around the treatment of gender in Indo-European. If we move to Semitic languages and examine some of the writings on the same question, we find Semitic gender described in words almost identical with those in which Indo-European gender had been described. However, this is true only of the writings of Western Orientalists. There is no doubt that the European intellectual climate influenced those Orientalists and their writings. In other 17

"A Suggestion as to the Origin of Gender in Language", Fortnightly Review, 73 (January, 1900), pp. 79-91. 18 Frazer, "A Suggestion as to the Origin of Gender", p. 88.

20

SPECULATIVE THEORIES OF GENDER

words, European authors of grammars of Semitic languages applied to aspects in Semitic languages the same reasoning used in attempting to explain the same aspects of Indo-European grammar, such as gender. Thus the writer of what is perhaps the most authoritative Western grammar of Arabic declares: The vivid imagination of the Semite conceived all objects, even those that are apparently lifeless, as endowed with life and personality. Hence for him there are but two genders, as there exist in nature but two sexes. 19 In some cases, the primitive Semites were alleged to have done and believed things which primitive Indo-Europeans i.e., the ancestors of these authors of Semitic grammars, were never alleged to have done or believed. The German author of what is still a standard reference grammar of Biblical Hebrew assures his readers that "the Semitic mind regarded the above-mentioned forms [some inanimate nouns] primarily as actual feminines" 2 0 (my emphasis) because these nouns are grammatically feminine, although they lack an overt marker of the feminine gender. The influence of Indo-European grammarians can be seen most vividly when the following statement is compared with the one cited on page 16 and attributed to Adelung. According to Albrecht, a German Semitist, masculine gender is assigned by the Hebrews and the Semites generally to whatever is dangerous, savage, courageous, respected, great, strong, p o w e r f u l . . . ; the feminine to whatever is motherly, productive, sustaining, nourishing, gentle, w e a k , . . . , 21

19 W. Wright, A Grammar of the Arabic Language, 3rd edition (Cambridge University Press, 1896), Vol. I, p. 131. This statement is really baffling in that it implies surprise at the fact that inanimate nouns in Semitic are classified as masculine or feminine. Wright knew German intimately (he originally translated his book from German and later expanded it significantly), and German has numerous inanimate nouns which are assigned to either masculine or feminine gender. 20

E. Kautzsch, Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar, tr. by A. E. Cowley, 2nd edition (Oxford University Press, 1910), p. 393, f o o t n o t e 2. 21

E. Kautzsch, Gesenius' Hebrew

Grammar,

p. 3 9 1 , f o o t n o t e 3.

21

SPECULATIVE THEORIES OF GENDER

The work of one more Orientalist, a Dutchman, should be mentioned here, if only because he devoted a very long essay to the subject of gender in the Semitic languages. Moreover, he sought to explain the peculiarities of Semitic gender along lines different from those of his predecessors in the field, although his explanation and approach remain as erroneous as those discussed above. He, too, was guilty of the same deadly sin, namely, of depending heavily on mere speculation and of considering, almost exclusively, extra-linguistic factors in arriving at his conclusion: In the non-monotheistic Semitic religions the change was much less accentuated and much more like the linguistic one which, of course, was wholly unconscious. The old beliefs were not declared devoid of reality; but states and acts related to them were declared impure. It is exactly the field of impure to which an uncommon magical power was ascribed and as such it is feminine (my emphasis). 2 2 For example, The localization of psychic affections in several parts of the body is another fact intimately connected with their being considered as seats of magical energy [and therefore feminine]. 2 3 These speculations about gender in Semitic reached their extreme form with the suggestion that the lack of an overt feminine ending is early Semitic implied a higher rating of females in Semitic culture and thus may be the reflection of a matriarchal organization of early Semitic society. 2 4 Those grammarians who have written about primitive peoples and their primitive languages were like the 'armchair' anthropologists of the nineteenth-century, who wrote about these peoples without any contracts with them or their culture. The picture changed in anthropology and in linguistics when specialists from these two disciplines

22 A. J. Wensinck, Some Aspects of Gender in the Semitic Languages 0=Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen te Amsterdam, Afdeling Letterkunde Nieuwe Reeks, deel XXVI, No. 3) ( 1 9 2 7 ) , p. 35. 23

Wensinck, Some Aspects of Gender, p. 38. C. Brockelmann, Grundriss der Vergleichenden Sprachen (Berlin, 1908), vol. 1, p. 4 1 7 . 24

Grammatik

der

Semitischen

22

SPECULATIVE THEORIES OF GENDER

learned first-hand about their subjects. A man who perhaps knows more about primitive societies than anyone else warns us that We must therefore alter our traditional picture of this primitiveness of the primitive man. The 'savage' has certainly never borne any resemblance either to that creature . . . nor to that consciousness governed by emotions and lost in a maze of confusion and participation.25 Alf Sommerfelt's ideas concerning gender represent a different kind of fallacious thinking. Although he admits that, historically, we might be able to explain why in Norwegian 'chair' is masculine, 'table' neuter, and 'bed' feminine, he dismisses this possibility on the grounds that he is dealing with the synchronic level.26 Adherence to a belief in the complete independence of the synchronic and diachronic processes in languages, as Sommerfelt's statement seems to imply, is artificial and unacceptable. A change in any linguistic system is a synchronic happening before it becomes a diachronic event. In contrast with the Western writers of grammars of Semitic languages, we find that the native authors did not even raise the questions raised by European grammarians. The Arab grammarians' approach, for instance, was strictly descriptive, especially in the first century of Arab grammar writing (eighth/ninth century). In explaining why certain nouns in Arabic which refer to inanimate objects and have no explicit feminine ending are treated as feminine in the grammar, they offered three explanations, all of which are descriptive in that these explanations were based on the linguistic material available to the grammarians and nothing else: (1) A word may be feminine simply because the speakers of the language treat it so. This was a cardinal rule which the Arab grammarians followed, i.e., to restrict their rules and explanations to the linguistic material they collected from Bedouins. A typical 'explanation' of why certain nouns are feminine would be something like: 'Because they were heard from the Arabs as feminine' . li'anmhä su mi'at21 25

'an-i-Varab mu

'unnatha).

Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, (University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 43. A. Sommerfelt, "Language, Society and Culture", in his Diachronic and Synchronic Aspects of Language·. Selected Articles (Mouton and Co., 1962), p. 119. 27 The verb sumi'at • 'was heard* and its adjective sarruTiyy in this context may be interpreted as meaning: 'established by received (oral) usage or hearsay'. 26

SPECULATIVE THEORIES OF GENDER

23

(2) The feminine status of some nouns was sanctioned because the diminutives of those nouns are feminine in form, e.g., ayn süq dar udhn

eye 'market' 'house' 'ear'

uyaynat- 28 suwayqatduwayrat'udhaynat-

(3) Sometimes gender is assigned to a word by 'association', 29 that is, it acquires the gender of another word associated with it by meaning or omission. Examples are: a. Association with a synonym: Here a word is made to accord syntactically with its meaning rather than with its formal ending. For example, lisan 'tongue' is masculine, but if it is used in the sense of lughat- 'language', itself feminine, then lisïïn may be treated as feminine. Likewise, kitab 'book' is masculine, but may be considered feminine if one uses this word to mean risolai- 'letter, message'. b. Association by omission (ellipsis) : The name of any city in Arabic is feminine, whether or not it has a feminine ending. It has been argued that in this case, and others, the name of a city acquires the feminine gender of the omitted, but understood, word for city, i.e., modifiât- 'city of '. Similarly, the names of mountains and rivers (among other things) are all supposed to be masculine in spite of the fact that some of these names have an explicit feminine termination (e.g. dijlat- 'Tigris'). This is so because nahr 'river' and jabal 'mountain' are masculine. Whether one says nahr dijlat- 'Tigris river' or simply dijlat- 'Tigris', the name of the river is always masculine by virtue of the gender of nahr 'river'. 30

28

-at is the typical feminine markei in Arabic. A hyphen is placed after -at because -at occurs in context, as opposed to pause, forms only, i.e., a word cannot have -at before silence. 29 Association is used here for the Arabic terms Haml, and ita'wS, 'interpretation'. 30 Another term which has been used to describe this process of omission is incorporation. I have encountered it in Bleek's article on "The Concord . . . p. lxvi and in J. Gruber, Functions of the Lexicon in Formal Descriptive Grammars (Santa Monica: System Development Corporation, 1967). More will be said about these and other processes of gender assignment in Arabic and more examples will be given later in the study.

III THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF GENDER

Before the history and outcome of the empirical approach to gender are reviewed, a quick look at the nature and function of gender will be useful. An understanding of the nature and function of gender is helpful in anticipating certain facts about the origin of gender. The nature of gender involves some very obvious facts, e.g., that it is not a universal linguistic category and that it has disappeared from some languages which had gender at a certain time in their history. An example of such a language is modern Persian. In some other languages, e.g. English, the gender system has radically changed and almost all of its morphological and syntactic manifestations have been lost. Furthermore, we know of no language which lost its gender system and then reacquired it or anything like it at a later stage in its history. 1 These facts, i.e., that many languages have never had gender and that gender has been lost in languages in which it once had existed, made linguists designate gender as a secondary grammatical category since it is not vital for the proper functioning of any language. As a secondary category, gender stands in opposition to primary categories

1 However, A. Rosetti reports an instance of the rebirth of neuter gender in Rumanian:

Après la disparition du neutre dans le latin danubien, nous assistons, à un moment donné, à sa renaissance, probablement à l'époque de communauté de roumain,. . . , et il emploi les désinences du masculin, au singulier, et du féminin, au pluriel, pour exprimer le neutre. "Remarques sur la catégorie du genre en roumain" in his Linguistica (Mouton, 1965), pp. 83-84. This article appeared originally in Studia Linguistica 13 (Lund, 1959), pp. 133-139.

THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF GENDER

25

such as the parts of speech, and functional categories like subject, object, etc. 2 Besides gender, secondary grammatical categories include tense and number. Yet gender is different from its secondary sisters in one important respect. Gender adds nothing to the meaning of an inanimate noun as, say, the category of number does. This is natural in view of the fact that, unlike all other grammatical categories, gender does not evince an authentic relationship with conceptual categories. 3 Moreover, grammatical gender is totally superfluous where it is needed most, that is, in making sex distinctions where these distinctions are semantically important and/or required. 4 In such cases, the language concerned, whether it is possessed with gender or innocent of it, makes the necessary gender differentiation by lexical means in one of two ways: (1) A different word (sometimes called a 'gender noun') is used to designate each of the members of the male-female dyad; e.g., English

father: mother,ram: ewe; Arabic ab: um, kabsh: na'jat-. (2) By using a process equivalent to the English method of designating gender distinctions in some words. Schematically, this is done in the following manner: male-X: female-X or he-X: she-X. For example, male elephant: female elephant and he-doctor: she-doctor.5 In Arabic, only the first

2

Lyons, Theoretical Linguistics, p. 274, section 7.1.5. Cf. I. Fodor, "The Origin of Grammatical Gender", part II, Lingua 8.2 (May, 1959), p. 195. 4 What is important differs, of course, from culture to culture. If we consider the field of kinship, it would be reasonable to say that in all societies, the immediate members of one's family (parents and siblings) are more important to him than other kin. In this connection Greenberg notes that it is "a probable 'factual universal' that all systems distinguish male and female parent by separate terms even though very frequently other kin types are included in the referents of both", 'mother' may also refer to 'mother-in-law' ("Language Universale" in T. A. Sebeok, ed., Current Trends in Linguistics, vol. Ill: Theoretical Foundations, p. 101) In another area, the animal kingdom, it is a truism that domestic animals and animals familiar to one from his immediate environment would be more important than other animals, hence the use of separate words to distinguish males and females is more likely for these animal groups than for others which are farther removed from one's immediate interest and experience. 3

5

Of course, English has, in addition to these, such expressions as lady

doctor.

26

THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF GENDER

of these two methods is possible and is used. Thus, the Arabic equivalent of the first English example above is: dhakaru-1-fìh 'untha-l-fil (dhakar 'male', 'unthä 'female'). The nature of gender as an unessen-

tial category, which serves no useful purpose .that cannot be serve.d by some other means, has prompted Bally to characterize gender as "un luxe linguistique sans relation avec la logique". 6 All of these facts about gender which have been discussed in this section gave rise to questions about the essence of gender. Vendryes was one of the early linguists to ask the crucial question and answer it most briefly: En quoi donc consiste le genre indo-européen? d'accord. 7

En une question

The question and answer are concerned with Indo-European gender, but as will be shown in the course of the discussion, agreement 8 is the essence of gender wherever it exists. Thus, in the words of Louis Hjelmslev, gender is reduced to une catégorie strictement grammaticale, ou plutôt grammaticalisée, relevant avant tout de la forme pure, du schéma même de la langue. 9 If the essence of gender is in agreement, then we should expect to find some correlation between those languages which have (or lack) gender woman teacher, etc., but these terms aie not any different from expressions with female in the principle governing their formation. 6 Le langage et la vie, p. 45. Quoted in I. Fodor, "The Origin of Grammatical Gender", II, p. 195. 7 J. Vendryes, Le langage: Introduction linguistique a l'histoire (Paris, 1921), p. 111. 8 There seems to be some disagreement as to the term used to describe the linguistic phenomenon whereby, roughly, one part of speech (usually a nominal) determines the morphological shape of one or more other adjacent parts of speech (e.g., adjective, article, verb). Concord and agreement are very commonly used in this respect. Other terms used include government, congruence and bonding. I. Fodor, in his article "The Origin of Grammatical Gender", uses at least four such terms interchangeably. These are: concord, agreement, motion, and congruence. But these are only partially synonymous (Cf. Mario Pei, Glossary of Linguistic Terminology). In this book, I shall use the terms agreement and concord. 9 L. Hjelmslev, "Animé et inanimé", p. 212.

THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF GENDER

27

and the linguistic type to which these languages belong. This expectation is legitimate because agreement, by definition, consists in that certain morphemes determine the occurrence of certain other morphemes and the non-occurrence of others, and not all types of languages allow such morphological processes. In fact, we find that Caucasian among the agglutinative languages, Indo-European and Semito-Hamitic of the inflectional group, and some American Indian languages of the polysynthetic type all utilize gender. But gender is not known to exist in any isolating language such as Chinese. 10 The point just made is more than a passing observation. It shows that gender is a linguistic phenomenon and that no extra-linguistic factors were involved in its emergence. Indeed, it is in the relation between grammatical gender and morphological types that some linguists hope to find an answer as to the origin of gender.11 There is an interesting corollary to the fact that gender is not universal. On the basis of recent research in aphasia, we should expect an aphasie speaker of a language with gender to lose his ability to make gender distinctions in his speech. This inference follows logically from the following two hypotheses: (1) That gender is a surface syntactic phenomenon, not present in the universal (or nearly universal) base component of the grammar. (2) That the "aphasies' concepts of universal grammatical relationships are preserved and that the dissolution of language following brain damage results in faulty performance in transforming them into surface strings". 12 At this point, after what has been said about the nature of gender, one might wonder whether grammatical gender has any useful role to play in language. Three possibilities come to mind readily: 13 (1) For those languages with a developed gender system and explicit gender-marking terminations, it becomes very easy and convenient for the speakers of such languages to express gender distinctions in animate beings. In order to express the same distinctions found in the following set of pairs of Arabic words, English has to

10 Fodor, "The Origin of Grammatical Gender", II, p. 207. » Fodor, "The Origin", p. 208. i2 Orlando L. Taylor, "Aphasia Research at Indiana University", Language Sciences 5 (April, 1969), p. 1. ,3 Cf. Fodor, "The Origin of Grammatical Gender", II, pp. 206-207.

28

THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF GENDER

resort to other means, namely, the prefixing of male-, female-, he-, or she- before each word:

'commando' 'martyr' 'American' 'mule' 'Pig' 'baby'

Masculine fidä'iyy shahld 'amrikiyy baghl khinzTr Tifi

Feminine fidä'iyyatshahîdat'amnkiyyatbaghlatkhinziratTiflat-

It has been found that this and similar derivational mechanisms add to the simplicity of the lexicon since a lexicon is the more highly valued, the lower the count of distinct types of subtrees found therein, regardless of the number of tokens or repetitive uses of that type. That is, we count types of subtrees found in the lexicon, not tokens. 14 If this principle (known as the 'simplicity criterion') is accepted, one cannot but agree that It is more favorable for a language to use derivational means for getting new words than to make up entirely new ones . . . . . . . . a new word will be more costly necessitating the counting of many new connections between the phonological part and the categories and subtrees therein involved. 15 (2) Stylistically, gender can be a valuable tool of disambiguation and permits more freedom of word ordering. Thus in modern Persian—which is devoid of gender and thus has one pronoun where English has 'he' and 'she' -ambiguities often arise because it is impossible to tell which of several nouns in a sentence is the antecedent of a pronoun. However, gender serves this function, not directly, but indirectly through agreement. (3) As is well known, gender can be, and has often been, exploited in literature by animating and personifying inanimate nouns. There is 14 15

Gruber, Functions Gruber, Functions

of the Lexicon, of the Lexicon,

p. 109. p. 113.

THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF GENDER

29

no doubt that the existence of personified objects in, particularly classical, literature and mythology is partly responsible for the early speculative theory of the origin of gender set forth by Adelung and others. The central point of this section, if it needs to be repeated, is to show how any investigation of gender should start from an examination of linguistic data. Any conclusion reached on the subject should, as much as possible, be made on the basis of this examination only. We have seen how, starting from fairly simple observations about language, we can reach important conclusions and ask deeper questions. These questions, in turn, require more data and closer examination of these data. With this in mind, we now turn to the question: How did gender emerge as a linguistic category?

IV ON THE ORIGIN OF GENDER

A question which we have avoided asking thus far concerns the nature of the relation which grammatical gender has to natural gender. For animate nouns, the correspondence between natural and grammatical genders in nearly perfect: almost without exception, every noun (in any language with a gender category) that refers to a male creature belongs to the class of masculine nouns and every noun denoting a female being belongs to the feminine class of nouns. This raises the question whether grammatical gender in its origin had anything to do with natural gender. There is unanimous agreement among recent writers on the subject that grammatical gender, at some stage in its development, must have been an extension of natural gender to the sphere of language. In fact, the names we give to the three Indo-European genders, i.e., masculine, feminine, and neuter, "clearly reflect the association which traditional grammar established between sex and gender". 1 The terms given by the Arab grammarians to the two genders of Arabic also reflect the same association: mudhakkar and mu'annath, literally 'masculinized' and 'femininized' respectively. But there is much less agreement among the same authorities as to how this association between gender and sex was established and the circumstances that led to it. Earlier, we saw how, according to some linguists, this association owed its origin to the creative imagination of the primitive. The displacement of this view by a more scientific one based on the study of data came about gradually and will be discussed below in two parts: in Indo-European and in Semitic historical linguistics. In later chapters, we will present evidence from various areas to support the ideas expressed here. ι

Lyons, Theoretical Linguistics, section 7.3.3, p. 283.

ON THE ORIGIN OF GENDER

A.

31

Indo-European Gender2

An early breakthrough, perhaps the earliest, in the evolution of a new approach to gender came with Heinrich Ernst Bindseil's book, Ueber die verschiedenen Bezeichnungsweisen des genus in den Sprachen (1838), in which the author réfute, pour le masculin et le féminin, l'idée d'une généralisation métaphorique des notions sexuelles, et la remplace par celle du terme générique rendant compte des evaluations adoptées dans la communauté linguistique. Par ces points de vue Bindseil est très considérablement en avance sur son t e m p s ; . . . . 3 In 1889 Johannes Schmidt published his Pluralbildung der indogermanischen Neutra where, for the first time, the identity of the nominative/accusative neuter plural and the nominative feminine singular in Indo-European was discussed. From this observation he concluded that in Proto-Indo-European plural neuters had a singular collective meaning. In this way he accounted for the fact that in Greek, for instance, a singular verb is used with a neuter plural subject. In more recent times, Schmidt's conclusions were corroborated by Kurylowicz, Jacobi, and van Wijk among others.4 The next important step was made by Herman Paul in his Principles

2

Useful serveys of research in Indo-European gender include the following: I. Fodor, "The Origin of Grammatical Gender", especially part I; L. Hjelmslev, "Animé et inanimé, personnel et non-personnel"; W. P. Lehmann, "On Earlier Stages of the Indo-European Nominal Inflection", Language 34.2 (1958), pp. 179-202. 3 Hjelmslev, "Animé et inanimé", p. 222. I have not been able to consult Bindseil's original work to which Hjelmslev refers. 4 On Schmidt, cf. Β. I. Wheeler, "Grammatical Gender", The Classical Review, 3 (1889), p. 391; W. P. Lehmann, "On Earlier Stages of the Indo-European Nominal Inflection", p. 179, footnote 1; and I. Fodor, "The Origin of Grammatical Gender", part I, p. 41. For examples and discussion see Schmidt's Pluralbildung, pp. 20, 35, 83, 141 ff., 210 ff., 225. The indentity of certain features of Indo-European and Arabic genders is striking. One feature is that discussed by Schmidt: in Arabic, too, the plurals of inanimate nouns (i.e., 'neuters') are treated as feminine singulars in every respect. Not only do these plurals take singular feminine verbs, they also take singular feminine adjectives and pronouns (personal, demontrative, and relative).

32

ON THE ORIGIN OF GENDER

of the History of Language,s Paul was probably the first linguist to recognize the importance of agreement in the rise of gender. He devotes Chapter XVII (pp. 338-350) to 'concord'. Likewise, he recognized that "Number also passes into a grammatical category solely by the development of concord" (p. 295). Of gender he says: The linguistic instruments whereby we recognize the grammatical gender of a substantive are the concord in which, on the one hand, attribute and predicate, on the other hand, a substitutory pronoun stands therewith. Thus the rise of the grammatical gender stands in the closest correspondence with the rise of a variable adjective and pronoun. 6 From this statement one can easily see that Paul was on the right track. For he goes on to look for the origin of gender, not in the noun, but in word classes with variable gender, particularly the "substitutory pronoun" where he thinks gender developed earliest. And because gender appeared first in pronouns, it has maintained itself longest in pronouns in languages such as English (p. 290). On the rise of concord, Paul believed that it was the result of the fusion of pronouns with verbs (p. 349). Using evidence from Semitic and other languages, in addition to evidence from Indo-European, R. Henning further developed Paul's meagerly exemplified ideas concerning the role of pronouns in the rise of agreement, hence of gender. 7 His conclusion confirmed that of Paul's: Gender did not originate in pronouns; however, elements which indicate gender are either of a pronoun origin or, at least, they are best reducible to pronominal roots. Another investigator who emphasized the role of the pronoun in the emergence of gender was Benjamin Wheeler, who thought that sex-gender was inherent in the pronoun, not in the noun. Then the adjective established the connection between noun and pronoun by means of concord. This is demonstrated by the observation that "the adjective, if we speak in terms of origins, 'agrees with' the pronoun 5

Translated from the German Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte by Η. Α. Strong (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1889). 6 Paul, Principles of the History of Language, p. 289. 7 In "Uber die Entwicklung des grammatischen Geschlechts", Zeitschrift fur vergleichende Sprachforschung, 33 (1895), pp. 402-419.

ON THE ORIGIN OF GENDER

33

rather than the noun", 8 since, as Paul has similarly argued, the morphological elements of agreement in Indo-European adjectives are very similar to the pronouns. Of the five linguists discussed thus far in this section, Bindseil and Schmidt used very little factual evidence to substantiate their claims. The views of the other three-Paul, Henning, and Wheeler-were variations on the same theme and, excepting Henning, they too used little evidence. In the remaining part of this section, the opinions of two more linguists on Indo-European gender will be discussed in some detail. Each of them has a radically different point of view from the other and from those discussed above. These linguists are: K. Brugmann and W. P. Lehmann. 1. Karl Brugmanrt:9 Brugmann sets out by quoting W. D. Whitney to the effect that "in explaining the prehistoric phenomena of language we must assume no other factors than those which we are able to observe and estimate in the historical period of language development" (pp. 1-2). He then observes that, in the Indo-European languages, there exist two methods for expressing distinctions in natural gender: either by different roots (which may have the same "mode of inflection"), or by the same root material but with different inflections. An example of the former method from Latin is pater and mater, and of the latter, deus 'god': dea 'goddess' (p. 4). In the case of grammatical gender, however, there is only one way for marking the masculine-feminine distinctions, and that is by the use of different inflectional endings as in Latin animus: anima. This observation leads him to the important conclusion that "the question as to how 'formal' gender is related to natural gender . . . depends entirely and exclusively on the terminations used to express gender, on the inflectional suffixes which mark sex" (pp. 4-5). Working from this conclusion, coupled with Whitney's principles, Brugmann ends up turning the old theory of gender on its head. Thus 8 B. I. Wheeler, "The Origin of Grammatical Gender", Journal of English and Germanic Philology 2 (1898), p. 542. See also pp. 535,538, 541-543. 9 The following discussion is based on Brugmann's lecture, The nature and Origin of the Noun Genders in the Indo-European Languages (1897).

34

ON THE ORIGIN OF GENDER

he boldly states: "It holds good, then, for the historical period of the Indo-European languages, that in personifying lifeless things, the sex is usually determined by the grammatical gender" (p. 30), and not vice versa as had been assumed by Adelung and his followers. Among the many examples he supplies from various Indo-European languages is one from German. In Old German mythology, der Tag appears only as a god, die Nacht only as a goddess. Next Brugmann shows how gender arose. His arguments may be summarized as follows: a. Animate nouns in -o-s were originally used as generic terms without regard to gender; e.g., Indo-European * e Ä w o-s(= Latin equos) originally denoted 'horse' in general. The -o-s ending could not have become specialized to masculine nouns without the development of some other suffìx(es) which had the power to express feminine gender (pp. 22-23). b. The feminine came to be expressed by -a-, and -ie- (-/'-). However, an examination of "all the words of the Indo-European languages which are formed with the suffixes -a-, -ie- (-/-)" leads one to conclude that "the original function of these suffixes was to form abstracts and collectives" (pp. 23-26). c. The function of these suffixes shifted from designating abstract and collective nouns to designating animate females. This transition took place through a process whereby terms expressing qualities came to be used for persons and things which possess that quality-a transition which is not uncommon in ancient and modern IndoEuropean languages. For example, youth in English stands for a quality and persons having that quality. So do old, rich, poor, blind, good, wretched and many other words. In German Bedienung means 'service' and 'servant', Aufwartung 'attendance' and 'attendant'. In this way, -a- and -ie- became attached to a number of words designating real females. d. The next step was relatively simple: -a- and -ie- were abstracted as designating feminine sex (p. 27). e. The final step was for the suffixes to be generalized (become productive). This happened when all nouns in -a- or -ie-, whether they referred to animates or inanimates, came to be thought of as 'feminine'. The generalization of the function of a suffix has many parallels in Indo-European languages. One example which Brugmann discusses is

ON THE ORIGIN OF GENDER

35

the German suffix -isch, which originally was used to form adjectives generally, especially from names of persons and peoples. However, some of the nouns to which this suffix was attached have a derogatory meaning: diebisch from Dieb 'thief, närrisch from Narr 'fool', etc. Because of such formations, -isch became a productive suffix for forming disparaging adjectives. Examples of the new formations are: teuflisch 'devilish', selbstisch 'selfish', etc. But there are adjectives of this class which have not acquired a pejorative connotation; e.g., himmlisch 'heavenly' and kriegerisch 'warlike'. In the same manner, words like Latin fuga 'flight' contain nothing of the idea of feminine sex (pp. 27-30). In spite of its flaws, Brugmann's theory has the great merit of seeking an explanation for the origin of gender in language alone without resort to arguments based on extralinguistic factors. One thing the theory still does not explain is how certain inanimate nouns, such as Latin furfur 'bran' (masc.) and vis 'help' (fem.), which have none of the typical gender-indicating endings, came to belong to the masculine or feminine classes, nor why nouns such as Latin poeta or Greek náufes 'sailor' have a feminine ending, although they are masculine in gender. Brugmann has also been criticized on two other accounts. The first is that he says almost nothing about the neuter, how it arose, when it was separated from the other two genders, etc. The second, which makes the theory appear almost worthless, is that he says nothing about concord which is so essential in any discussion of gender.10 These criticisms, although understandable, are unfair in view of Brugmann's expressed aim, which was not meant to be a complete study of Indo-European gender, but only to show "that it is possible to take a historical view of the noun genders masculine and feminine without ascribing to our Indo-European ancestors a mental state that has no analogy in those periods that are familiar to us from historical tradition". 11 Before W. P. Lehmann's views are discussed, we should pause briefly to consider the opinions of Antoine Meillet on Indo-European gender.

10 11

Fodot, "The Origin of Grammatical Gender", Part I, pp. 17-18,19. Brugmann, "Nature and Origin of Noun Genders", pp. 30-31.

36

ON THE ORIGIN OF GENDER

Meillet's main thesis is that the three genders did not rise all at the same time. 12 First, animate nouns became separated from inanimate nouns, and later the animate class split into masculine and feminine. 13 Meillet accounts for the occurrence of the first split, but does not explain why the second bifurcation had to take place. In his opinion, the animate was detached from the inanimate because of a need to distinguish, within the animate nouns, the subject from the object, since because of initially free word order, the original identity of nouns in the two cases (nominative and accusative) caused ambiguity and misunderstanding. 14 Some of Meillet's ideas marked a return to the speculative theory of gender. For example, he claims that L'arbre (féminin) s'oppose au fruit qu'il porte, qui est une chose 'inanimée', de genre neutre. Un organ actif est animé: ainsi la 'main' qui reçoit est féminin, par opposition a 'pied', masculin. 15 Thus we see that Brugmann's ideas on gender remain superior to all others and, in fact, remained so for about seventy years after they had been published until W. P. Lehmann published his excellent articleon the same subject, to which we shall turn immediately and in which he accepts some of Brugmann's ideas. 12 Meillet's ideas are expressed in his Linguistique historique et linguistique générale, I (Paris, 1921), pp. 199-229; II (1938), pp. 24-28. Meillet's theory is discussed in Fodor, "The Origin of Grammatical Gender", I, pp. 19-30, which discusses also a number of linguists who developed Meillet's ideas further and contains a good bibliography. See also Hjelmslev, Essais Linguistiques, p. 224 ff. 13 It is interesting to see that W. D. Whitney reverses Meillet's scheme of the separation of genders. Whitney, without providing any supporting evidence, thinks that the feminine was first differentiated from the masculine when "certain words were distinguished as possessed of feminine qualities, and marked by a difference of derivative ending . . . . The separation of neuter from masculine was both later in origin and less substantially marked...". See Whitney's Language and the Study of Language, 5 th edition (New York, 1873), pp. 273-274. H. Guntert in a book published in 192S argues that the three genders were separated in the order suggested by Whitney (however, without referring to Whitney). See part I of Fodor's paper, p. 23, footnote 28. 14 Meillet receives full support for these ideas from J. Kurylowicz on the basis of the latter's examination of Slavic data. See Kurylowicz, "Personal and Animate Genders in Slavic", Lingua, 11 (1962), p. 255. 15 A. Meillet, "Le genre féminin dans les langues indo-européennes", Linguistique historique . . . , I, p. 24.

ON THE ORIGIN OF GENDER

37

2. W. P. Lehmann·}6 Lehmann rejects the indentification of the nominative/accusative plural neuter with the nominative singular feminine in late Indo-European (but see footnote 17) and suggests a change in reconstructing Proto-Indo-European by eliminating the mark for PIE nominative/accusative neuter plural (p. 188). He then proceeds to demonstrate meticulously how the nominal endings -s, -m, -h, -φ (zero) served in pre-Indo-European to mark different forms (with different meanings) 17 of the same paradigm. Examples are: Sanskrit hirria (a reflex of the h- form) 'winter', himás 'cold, frost' himam 'snow' (pp. 189-191). However, In late Proto-Indo-European the nominal declension developed with its categories of gender, number, and case; and noun^inherited from pre-Indo-European were fitted into the new system (p. 191). As a result, -s, -m, -h, and φ, which formerly marked different forms of the same paradigm, came now to mark the nominative forms of four different paradigms. Next Lehmann discusses the central issue in gender, agreement (which he calls 'congruence'). Indo-European gender concord "irose in great part as a result of the fixing of forms induced by the shift of accent and by the rise of long vowels resulting from the loss of laryngeals" (p. 195). These phonological changes took place in the noun paradigm as well as in the adjectives of the vocalic declension

16

The following discussion is based on Lehmann's article "On Earlier Stages of the Indo-European Nominal Inflection", Language, 34.2 (1958), pp. 179-202. 17 According to Lehmann, -s marked a word "representing an individual", -m that "representing the result of an action"; -A marked a collective. Many Λforms "corresponded to the later nominative singular feminine, others to nominative/accusative plural neuters" (pp. 190-191). After a lengthy argument, Lehmann concludes on page 197 that "the neuter gender developed late in Indo-European, not before the time of the development of masculine and feminine gender". It should be recalled that this was Whitney's and Guntert's opinion too. If this chronology is correct, it provides a possible explanation for one of Greenberg's universale: "Where a neuter exists alongside of a masculine and feminine, the neuter is the most marked category and can be opposed to the masculine/feminine" ("Language Universale", Current Trends in Linguisties, vol. Ill, p. 81). I am assuming here that the later a category arises, the more marked it is.

38

ON THE ORIGIN OF GENDER

and vocalic demonstratives (e.g. /so-/). With the development of fixed forms in the noun paradigm and with the adjectives and demonstratives undergoing phonological change, the emergence of the concord system was only a matter of time: Similarity in function, leading to similarity in endings, of many nouns, adjectives, and demonstratives led to gender congruence between nouns and their modifiers: a noun used as subject with -a would require pronouns or adjectives in -asubstituting for it; . . . . Through the resulting agreement between forms of similar ending, the threefold congruence distinction arose . . . , though without any reference to sex or natural gender (p. 196; my emphasis). To explain the change of this purely 'formal' congruence into one of natural gender, Lehmann refers us to Brugmann's explanation since we have no evidence (such as detailed historical texts) that it happened in any other way. But we should not overlook an important difference between the two theories: Lehmann assumes that "the three congruence classes arose simultaneously" by late Proto-IndoEuropean (p. 199) because the three gender classes were the outcome of the same phonological and morphological changes. Lehmann finds support for his theory in some reflexes of the old, i.e. pre-Indo-European, system. He asserts that "the nominal congruence system was never extended to the oldest members of the pronominal system" such as Sanskrit aham, tvam, and "only superficially to the oldest members of the nominal system such as the consonant stems. Even in the thematic stems the new concord system was not established with the same consistency throughout the dialects" (p. 199); cf. Latin poeta, Greek mutes 'sailor', both of which are feminine in form, but masculine in gender. Before concluding the subject of gender in Indo-European languages, perhaps it would be useful to compare Lehmann's views with Fodor's, if only because both studies appeared at approximately the same time 18 and concerned themselves almost exclusively with Indo-European gender, and yet they reach basically different conclusions.

18

Fodor's study first appeared in Hungarian in 1958-59; Lehmann's in 1958.

ON THE ORIGIN OF GENDER

39

A fundamental difference between the two positions is that Fodor accepts in principle Meilett's theory concerning the separation of animate and inanimate nouns as the first stage in the emergence of Indo-European gender. 19 Furthermore, Fodor seems to attribute gender to a later period of Indo-European languages, the period of Proto-Indo-European, whereas Lehmann assigns it to the pre-IndoEuropean times. Consequently, Fodor argues that "gender did not spring forth simultaneously throughout Proto-Indo-European, it did not come about in a uniformly indentical way and in consequence of indentical causes". 20 His acceptance of the animate-inanimate dichotomy leads him to the conclusion that neuter and non-neuter were separated for syntactic reasons, whereas masculine and feminine became differentiated due to semantic and morphological causes. Fodor leaves his arguments and conclusions at the level of general statements with very little documentation to support them. B.

Semitic Gender21

Gender in the Semitic languages has not been explored to the same degree as it has been in the Indo-European family. The study of Semitic gender, therefore, is still at a primitive stage compared with Indo-European studies. This is not an isolated phenomenon, but reflects the backwardness of Semitic linguistics in general. One reason for this seems to be the Semitists' ignorance of achievements in historical Indo-European linguistics. In an area like gender, familiarity with the accomplishments of Indo-Europeanists is a desirable, even essential, thing. We will see below how some of the mistakes which occurred in the course of investigating Indo-European gender have been duplicated in Semitic studies.

19

Fodoi, "The Origin of Grammatical Gender", I, p. 32. Fodor, "The Origin", p. 41. 21 Semitic languages have not received as much attention as have their Indo-European sisters. The only survey I know of, and a good one fortunately, which surveys theories related to the origin of Semitic gender is Robert Hetzron, "Agaw Numerals and Incongruence in Semitic", Journal of Semitic Studies, 12.2 (1967), pp. 180-184. A very brief, but good, summary of some theories of Semitic gender is to be found in E. A. Speiser, "Studies in Semitic Formatives", Journal of the American Oriental Society, 56.1 (March, 1936), pp. 36-37. 2°

40

ON THE ORIGIN OF GENDER

For instance, many Semitists are not certain whether gender is as old as language itself or not: "at a certain period of its development, it is very likely that Arabic differentiated neither numbers nor gender". 22 Another outstanding Semitist, Carl Brockelmann, is not positive whether grammatical gender originally had anything to do wittí natural gender. 23 in this section the opinions of two Semitists will be discussed, those of C. Brockelmann and E. A. Speiser. The section will be concluded with a brief discussion of the treatment of Arabic gender by the Arab grammarians. 1. C. Brockelmann : 2 4 Brockelmann thinks that the origin of grammatical gender in Semitic languages has nothing to do with natural gender. He cites two major reasons for his suspicion: a. In cases where it seems most natural to use grammatical gender to make sex distinctions, the Semitic languages express these distinctions by using different stems, not by grammatical means. Examples from Arabic, HiSân 'horse': faras 'mare'; 'ab 'father': 'urn 'mother'; jamal 'he-camel': näqat- 'she-camel', etc. 2S Similarly, one finds in Arabic words designating states which are specifically feminine, yet these words lack the feminine ending: e.g. 'âqir 'a sterile woman', Hamil 'pregnant', HaiD 'menstruating', etc. b. In all of the Semitic languages one finds many nouns which are considered feminine but which have no feminine ending and, conversely, nouns which refer exclusively to males and have a feminine termination. For instance, all Semitic languages treat words for 'earth' and 'soul' (Arabic 'arD and nafs, respectively) as feminine although they lack a feminine desinence. On the other hand, words like Arabic khalifat- 'caliph' and Taghiyat- 'tyrant' have the feminine ending although they refer exclusively to males. 22 23

A. Murtonen, Broken Plurals·. Origin and Development (Leiden, 1964), p. 28.

C. Brockelmann, Précis de linguistique sémitique, translated by W. Marçais and M. Cohen (Paris, 1910), p. 126. 24 The discussion is based on Précis de linguistique sémitique (footnote 23), p. 126ff., and on Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der semitischen Sprachen (Berlin, 1908), Vol. 1, p. 404ff. 25 Cf. Κ. Brugmann above on Indo-European gender, p. 42. For more examples from Arabic and other Semitic languages, see Brockelmann's Grundriss, I, pp. 416-418.

ON THE ORIGIN OF GENDER

41

So far Brockelmann has said nothing new. The two points mentioned above were observed and recorded by the Arab grammarians in the Middle Ages. 26 He even fails to mention another class of words which supports his argument. This is the class in which one word refers to both the masculine and feminine members of a pair. Some of these words are feminine in form, others are masculine. For example, Hayyat- 'snake', na'ämat- 'ostrich', 'insan 'human being', ba'Tr 'camel'. 27 But Brockelmann was responsible for a suggestion regarding the origin of Semitic gender which continues to be a respected opinion among many Semitists. Primitive languages, he writes, may have not only two noun classes as in Semitic languages or three as in IndoEuropean languages, but several classes which are grammatically distinguishable. He explains this phenomenon as stemming from the mythological and superstitious considerations of primitive man who considers the whole world around him to be endowed with life. It is possible, then, that the same may be found in Semitic languages. Indeed, we find in the Semitic languages traces of a class system, for in addition to the most important feminine ending -at (and its variant -t), there are other minor terminations which today seem to us to be synonymous (in that they all mark feminine gender), but which originally may have had different significations. 28 Two recent books repeat Brockelmann's views. One of them contains the statement that Semitic gender "probably goes back to a more complex and ancient system of classes". 29 H. Fleisch goes further and assumes that these alleged ancient classes semblent avoir conflué dans une classe encor discernable: la moindre valeur, l'inférieur,30' qui peut rendre compte des différentes catégories de mots qui peuvent les recevoir: diminutif, péjoratif, collectif, mot 26

See, for instance, al SuyutPs al-Muzhir, vol. 2 (Cairo edition), pp. 204-217, 220-222._ _ 27 Suyuti7al-Muzhir, pp. 222-223.. 28

Précis de linguistique sémitique, pp.126-128. S. Moscati et al., An Introduction to the Comparative Grammar of the Semitic Languages (Wiesbaden, 1964), pp. 84-85. 30 Nor is this-the idea that what is considered inferior in Semitic culture is marked as feminine-original with Fleisch; see, e.g., L. H. Gray, Introduction to Semitic Comparative Linguistics (New York, 1934), p. 51. 29

42

ON THE ORIGIN OF GENDER

abstrait. En vertu de cette estimation (moindre valeur, inférieur), ils ont pu recevoir leurs suffixes (distribués sans doute selon des degrés ou des nuances que nous ne pouvons plus atteindre). 31 Another notion about Semitic gender which later found wide acceptance among Semitists was that the feminine endings in Semitic (originally) served to express the collective and the abstract, in addition to distinguishing natural gender in some cases.32 So if it can be said that the origin of the plural neuter in Indo-European was collective feminine singular, in Semitic, too, the source of plurals is the feminine singular. Although Brockelmann does not state so explicitly, he presumably wants to account for the fact that plural collectives and abstracts (and non-human plurals generally) are treated as singular nouns in Arabic. We see how primitive these ideas are and how none of the Semitists referred to thus far mentions agreement or discusses it as part of his consideration of gender. This is another place where some knowledge of the problems of Indo-European gender and how they have been approached would have helped Semitists to direct their efforts to the central and relevant issues in Semitic gender. Two French Semitists, however, were familiar with the work of A. Meillet. These were M. Féghali and A. Cuny, who soon after Meillet's first volume of Linquistique historique et linguistque général appeared in 1921 published a short study of their own 33 in which they utilized Meillet's central ideas on the development of Indo-European gender, namely that the first division of nouns was into animate and inanimate. They argue then, as Meillet did for Indo-European, that the animate class split into masculine and feminine. The inanimate class was later absorbed, mainly by the feminine, but, in some cases, also

31

H. Fleisch, Traité de philologie arabe, vol. 1 (Beyrouth, 1961), pp. 325-326. The passage quoted here is repeated, almost verbatim, in another book by Fleisch, L'Arabe classique: Esquisse d'une structure linguistique (Beyrouth, 1956), p. 35. 32 Précis, p. 128. It is not easy to determine who made this idea popular: Brockelmann or the various grammars of Semitic languages written before him, all of which contain references to the 'collective' and the 'abstract' among the functions of the Semitic feminine endings. 33 M. Féghali & A. Cuny, Du genre grammatical en sémitique (Paris, 1924).

ON THE ORIGIN OF GENDER

43

by the masculine. The authors believe that all of these developments took place before Semitic split up into individual languages. 34 Furthermore, Féghali and Cuny make the important statement that the feminine ending -at "n'avait, du moins à l'origine, une valeur spécialement féminine. Il jouait uniquement le role d'un élément d'opposition entre les formes", for example, between a numeral and its complement as in khamsatu rißl 'five men' and khamsu nisa 'five women'. 3 S The authors of this study also discuss the stages of the development of agreement in Semitic, but their study adds little to what is already known about Semitic gender. The bulk of the study consists of listing a number of Semitic nouns and their treatment with respect to gender assignment in different Semitic languages. Some minor, but important, contributions of the study will be referred to below. Féghali and Cuny's findings anticipated Speiser's shorter but more important study of Semitic gender. As will be seen immediately, Speiser's ideas converge with those of Féghali and Cuny although Speiser, judging from his references, had not read Féghali and Cuny when he wrote his article. 2. E. A. Speiser:36 Taking the interrogative pronouns as his starting point, Speiser believes that the earliest classifications recognized in Semitic were animates and inanimates. The interrogative pronoun for person has one and the same form for both masculine and feminine. In the personal pronouns, there is no sex differentiation in the pronouns of the first person, presumably because the sex of the speaker was "at all times obvious to the audience" (p. 33). The writer then inquires into the origin of the feminine element -at which is found in all Semitic and Hamitic languages, ancient and modern. He rules out two likely sources: a. -at does not owe its origin to the personal pronoun (see pp. 35-36 for an explanation). 34

M. Féghali & A. Cuny, Du genre grammatical, pp. 8-9, 81-82. M. Féghali & A. Cuny, Du genre grammatical en sémitique (Paris, 1924), p. 17. The significance of this statement will be further explored in the following section on E. A. Speiser. 36 The following discussion is based on the second part of Speiser's article "Studies in Semitic Formatives", Journal of the American Oriental Society, 56.1 (March, 1936), pp. 33-46. 35

44

ON THE ORIGIN OF GENDER

b. -at did not originate in "some prominent designation of beings naturally female" (p. 36) since, in early Semitic, different stems were used to designate males and females (see p. 40 above). The feminine suffix did not exist as a marker of feminine gender until a relatively late, though still prehistoric, period (p. 37). Evidence for this claim comes from the fact that, in all Semitic languages known to us, -at has functions other than the marking of feminine gender. These include (pp. 37-38): (1) Forming abstract nouns from adjectives, numerals, and verbs; e.g. Arabic Hasan 'good'; Hasanat- 'goodness, virtue', *khamis 'five'; *khamisat- 'quintet'; Arabic fa'al 'did'; fi'lat- 'deed'; Akkadian nb' 'call' ; nibit- 'nomination, call'. (2) Making collectives out of participles: Arabic käfir 'unbeliever'; kafarat- 'unbelievers'; Akkadian khazïïn 'governor'; khazänätgovernors';37 Ethiopian kähen 'priest'; käheriät- 'priests'. (3) Building singulatives (nomina unitatis) from collectives, a function diametrically opposed to (2) above: Arabic baqar 'cattle'; baqarat- 'cow'; Aramaic se'arih 'barley'; se'arfä 'single grain'. (4) Finally, it is found in diminutives and "related classes": Hebrew *yaniq 'sapling' ;yïïniqat- 'twig'. This "remarkable versatility" which the ending -at exhibits compels Speiser to conclude, and rightly so, that it forms, among others, not only collectives but also their precise opposite, i.e. nomina unitatis . . . . It is this seeming inconsistency that furnishes the necessary clue for the appreciation of the principal function of -at. This was not to mark inferior classification, or to form abstracts, collectives, diminutives, or the like, but plainly to construct derivative

stems

with

some

special

modification

of

the

original

meaning . . . . Once the formative [i.e., -at] had gained prominence, it was the derivative signification that facilitated its expansion. The starting point was the decisive thing . . . . Our formative became the simplest means of producing derivative nouns whose specialized meanings depended mainly on the primary values of the simple bases (pp. 39-40; my emphasis). A question which may be raised here is: Why was -at and not some other 'formative' used for deriving new words? Speiser does not consider this question at all. The answer seems rather obvious to those 37

According to Speiser, -at is -at with secondary lengthening of the vowel (p.38).

ON THE ORIGIN OF GENDER

45

familiar with any of the Semitic languages. Derivation in Semitic, unlike in Indo-European, does not rely on derivational suffixes. Rather, the derivational process is carried out by manipulating roots according to certain patterns. It seems, however, that this method does not supply all the words needed by the speakers of the language. Therefore, -at is the only genuine derivational suffix in the Semitic languages.38 The relation between the meaning of the base form and that of the derived form, what Speiser calls "the specialized meanings" of "the derivative nouns", is more complex than he suggests. The terms 'collective' and 'abstract' are too broad to be useful in classifying the resulting derived nouns with -at. The rest of Speiser's study is functional in its approach and does not depend primarily on historical data. He emphasizes that -at must have become a derivational suffix before it acquired its other function as a feminine ending, hence before the emergence of grammatical gender in Semitic. But it did not take long for -at to acquire its new role once its value in modifying word meanings had developed. For instance, the value of our suffix must have been recognized in modifying the meaning of kinship terms. In addition to *'abu 'father', *'akhu 'brother', and *bin 'child, son', the words *'abu-Mt-, *'akhu+at- and *bin+at- were formed and their meaning "would depend on the needs of the language" (p. 40). Thus, for example, *'abat- survives in Hebrew in its collective sense of 'fathers'; in Arabic it has the abstract sense of 'fatherhood'. * 'akhat and *bin(a)t-, too, could yield abstracts or collectives (Cf. Arabic 'ikhwat- 'brothers (and sisters)' and 'ukhuwwat- 'brotherhood'). Collective nouns refer to males and females at the same time. Now "if the corresponding simple plurals had been in vogue too long to be easily displaced, the new derivatives could be specialized for the females alone" (p. 40). Speiser is not certain how -at came to be used in the names of animals, but he suggests what might have happened, again in a typically functional manner: "with the restrictive value of -at on the one

** I say 'the only genuine' because there is another derivational suffix of limited use which manifests itself in slightly varying forms in the various Semitic languages and which is used to form adjectives from certain classes of nouns. In Arabic this suffix is manifested as -iyy as in 'arabiyy 'Arab* from 'arab 'Arabs',

filisTíñiyy 'Palestinian' îiomfilisTm'Palestine', etc.

46

ON THE ORIGIN OF GENDER

hand, and the inconvenience of separate stems to designate beings respectively male and female on the other, the ultimate specialization of our ending as the feminine element was merely a matter of time" (pp. 40-41). Once -at had come to mark the feminine of masculine animate nouns, the next step was that all nouns ending in -at were included under the grammatical feminine and the same ending spread to the verb: Arabic halak-at 'she perished'. Finally, the feminine plural developed on the analogy of the masculine plural, i.e., by lengthening the vowel of the singular as follows (p. 41): Masculine Sing. PI. -u -u

Feminine Sing. -at-

PI. -at-

In the remaining part of his article (pp. 41-46), Speiser searches for the origin of -at which he thinks comes from "the -t- which appears as an accusative exponent in Akkadian to form independent pronominal forms indicating the direct object" as in ya-t-i 'me' and ka-t-i 'te' (p. 42). 3 9 Like Brockelmann, Speiser fails to discuss agreement adequately. Although he mentions that -at somehow "spreads" to the verb, he says nothing of the adjective agreement. It seems that agreement 'spread' to adjectives in Semitic in the same way described by Lehmann for Indo-European (see p. 38 above), i.e., through similarity in the functions of nouns and adjectives, which is more pronounced in Semitic than in Indo-European, and through the substitution of adjectives for nouns. 3. The Arab Grammarians on Gender.*0 As mentioned before, the Arab grammarians' approach was strictly descriptive and taxonomic. In the field of gender, they specified the kinds of gender found in Arabic, masculine and feminine. They recognized the feminine form 39 On the other hand, Brockelmann is of the opinion that -at was originally "ein demonstratives Element" (Grundriss, I, p. 405), and Meinhof, on the basis of his investigations of Hamitic languages, thinks that this suffix originally marked the direct object of the verb (Die Sprachen der Hamiten, p. 24). «0 See also Chapter 2, pp. 22-23.

ON THE ORIGIN OF GENDER

47

as the marked member of the pair: The feminine is a derivative of the masculine; therefore, it (the feminine) needs a marker. 41 Then they classified feminine words in Arabic into groups which sometimes differ slightly from one author to another, but which may be stated as follows. a. The true feminines (mu'annath HaqJqî): words which refer to female creatures, whether these words have a feminine ending or not; e.g., 'azTzat- (name) and baqarat- 'cow', or häjar (name) and 'urn 'mother'. b. The metaphorical feminine (mu'annath mafizi): an inanimate noun with or without a feminine ending, though treated as feminine by the language, such as dawlat- 'state, government', darrajat'bicycle', yad 'hand', shams 'sun', etc. c. The morphological feminine: (mu'annath lafDhi): a noun with a feminine ending, though used exclusively to refer to males and treated as masculine; e.g., Hamzat- (a man's name), khalifat 'caliph'. It is clear that words in the second category which have no feminine ending cause problems. The grammarians made lists of such supposedly feminine words and lexicographers marked them as feminine in their dictionaries. But there was never unanimous agreement among them as to what words such a list should include. The contents of each grammarian's list varied, depending mainly upon the dialect or dialects of his informants. In a recent investigation, a list has been compiled which includes, according to the investigator, all of the words which occur in the different lists of the grammarians. This list shows that various grammarians listed about 240 words which were allegedly feminine without an overt feminine marker. However, examination of the list shows that there was full agreement on fewer than 100 words. 42

41 al-ta'nithu faru al-tadhkir, wa-lidhälika-Htäja al-ta'nithu ila 'alama. Rejoinder by A. Hamrush in Majallat Majma' Fu'ad I li-alugha -al-'arabiyya,

vol. 6 (1951), p. 106. See also"Abbas Hasan, al-Nahw al Wäfi (Cairo, 1963), vol. 4, p. 437. 42

M. Al-Khai, "al-Mu'annathat al-Sama'iyya",Afe/jWaf al-Majma 'al-'ilmTal-'iräqi, Part I, vol. 13 (1966) pp. 310-339; Part II, vol. 14 (1967), pp. 121-150. More details about this problem will be given in the section dealing with gender assignment in Arabic, Chapter 5.

48

ON THE ORIGIN OF GENDER

Another topic related to gender which the grammarians discussed was the rules for gender concord between the verb and its subject. There was more agreement among them in this area than in the preceding one. But the two competing schools of KOTa and Basra (both in Iraq) disagreed on some minor details. 43 Apart from these general topics treated by the Arab grammarians and their realization that 'feminine* was primarily a grammatical label which sometimes corresponded to natural gender, some of them also recognized one of the uses of -at which was revealed by modern philological studies. This is the singulative function of -at, i.e., the formation of nomina unitatis from collectives as in dajajat- 'hen', Hamämat- 'pigeon', and baTTat- 'duck' from their respective collective forms: dajaj, Haniâm, and baTT.44 EXCURSUS Although this study is not meant to be strictly historical, one such problem cannot be left without some comment. This is the problem of the various feminine endings in the Semitic languages of which Arabic has the largest number, namely, the four endings -at, -t, -a and -a. Very little attention has been paid to the history of the last pair (