Patriarchy and linguistics

[loopyloops]

Hi feminists

I am a languages teacher. Every time gender is explained to children (and I felt the same way) there is outrage from the girls, and a sense of one-up-man-ship from the boys with regards to the male gender taking preference over the female.

The best example if this that I can think of is:
Il est grand (he is tall)
Elle est grande (she is tall)
Ils sont grands (they are tall, all boys)
Elles sont grandes (all girls)
Ils sont grands (a billion girls and one tiny, insignificant boy)

Does that make sense? Why does the masculine always take priority?

There are many other aspects of gender in language that highlight this - obviously at some point someone decided which nouns would be masculine, which feminine (and in the case of some languages, which neuter). What I would like to know is how do feminists whose maternal language uses a gender system deal with this?

Also, from a foreign language learning point of view, my female students are automatically at a disadvantage in exams. Every time they want to express themselves using the past tense "être" formation they have to remember an extra e. Boys don't. (eg. je suis allée, je suis allé). Maybe girls should naturally have a couple of extra points when it comes to marking.

Maybe I'm just being silly and there's nothing misogynistic about this at all...?

You might want to read some Luce Irigaray on binaries in linguistics. I think a lot of French feminist thought deals with all that stuff.

ElephantsandMiasmas
I actually wrote about 'she' in middle english for my finals...and I can't remember! He was he and she was heo in OE and I think the latter had a sort of palatized fricative sound going on which developed into ME sho in some dialects, from which we can extrapolate blah blah - but unbelievably that was just one theory of its development.
Pre-OE I don't recall there not being a feminine pronoun, and in other germanic languages there are certainly feminine pronouns.
Small disclaimer: I went to university 20 years ago

Thanks for that, BitOfFun.

Funnily enough, I'm subtitling a play at the moment and I've come to a line that could be "he can't talk", "she can't talk" or "it can't talk" - Czech doesn't require a personal pronoun, and it's not clear here from the context. But I need to know! So there's an example of English being more gendered.

ISeeGrace - Portuguese uses the permanent state of being "to be" for married, which I find interesting in itself.

Someone asked whether there were any feminists in France. There's a fascinating departure there in the last decade or so (more?) which is to establish feminine forms of occupations so that they don't use the basic [masculine] forms and tack on "femme" at the end. Feels weird to me but that's what was deemed PC at the time.

interesting thread.

Iirc spanish uses the impermanent form of "to be" for death. Apparently due to catholisism and therefore belief in judgment day. This shows how directly culture is reflected in linguistics. I wonder if dead was always impermenant ie, pre christian or if it was altered, by the inquisition maybe? And if so if there are any other examples of authorities purposefully altering gender in a way that is more specifically relevant to feminism.

Estou corrigida ... ish, jkkplu. I suspect they lean towards the temporary form in Brazil, where I learned!

IseeGrace - possibly, though one of my teachers was Brazilian. But already interesting that it's different in Spanish and Portuguese. I love language diversity, especially across the same language group.

This is a great thread. There are fun niceties in Slav languages, too, eg feminine and neuter words for "motherland" and "fatherland" - viz. Russian "rodina" and "ot'echestvo". The former tends to be used when talking about what is to be defended from marauders - the family, the soil - and the latter when encouraging military effort on the offensive. I think it gets more complicated in some other Slavonic languages, to the point of the choice of word indicating whether the origin of a citizen of one of the former Yugoslav republics can be identified by this word alone.

But overall I'm sceptical of any pre-conceived patriarchal plot in language planning. The terms masculine and feminine in grammar are really just the most obvious natural dichotomy and, therefore, emphasise the difference. I wonder whether they could have conveyed the same by using red and blue or salt and sweet?

As I say, a great thread.