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wizzwizz4
wizzwizz4
5:30 PM
@Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi I've lost my notes from the last time I had to argue this, but: "sex-based pronouns" as their primary and only sense is a recent, rare dialectal phenomenon. I'll offer an early 19th-century Australian newspaper article as evidence: it uses personal pronouns in multiple senses (personal gender, social gender, anatomical description…). (I could also cite Shakespeare.) This topic is nuanced and comments are short, so do you want to take this to chat? — wizzwizz4 12 mins ago
 
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
Could you clarify what you are arguing?

It seems to me that you are trying to say that languages in general, and English in particular, did not use gender as a primary... what's the word, parameter to determine pronouns. Am I correct?
 
wizzwizz4
wizzwizz4
@Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi Gender as a social construct, distinct from sex, is not a recent phenomenon.
 
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
By that you mean "gender identity" I suppose - when I say gender, I mean "sex".
 
wizzwizz4
wizzwizz4
People described it using language like "social sex" or "ceremonial role", because the terminology sex/gender distinction is quite recent.
Thesis: the idea that English's gendered personal pronouns are "sex-based" is a localised, fairly modern phenomenon. For much of the modern English period, the dominant anglophonic cultures have been cisnormative and gender-binarist: however, in writings about people who've been outed (or were bold enough to just be themselves), we can more clearly see the complexity of the language use.
I'll note in advance: observations about how language has historically been used – or even how it's currently used by some people – should not be used as an argument to say that other ways of using language are wrong. I don't agree with linguistic prescriptivism (as you can probably tell by the fact I call it "linguistic prescriptivism", even though that's not the name Wikipedia uses).
@Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi And by "sex", you mean? (Just curious; this is a tangent.)
 
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
5:45 PM
By sex I refer to the dimorphism of our species that has evolved as our reproductive strategy.

I also have no problem with someone using different language conventions; definitions are arbitrary, arguing about what essentially are _variable names_ is a waste of everyone's time.
 
wizzwizz4
wizzwizz4
@Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi Oh, so a catch-all term for all of it. That's a pretty sensible definition imo.
 
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
How are you arguing your thesis? There must be something I'm missing, as all documents from the past reflect how society acknowledges this distinction in a binary sense.
In fact not only in our culture. In pretty much every culture there is some amount of grammatical constructs that differ when used in regard to men or women.
 
wizzwizz4
wizzwizz4
@Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi Which distinction?
Depending on context, the words can refer to multiple different distinctions.
 
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
Sure, sorry, it was not very well written. What I mean is, even reading literature dating back to 2-3 centuries ago, I've always found the sex-based personal pronouns we use today.
 
wizzwizz4
wizzwizz4
You've found the personal pronouns used in a way consistent with the sex-based distinction you're aware of.
 
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
5:53 PM
Yes. In Italy where I'm from we study Latin, and we read texts often older than 2000 years. In that language they also use personal pronouns that are declined according to case, gender and number.
 
wizzwizz4
wizzwizz4
Given that most literary characters from 2-3 centuries ago are cishet, this doesn't tell you that they're making that distinction.
Fun fact: it took several centuries before Latin grammarians gave the "masculine" and "feminine" labels to those grammatical genders.
Should we list a few possible senses for the personal pronouns, then see if we can find texts that use some senses but not others? That worked quite well last time I had a discussion like this (and it's really annoying that I can't remember where…).
 
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
Sure, although I still - most likely due to inexperience with the topic - fail to see what the conclusion might be.
Breadth of expression in some cases? Variety of declining personal pronouns in ways that go beyond gender?
You claim that sex-based pronouns is "localised" - in what way? That only a minority used to use them?
 
wizzwizz4
wizzwizz4
@Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi A linguistic minority, yeah.
But not "used to": currently.
There was a lot of linguistic prescriptivism in the Victorian era, much of it still perpetuated in schooling, that led to a lot of people having an incorrect understanding of how they used their language.
In some places, with some constructions, that led to an actual shift in how the language was used (making the schooling no longer incorrect).
 
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
How can this be shown? By examining a statistically significant sample of... everything and showing that most people didn't use gendered pronouns?
 
wizzwizz4
wizzwizz4
Most people do use gendered pronouns.
It's what they're signifying with those pronouns that varies.
For most people, it varies based on context.
 
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
6:04 PM
All right, I'm listening.
 
wizzwizz4
wizzwizz4
Some minority variants of English use it exclusively to refer to sexual characteristics; I posit that this is a rare use.
 
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
I'm still fairly confused, but I'm listening.
 
wizzwizz4
wizzwizz4
Senses include:
(a) the dimorphism of sexual characteristics
(b) some kind of internal felt-sense (historically rare)
(c) social role
We should really split (c) up a bit, but it's a while since I've studied this, and I can't really remember how, so this'll have to suffice.
Let's look at my 1829 / 1830 article (sources disagree on when exactly it was published).
The first use of pronouns for James Allen appears after the sentence:
> positively, declaring that she had never before known that her husband was a woman.
"woman" here is meant in sense (a).
Then we have the most (linguistically) interesting sentence of the whole article.
> The deceased had a very weakly voice, and no beard of whiskers; she represented herself as having been a married man for upwards of 21 years, and his wife is now living, an industrious honest woman.
@Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi What do you make of this?
 
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
I've read the article; it pertains to a woman that was believed to be a man even by his wife.

I assume that the text refers sometimes to how she was perceived by her wife, and how she was perceived by the doctors that took care of her.

I still don't see how a claim can be made that people that used gendered pronouns in a way that refers to the sex of the person they describe were a "minority"; this implies that the majority used pronouns to refer to a social role, which often coincides with gender..?
Clarification: how does referring to someone's social role (instead of sex) differs in terms of usage of language?
If I say

Tom, he's such a good lad. I enjoy his banter at the pub"

How can you tell if I'm referring to his sex or his social role?
 
wizzwizz4
wizzwizz4
You can't without more information.
That's why we can only really analyse how people are thinking about their language use in obscure cases like this.
 
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
6:15 PM
I'm sorry, I really don't understand how this relates to the broader subject we were discussing in the Meta article.

Certainly, for the vast majority of past history, people used gendered pronouns to distinguish between men and women as they are, not as they identify as. Modern gender ideology was not even known to the masses.
 
wizzwizz4
wizzwizz4
I'm not sure what you mean by "modern gender ideology".
Everyone I've seen use that phrase has a complete misunderstanding of the claims that trans people (and academic sociologists) are making.
 
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
By "gender ideology" I mean the notion that an internal, personal sense of identity should be more important to society and language than objectively measurable characteristics, such as sex.
 
wizzwizz4
wizzwizz4
Let's put that aside for now, then; it's a "should", and arguments about those can degrade quite quickly.
We can focus on the "is": what things are important to societies, both now and historically?
 
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
I have no problem accepting that different people have different hierarchies of what they deem important; I accept that there are people that see their gender identity to be much, much more important than their sex.

That aside, the question is a bit broad.
Societies largely care about their survival first, then about the sustainable progress and improvement of themselves, where "themselves" gradually stops becoming an insular "us" and becomes all humanity.
Sorry, broad question, even broader answer.
 
wizzwizz4
wizzwizz4
I'd say that's a good answer.
@Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi One might say "society shouldn't put so much of a focus on people's sex" is a major theme throughout much of early feminism. (Later feminisms have broadened to encompass basically every civil rights movement.)
Misogynistic societies don't usually discriminate on the basis of sex directly.
 
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
6:21 PM
That's one way to see it, but one I don't share.

As sex is such a central characteristic to our species, I am not surprised to see it represented so prominently in our culture and language.
 
wizzwizz4
wizzwizz4
They construct distinct social categories with different signalling behaviour and force people to conform to them, and they do that on the basis of sex.
Hence why Queen Victoria was accepted as monarch, despite what the rest of society looked like.
 
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
It is also not only rationally sound but empirically demonstrated that men and women differ in behavioral tendencies and preferences.
 
wizzwizz4
wizzwizz4
On average, yeah.
It's empirically demonstrated that members of different cultures differ in behavioural tendencies and preferences, too.
But we have lots of evidence that that isn't a biological thing.
(Or, not an independent-of-environment biological thing; technically, the brain is a biological thing…)
We don't have any humans to study who exist in a genderless society, so we can't really say that the differences between men's and women's behavioural tendencies and preferences is necessarily determined by their sexual dimorphism.
 
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
Emanuele-reinsMonica-Ciriachi
Yes, that much is left open to interpretation. I personally think it's a mix of both, but this view is only informed by my personal experience and thus not universally valid.
I have to take a break; I will be returning to this chat later.
 
wizzwizz4
wizzwizz4
> The religion and the training of the clergy make them what they are, and they can no more alter than the Ethiopian can change his skin or the leopard his spots. […]; and the clergy, who, as Sidney Smith said, are a third sex—neither male nor female, but effeminate—are instinctively conservative, thoroughly enamored of what is, and obstinately averse to all radical changes. Their timidity would be quite phenomenal, if they were not the third sex;
 
wizzwizz4
wizzwizz4
7:24 PM
We use "it" to refer to infants; this is traditional language use, dating back to (and therefore perhaps associated with) the time when breeching was a thing.
It is usually considered offensive to refer to older children and adults as "it".
It is clear that this distinction has little to do with sense (a).
 
 
2 hours later…
wizzwizz4
wizzwizz4
8:58 PM
If we assume that sense (a) has been the primary-in-all-contexts sense of gendered personal pronouns throughout history, English doesn't make sense.
People are not obliged to continue to use English in the same ways as it's been used in the past. However, on an unrelated note, most people I know continue to use this part of the language this way.
Does this make sense? Also, is there anything obviously wrong / jumping-a-stage-of-reasoning about it?
 

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