the gender of language

[erratio]

The other day I was wondering: The language reflects the culture of a people, right? Like the Japanese have a million and one honorifics because social status is extremely important to them. So, how does gendering of a language reflect culture/shape people's thoughts? By gendering I mean languages like Hebrew which not only require verbs to agree with gender when talking about people but assign gender to all nouns based mostly on the way they sound.

The distribution of gendered nouns isn't quite what you would expect it to be; not all objects stereotypically used by females are of the feminine gender and vice versa. And when coining neologisms, how much consideration does gender get?

Also, one might think that a non-gendered language would belong to a culture that doesn't have strong gender roles, except English shows this to be a lie straight away. It started losing its genders in the Middle English period, whihc doesn't correlate at all with feminism etc.

Comments

Re: Gender of language

[erratio.livejournal.com]

Have you seen the British series Coupling? Thanks to it, I will never forget the word shadayim..

But on a more on-topic note, do you know why this is? I'm guessing there was probably some kind of weird logic behind it originally

Re: Gender of language

[(Anonymous)]

I have absolutely no idea. One of those great quirks of language, I guess. I have, in fact, seen Coupling, but not the episode where "Shadayim" is mentioned. It's quite a funny series, though a bit repetitive.
Daniel

Re: Gender of language

[erratio.livejournal.com]

Ah, the episode concerns an Israeli woman with large shadayim, and thanks to a complete language barrier Geoff ends up thinking that that's her name. It was a really well done episode too. They switch between Geoff's point of view and the Israeli's (during the Israeli's point of view Geoff speaks Italian I think)