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Through the Language Glass, Why the World Looks Different in Other LanguagesEven in the most erratic gender systems, there is usually a core group of nouns that are assigned grammatical gender in a consistent way. In particular, male human beings almost always have masculine gender. Women, on the other hand, are much more often denied the privilege of belonging to the feminine gender and are relegated to the neuter gender instead. In German, there is a whole range of words for women that are treated as БЂњitБЂ«: das Mц¤dchen (girl, the diminutive form of БЂњmaidБЂ«), das Frц¤ulein (unmarried woman, the diminutive of Frau), das Weib (woman, cognate with English БЂњwifeБЂ«), or das Frauenzimmer (woman, but literally БЂњlady chamberБЂ«: the original meaning referred to the living chambers of the lady, but the word started to be used for the entourage of a noble lady, then for particular members of the entourage, and hence to increasingly less distinguished women). The Greeks treat their women a little better: while their word for girl, korцtsi, is, just as you would expect, of the neuter gender, if one speaks about a pretty buxom girl, one adds the augmentative suffix -aros, and the resulting noun, korцtsaros, БЂњbuxom girl,БЂ« then belongs to theБЂ¦ masculine gender. (Heaven knows what Whorf, or for that matter Freud, would have made of that.) And if this seems the height of madness, consider that back in the days when English still had a real gender system, it assigned the word БЂњwomanБЂ« not to the feminine gender, not even to the neuter, but, like Greek, to the masculine gender ...» |
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