I have a tag that reads "the mad linguist strikes again", and last night was a brilliant example for why I occasionally call myself a mad linguist.
So I woke up at shortly after 4 a.m., not because Felix woke me but because I was really thirsty, so I drank some water and tried to fall asleep again. Now, you probably all know the experience when you just can't fall asleep because your mind is busy doing other things? That happened to me. Except my mind didn't circle around the things normal people's minds take refuge to - I dunno, shopping lists or urgent current problems or that sort of thing - but about Latin words that look (grammatically) feminine, but are, in fact, masculine, such as
agricola ("farmer") or
pirata ("pirate", NO WAI) or
scriba ("scribe", ENGLISH YOU ARE A THIEF).
How's that for a no-brainer?
See, when we came across such words in Latin class, enquiring minds (like yours truly) wanted to know how come these words are so weird? I mean, why would "pirate" of all things come in such deceptively feminine shape, that's after all a pretty masculine concept, no?
The reply of both Latin teachers I had in the six years I learned the damn language always was "Nobody knows, that's just the way it is, just memorise it and shut up" [paraphrased].
I always found that frustrating, but what can you do if even your teachers don't know the answer?
(These days, I am suspecting that these words are, in fact, loanwords that happen to look feminine in Latin because their original form was consistently turned into an
-a ending in Latin, never mind grammatical gender. Not that I've managed to find a Romanist to confirm my theory, but it's a start, and even if it's wrong, it still sounds better than "nobody knows, just damn learn it", right?)
Anyway. From that delightful line of thought, my mind promptly went on to consider generically masculine nouns.
Of course, English is a horrible language in which to think about this, as (modern) English has hardly any grammatical gender left in the first place. I mean, most nouns - even terms for professions nouns, were specific feminine and masculine forms might be useful - come only in one generic form, and you can then guess whether it's a man or a woman doing the job. Unless there's a name or a pronoun or some other helpful context attached, your guess will probably heavily depend on your own bias. If you hear "nurse", you'll probably think of a woman (in fact, "nurse" is one of the rare cases that might count as generically feminine -- if I mean to talk about a male nurse, I'll probably specify "male nurse"). If you hear "blacksmith", you'll probably imagine a man. If you hear teacher, your idea might depend on whether you hear the subject this teacher teaches; perhaps during your school years, all history teachers you encountered were male, so you'll interpret "history teacher" as masculine. I'll go out on a limb and assume that, in English as in German, "science teacher" is more likely to be interpreted as masculine, and you might likely expect a "literature teacher" to be female. If I talked about "my cousin, who is a math teacher", you will not automatically know whether said cousin is male or female. In English, that is. You might lean towards "male" as maths are often considered to be a dude thing, but you can't tell from the sentence as such. (In German, you could, because "cousin" comes in two shapes -
Kusine (f) and
Cousin (m), or
Base (f) and
Vetter (m), and so does "teacher" -
Lehrerin (f) and
Lehrer (m). (Most German professional terms turn feminine when you add an
-in.) Heck, even the relative pronoun would give me away, because in German, there are three variants of (singular) "the" -
der (m),
die (f) and
das (n). I would have to say
meine Kusine, die Mathelehrerin ("my cousin
[f] the
[f] math teacher
[f]) or
mein Cousin, der Mathelehrer ("my cousin
[m] the
[m] math teacher
[m]") and you'd clearly know whether I'm talking about my cousin Sandra or my cousin Stephan. (As it happens, I'm talking about Sandra.)
Anyway.
So German differentiates between female and male people who do a job (as does French for the most part).
But very often, that only works in the singular.
See,
technically, there are separate forms for the plural as well. (Except for the forms of "the", which all - masculine, feminine or neutral - turn into
die in the plural. As
die is also the singular feminine, maybe this is actually a weird case of generic feminine? Hmmm.) So where the English says "teachers" for a group of, well, teachers, German clearly differentiates between
Lehrerinnen for Ms. Doe, Ms. Brown and Ms. Miller and
Lehrer (looks like the masculine singular, but can also be masculine plural - then the relative pronoun changes from
der to
die. ISN'T GERMAN FUN.) for Mr. Smith, Mr. Snyder and Mr. McAllister. The same goes for students: Jane, Liz and Kate are
Schülerinnen, and John, Tom and Paul are
Schüler (again, looks the same as the masculine singular, but would appear with
die instead of
der).
So that's all fine and dandy until you either get a coëducational group.
In modern German, you'd probably try to be egalitarian, talking about (or writing)
Lehrerinnen und Lehrer ("female and male teachers", or maybe "she- and he-teachers"?) or
SchülerInnen ("FeMale students" or "s/he-students"). But this kind of disjunction really is pretty recent, and until maybe 30, 40 years back, you would simply have used the generic masculine form. That is, if Ms. Doe, Ms. Brown, Ms. Miller (or, in those days, Mrs. Doe, Miss. Brown and Miss Miller?) and Mr. Smith are in the same classroom, you'd have said "In dieser Klasse sind nur Lehrer" ("This classroom is full of teachers
[m] [and no students]"). Even if the female teachers are, in fact, the majority. You'd probably still say that today unless you wanted to show that you're a feminist or egalitarian at the least.
The same works for French - three
institutrices, one
instituteur, the whole group gets labeled as
des instituteurs. Well, they probably do disjunction as well, these days. But you don't strictly - that is, grammatically - have to. Same in Latin - three (or fifteen, or a hundred for that matter)
magistrae, one measly lone
magister, the entire group turns into
magistri), and, presumably, modern Italian or Spanish or what-have-you. I found that terribly unfair, back in school, and my French teacher
[f] used to say "Yes, it really is unfair, but at least it's easy to remember and you don't have to do any maths first". Fair enough, I guess.
(If you now stumbled across the idea of three, or fifteen, or a hundred female teachers in the Ancient Roman world, congratulations. You're historically sexist. :P)
[Note to self: If you ever try creating a language again, it is going to have four plural forms - masculine, feminine, neutral and coëducational. Possibly eight - exclusive and inclusive. And, of course, the same number of dual forms. AND THAT ALSO GOES FOR THE BLOODY RELATIVE PRONOUNS.]
Now as I said, these days you might try to solve that problem by using disjunction, just as an English speaker might try to be egalitarian by saying "The teacher may decide at his/her discretion" or something along those lines. But this is modern, modern thinking. This wasn't consistently attempted until a couple of decades back (although of course you can always find someone here or there trying to be egalitarian earlier on).
By now it was probably 4:45, and my mind turned towards a really neat article I read on - of all places - a friend
[f]'s Tumblr - yes, some people apparently manage to have clever and insightful discussions on Tumblr, well I never.
There you go.[My underfed history geek now wants to add that in fact, even among the upper class and nobility, we tend to underestimate the importance of the roles women played, at least in England, but that's another ramble for another time. Actually, why don't you just go and read Eileen Powers'
Medieval Women to get started, it's a sweet little book of just a couple 100 pages.]
And, in my insomniac musings, I thought "But it wasn't just the Victorians [and non-British Empire contemporaries] dicking with history. It's the damn language itself!".
Because thanks to the generically masculine plural, you'd look at words and not know whether they really describe a group of men only, or a mixed group of men and women.
Let me repeat that (it felt like a revelation
[f] last night at 5 am or whatever):
A masculine-looking plural might actually be including a couple of women. YOU JUST DON'T SEE IT. And because so many people stupidly assume that society has always been the way it's been the past 200 OR LESS years, you'll look at "carpenters" and "brewers" and "peasants" and think of dudes.
(Actually, "brewer" is one of the rare English words that
does have a specific feminine form -
brewster. I don't know about carpentresses - though the word probably existed.
Webster (feminine form of "weaver") and
spinster (feminine form of
spinner, are you detecting a pattern?) are some more, but I guess the latter two are jobs we're comfortable assigning to women, historical or otherwise, anyway).
Thanks to Eileen Power, I learned - I didn't know this before either - that actually there were female apprentices -
and craftswomen, listed on guild rolls of Medieval London, even for crafts we (inclusive we, "modern-people-ignorantly-looking-back" we) consider masculine, like blacksmithing. If you expend just a tiny bit of brainpower, that makes sense. You don't just lock up half (or more, very likely) the potential workforce in the kitchen. If you're a blacksmith or a carpenter and you've got three daughters, one of them will needs must take over the family business (or marry a guy who can do it). So she becomes a blacksmith's or carpenter's apprentice
[f], which will profitably teach her the trade she's going to work in anyway, as her father's or husband's assistant
[f] or as a craftsmistress in her own right. (The latter presumably only happens if her father dies and leaves her the family business even though she's unmarried, or if she inherits her husband's business as a widow: but it did happen. There are women listed in their own right in guild documents, running their own workshops and teaching their own apprentices (of either sex). That's Truth In Televion in - of all films -
A Knight's Tale, ladies and gentlemen. Oh look, there's one disjunction that's actually got tradition! :D - And for every woman listed, there are presumably dozens of wives and daughters and sisters who are
not listed because their husband or father or big brother owned the workshop.)
So today, we look at "blacksmiths" and "carpenters", and even "weavers", and imagine a world full of men. But there are Janets and Annes and Kates among the Johns and Pauls and Peters, and just because you can't see them in the grammar, that doesn't make them less real or "historically incorrect".
:D
Not that they didn't have it hard, no doubt, probably harder than their male counterparts, were underpaid, etc. BUT THEY EXISTED.
[Of course, I am now tempted to write a world in which scribes and pirates and farmers are actually typically female, just for the heck of it...]
And eventually I finally fell asleep again. Phew.
[Here's a link to the post that seems to have sparked the Tumblr discussion above:
Historically Authentic Sexism in Fantasy. Let’s Unpack That by Tansy Rayner Roberts.
And here's another great article, responding to the blog post by Tansy Rayner Robers:
PSA: Your Default Narrative Settings Are Not Apolitical by Foz Meadows.]
There was more, but I'm afraid most of you stopped reading long ago anyway, so I'll just stop rambling now. Maybe some other times when I can catch you at unawares again. ;)
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