Just when is a “gender-neutral term” gender-neutral? The answer, I submit, is rarely simple.
It is often said that Mensch is “gender-neutral”- in German,
or as used in English in particular ethnolinguistic environments. Clearly, it
sometimes is. Just as clearly, it sometimes isn’t. Even when every effort is
made to use it in a gender-neutral way, it often isn’t. Context
activates its latent male-genderedness. Watch this delightful cartoon if you don’t
believe me. The distribution of the terms “Mensch” and “girl” is telling.
All I know for sure is this. The one and only time a very smart,
well-traveled young woman called me “a real Mensch” to my face was when I was 20
years old, all curls and muscle. The attributive language amounted to a very
gendered come-on. Even and perhaps precisely because she knew that adam =
anthropos = homo = Mensch.
This post concludes the following series:
A Real Mensch: Gender-Neutral Terminology in the Bible ande Beyond
John:
I wonder whether the answer might be simpler than you think.
I have seen confusion arise in many analyses of Hebrew and of English, due to the unfortunate conflation of instances that use the same noun but with differing referential function. Perhaps this finding applies to other languages where social gender correlates to some extent with noun choice or inflection.
That is, a noun that is used to refer to a category of persons may well be gender-neutral (or non-exclusive). But when that same noun points to a particular individual, it may assume a gendered connotation.
Would that explain the usage of Mensch as you have observed it?
Posted by: David E. S. Stein | May 01, 2009 at 07:27 PM
No, I don't think that observation exhausts the dynamics of what is going on.
Otherwise, you would not have ordinary people, and linguists, thinking of both of the following examples as "cross-dressing" (as it were):
She's a mensch.
He's a bitch.
Nor would it be possible for a selfsame phrase:
She is one of the guys.
to have so many possible meanings, quite apart from the particular gender of the person denotated by "She."
Posted by: JohnFH | May 01, 2009 at 09:18 PM
OK. So I've watched this animation several times and I don't get what you're talking about. To the girl, the mensch is a guy, and she says so. To the guy, the mensch is a girl, and he says so. I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood, and I speak German, so I may hear this differently from you. Mensch just means a stand-up person in Yiddish.
At the same time, I agree that guy is well on its way to becoming gender neutral. (There's a growing linguistic literature on the topic.) On the other hand, *He's a bitch. is not grammatical in my dialect, but It's a bitch. is. That, however, means something different.
The story about your youthful encounter with a young woman calling you a mensch as a come on actually says nothing about the genderedness of mensch. On this right lips, any compliment can be a turn on, you sexy thang, you.
The factors behind the gendered usage of the "human" word are well-known and well-understood. Such reference runs on prototypes, and the usage patterns are by no means limited to words referring to humans. One can use the word referring to general class to refer to the best instance (prototype) of the class. That's how the Germanic word man '(some)one' came to mean 'adult male human', and Latin homo '(adult) human being' came to mean 'adult male human' in the daughter languages Sp. hombre, It. huomo.
Or one can use the name for the prototype to refer to any member of the general class. For example, we can call cattle, cows.
In most societies the best example of the human being is an adult male. Hence, adam - anthropos can appear in context to mean adult male human, when, in fact, they properly mean just '(adult) human being'.
It's worth noting that there are also Koine instances of aner 'adult male human' being used to mean 'human being' unambiguously referring to females.
The short story is. Don't read too much into the gendered use of non-gendered terms. The story is, as you say, much more complex.
Posted by: Rich Rhodes | May 03, 2009 at 07:41 AM
Hi Rich,
Thanks for insightful comments. Mensch in German is one thing, Mensch in English another. In German, it has a grammatical gender - masculine - and a range of gendered and non-gendered usages.
Even in German, the question is whether a word's connotations and denotations *in the abstract* form a point of reference or are implicit in every given instance of usage. My sense: no, they are not.
The situation is even more complicated in the case of Hebrew *ish* which, like *aner* in Greek, is gender-neutral in some contexts, and male-gendered in others, most obviously, when *ish* "male" and *ishah* "female" are collocated with those particular connotations activated in context.
So are *ish* and *aner* gendered terms whose male-genderedness is washed out in some usage, or are they gender-neutral terms which sometimes have a gendered use? Is it even helpful to pose the question in this way?
Posted by: JohnFH | May 03, 2009 at 11:08 AM
John,
Grammatical gender is taken way too seriously by those who do not speak languages with grammatical gender.
It's interesting that much ado is made over the essential masculineness of Greek anthropos (and Ger. Mensch), but no one ever suggests that Sp./It.persona is essentially feminine (or for that matter that Ger. Kind and Greek teknon, paidion or prosopon are essentially neuter). Because there aren't crucial feminine cases in Greek, the inconsistency goes unnoticed.
This is convenient for those who have theological commitments that are well served by taking the view that anthropos is essentially masculine.
As for the question of whether a term is essentially gendered or not is a matter of norms. This is relatively easy to tell for languages where we can ask native speakers. But in dead languages, you have to look for evidence of use in contrastive environments, like ish collocated with ishah, as strong evidence that they are essentially gendered. (We can always account for the non-gendered use of the prototype term from our understanding of how categorization works.)
Posted by: Rich Rhodes | May 05, 2009 at 01:38 AM
Rich Rhodes:
You wrote—
We can always account for the non-gendered use of the prototype term from our understanding of how categorization works.
Would you be willing to say more about this? I’m not sure what you mean. And I am curious.
Posted by: David E. S. Stein | May 05, 2009 at 02:20 AM
David,
It'll take quite a bit to explain it, but the short story is that it is common for there to be usage connections between the term for best or most salient instances and the general term. This is most readily seen in language change. In the most common case the general term comes to refer to the most salient instance or the best example, like OE _deor_ 'animal' Mod Eng. _deer- 'deer'. Gmc *_kwoeniz_ 'woman, wife', OE _cwen_ 'wife of the king'. But occasionally the term for the special case becomes the general term, like OE _bridd_ 'little bird, young bird' (_fugol_ 'bird'), Mod Eng _bird_.
This is how it works for terms for people. In patriarchal societies adult males are the best/most salient instances of humans, hence there can be usages of the term for the 'human being' to refer to 'adult male' and vice versa.
Posted by: Rich Rhodes | May 05, 2009 at 11:48 PM
Rich,
Since I'm fluent in Italian and do fairly well in German and other gendered languages, I know what you are getting at with respect to the relative "emptiness" of grammatical gender in many cases.
But it is not empty in many other cases. Furthermore, emptiness is rather often in the eyes of the beholder.
That explains why there are ferocious (and understandable) attempts in both gendered and relatively ungendered linguistic environments to degender and regender what used to be universally accepted (male-gendered or gender-neutral, take your pick) means of expression.
The debate about the use of masculine pronouns, in reference to people and to God, now invests specific linguistic communities in both gendered and relatively non-gendered contexts. It has become a polarizing factor of the first order.
As far as Bible translation is concerned, the attempt by some on both sides of the debate to construe it as a debate about accuracy in translation is sometimes little more than a rhetorical ploy.
Honesty is such a lonely word. It is still best to admit that all of our apparently benign and irrelevant linguistic discussions take place, not in a vacuum, but in a highly charged ideological environment in which the choice to gender / degender / regender the language of the Bible "horizontally" and/or "vertically" is equivalent to laying down a boundary marker between opposing confessional camps.
Posted by: JohnFH | May 06, 2009 at 08:57 AM
John,
I'm painfully aware that the discussion does not take place in an ivory tower vacuum.
My wife and I, who have a very egalitarian relationship, spent 14 years as part of a large, extremely complementarian Christian community in the 70's and 80's. (You're probably familiar with the foundational volume on the topic from that community -- Steve Clark's _Man and Woman in Christ_, all 768 pages of it.)
Now we are part of the Evangelical Covenant Church, a non-confessional denomination, which has a single _de facto_ confession, namely, every ordained minister must sign that he/she is egalitarian.
I have seen the good and bad fruit in each -- and there's plenty to go around. In the name of trying to counter the influence of worldly culture on the church, like [gasp] feminism, the complementarian community effectively embraced 1950's American culture (or an idealized and sanitized version of that culture) and mistook that for Christian culture.
On the other hand, the ECC has failed miserably to bring the rank and file congregations along in their attempt to do what they think is theologically correct, and the result is that many congregations are _de facto_ complementarian, including rank and file pastors who behave like complementarians in spite of their promises to the denomination. The fruit is predictably awful. I've been in the denomination for 20+ years, and I have yet to meet a woman in ministry in the ECC who has not been significantly wounded because of this disconnect.
And I'm yakking on and on because I constantly deal with the very thing you are talking about: gendered or non-gendered language is seen by everyone as standing symbolically for positions in this whole mess.
All the more reason why we linguists, who rolled our eyes when the feminists insisted on _mailperson_ instead of _mailman_ and _waitperson_ instead of _waiter_, also get to say that the reactions to these extremes, like the complete nonsense about singular uses of indefinite _they_ are just as inappropriate.
Someone has to be able to say: Language works like this ...
English works like this ...
Don't write your theology into your translation lest you find yourself under the curse of Rev. 22:18.
Posted by: Rich Rhodes | May 06, 2009 at 01:07 PM
Rich,
I'm glad you are yakking away on this. That's one thing blogs are for.
My egalitarian roots run very deep, several generations. I feel as if I know its strengths and weaknesses as a culture and as a theory fairly well.
At the same time, I have younger cousins who found their egalitarian upbringing wanting and who, in the process of becoming vibrant Christians, have shifted to a soft complementarianism. I see more mutual respect modeled in their marriages than in most marriages I know of where both spouses self-identify as egal. But mutual respect in the soft complementarianism I know first-hand is combined with a certain sure-footedness about lines of domain-based authority and a commitment to old-fashioned courtesies that are unusual in egalitarian settings.
Outside of other more important convictions, egalism doesn't always amount to more than equal rights under the law to hurt one's spouse (as in Kramer vs. Kramer, almost a metaphor for an entire culture), a greater openness to divorce in principle (in practice, it works out about the same), and other amenities.
Egalitarianism in the denomination I serve (United Methodist) is also correlated, among those who run the show, with masculine-free language in reference to God and horizontal inclusive language to the point of awkwardness.
I know it is well-meaning in the extreme, and even helpful in some settings. But still, it comes across as hopelessly irrelevant in most contexts.
In my setting the the rank-and-file for the most part is indifferent on horizontal gender-neutral language, and annoyed to death when the result is "Christa" in worship or God addressed as mother but never father.
Posted by: JohnFH | May 06, 2009 at 02:01 PM
I can't do "Christa". Jesus was a man. Get over it.
God as Mother may be OK, but absolutely not to the exclusion of God as Father.
The place where gender-neutral language gets to me is in the hymns.
"Rise up, O men of God". It's OK to have hymns that are addressed to part of the church.
And all too often gender-neutral language ruins the poetry.
"Dear Lord and Father of humankind" [gag]
And you don't get to re-write hymns if the poet used language to refer to himself!
“Thou my great Father, thine own may I be,
Thou in me dwelling and I one with Thee”
for
"Thou my great Father, I Thy true son;
Thou in me dwelling, and I with Thee one."
I guess this is why I simply say what I think is true about the language of Scripture, and let people yell at me. (Have you seen the conversation going on over at Aristotle's Feminist Subject?)
I'm an equal opportunity offender. I'm too close to gender neutral for the complementarians but I'll insist on original gendered language when it's warranted.
Posted by: Rich Rhodes | May 06, 2009 at 07:35 PM
To Rich Rhodes:
Thank you for taking the time to spell out what you meant. If I understand you correctly, you are drawing upon a linguistic theory that human beings think in cognitive categories that feature prototypical members.
To John:
Although that theory can indeed explain a lot of things, I find myself wondering in what way it applies to the Hebrew noun ’ish. (I mention this because we were debating under what conditions ’ish establishes its referent’s gender as a matter of denotation, or whether the referent’s maleness is rather a connotation provided only by context.)
Prof. Rhodes suggested earlier that the fact that a grammatically masculine noun has a feminine counterpart noun is “strong evidence” that the masculine version has an intrinsically male reference. Yet perhaps that claim oversimplifies the situation. It seems to ignore that in Hebrew, a masculine-feminine noun pair is embedded in a larger grammatical pattern that divides the animate world into two categories: female and not-female. Grammatically feminine inflections are used when a referent is believed to be solely female; otherwise, grammatically masculine inflections are used by convention. (I say “by convention” because in certain other dual-gender languages, the grammatical gender used is not the same one that’s used when the referent is believed to be male. At least, so claims Greville Corbett in his 1991 book on gender as a linguistic category.)
In Hebrew, this linguistic convention applies broadly: not only to nouns but also to pronouns and to verbal inflections in the absence of a noun; and not only in 3rd-person reference but also in 2nd-person address. Given such pervasive application of that convention, one would expect grammatically masculine-feminine noun pairs to follow the same rule: the masculine term would naturally be used except when a referent is believed to be solely female. If so, then when a noun is pointing to a non-specific referent and the topic is not restricted to males, this convention alone seems to be enough to explain Hebrew’s usage of a grammatically masculine term.
In other words, such contextual situations mute the male meaning-component of the noun; by convention, both speaker and listener simply ignore that aspect of the word.
What I would wish to ask Prof. Rhodes is:
What then is the need to invoke prototype theory? What difference does it make if in Israelite society, adult males were perhaps considered “the best/most salient instances of humans”? (And how would we prove such a claim anyway, since the linguistic convention confounds the analysis?)
In asking these questions, I grant that in the biblical world, certain men (family patriarchs, elders, kings) typically represented their entire corporate household or clan or nation, in terms of decision-making and ritual-or-ceremonial presence. Yet isn’t that fact of societal organization a logically distinct phenomenon from linguistic categorization and prototyping?
Furthermore, prototype theory seems ill-suited for the analysis of the Hebrew noun ’ish in particular. For it is a noun that indicates relationship between the referent and another party. It does not designate an “adult male” in isolation, except as a matter of connotation. As such, it does not denote an element within the cognitive category “human being.“ Rather, it belongs in a different cognitive category altogether.
I would agree with Prof. Rhodes that “there can be usages of the term for the 'human being' to refer to 'adult male' and vice versa.” Yet I am still wondering: how is that relevant to ’ish?
Posted by: David E. S. Stein | May 10, 2009 at 02:14 AM
Oops, I see that I misrepresented what Rich Rhodes had written, for which I apologize.
He cited not only the mere existence of a feminine counterpart noun (like ’ishah) but also of its occasional collocation with the masculine noun: “of use in contrastive environments, like ish collocated with ishah, as strong evidence that they are essentially gendered.”
Yet the recognition of this point does not change my questions. Due to the linguistic convention that I discussed in my previous comment, the meaning of ’ish in “contrastive environments” cannot tell us everything about its meaning when used alone. Or so it seems to me.
Posted by: David E. S. Stein | May 10, 2009 at 08:00 AM
David,
Rich Rhodes, I think, plans to do a series on this topic over at Better Bibles.
It is my understanding, and I base this also on my daily use of a dual-gendered language, that masculine pronouns for example can be utilized with a generalized reference at least three different ways:
(1) with references to males only. That males only are spoken of is determined by context, sometimes, by *extra-linguistic* context alone; or by delayed clarification within the discourse stream;
(2) with reference to males "primarily," i.e., with their situation in particular view, but with the possibility of refocussing the discourse, even suddenly, on females only;
(3) in a completely washed-out gender-neutral fashion. This is particularly frequent with the use of the 2nd person plural.
I am of course completely oversimplifying! (2) is not a common procedure today, because of broad cultural changes it seems to me, but it still occurs, and is culturally appropriate in some instances.
The questions, then, are: how to know when is 'ish used in one of these three ways, or some other; what kind of collocations characterize one usage as opposed to another; what discourse-level cues, redundantly or otherwise, clarify matters?
Posted by: JohnFH | May 10, 2009 at 09:23 AM