No Grammar is Neuter - by Maddie Stoll

“There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me.
As if I were their well-acquainted friend.”
The Comedy of Errors, Act IV Scene II
- by William Shakespeare

This quote from The Comedy of Errors has a lot to say about the power of grammar. In a couple of lines, Shakespeare reinforces and subverts a patriarchal view of the world. Here we’ll take a look at how it’s the small words that count the most.

Language has a real power to influence how we understand the world and our place in it. Of course, we read and hear things on a daily basis that might confirm the way we think or challenge them in unexpected ways. But if we look closely at the technicalities of how a language works, we see a lot of assumptions and structures that are perhaps doing more harm than we realise.

In English, a natural gender language that follows similar rules to Scandinavian languages, this bias is most clear in our use of pronouns - even today there is often the assumption that any generic person would be a “he”. In principle, this should not carry any information about gender, as it should be purely a grammatical convention but, there are hidden politics here. Try saying or reading “he” without imagining some representation of a man. It is seemingly impossible. Shakespeare is guilty of a similar assumption that the male covers all of humanity when he writes “There is not a man I meet…”. This unfair prescription of “he” and “man” to at least half the species is not insurmountable. Indeed, as Shakespeare demonstrates in the following line, “their” or “they” is a perfectly acceptable and far less problematic alternative.

This hidden sexism lies within the grammar of many languages. Romance languages, for example, have gendered nouns. In Italian, to refer to the sea you would use the masculine ‘il mare’ but in French you would use the feminine ‘la mer’. These seemingly arbitrary systems can sometimes contain and reinforce gender stereotypes. When it comes to job roles, many female roles are indicated simply by adding a suffix to a male equivalent. For example, the Italian ‘professoressa’ coming from ‘professor’, or the female ‘studentessa’ coming from the male term ‘studente’.

These demonstrations of a default-to-male position are perhaps more visible when it comes to referring to large groups. French, Spanish, Italian and German are all guilty here. In French, if a classroom is made up of 99 female students and only one male student, the masculine plural “ils” form will still be expected when referring to them as a group. Equally, if the gender of the students is unspecified, it is the masculine plural ‘studenti’ or ‘Studenten’ that would be used in Italian or German.

Similarly, when wishing to refer to a typical or non-specific person, the default in Romance languages is once again the male. In English we tend to speak of a ‘Joe Bloggs’ or ‘Any Tom, Dick or Harry’. This is the same in German, where ‘Hans und Franz’ or ‘Hinz und Kunz’ could be translated as ‘everybody and anybody’.

In Mandarin, the problem is inaudible - some of its written characters ascribe negative stereotypes to women. Characters are made up of smaller components, called radicals, that come in two types. Phonetic radicals suggest pronunciation, and others give clues about meaning. For example, the radical meaning “water” features in characters associated with water such as river, port, ocean. Similarly, the Chinese radical for “woman” is found in characters for mother, sister and grandma.

河，港，海

Here the “water radical”    氵 is found in the words river, port and ocean.

妈妈，姐姐，奶奶

The radical for “woman” 女 present in mother, sister and grandma.

But, the “woman” radical is also found in characters for words such as “jealousy”, “slave”, “suspicion” and “devil”. The woman radical itself is thought to have come from an image of a woman bending over with her palms together. This radical does also appear in some more positive cases such as “good” and “safety”, yet this is still reliant on stereotypes - “good” depicting a woman next to a child, and “safety” a woman under a roof.

忌妒， 奴隶，嫌疑，妖怪

The “woman” radical 女  reappearing in jealousy, slave, suspicion, and devil.

好，安

“Good”, and “safety” both stereotypically reliant on the woman’s position as carer or housebound

The word for man, on the other hand, is made up of radicals meaning “field” and “strength.” Word order and grammar in Chinese also usually favours men. Siblings for example, are always presented in the following order: older then younger brother, followed by older then younger sister.

男

nàn, meaning male, composed of field, and strength

兄弟姐妹

The word for siblings with the characters arranged according to a patriarchal order of importance.

Languages are constantly shifting and evolving. We only need to look to the past few years to see how use of ‘they’ in English speaking countries has grown significantly. Defining the pronoun most comfortable for an individual is gradually becoming normalised. Progressive inclusion of gender-fair expressions and neutralisations (e.g. chairman/chairwoman to chairperson) are steps in the right direction. But we must also bear in mind these patriarchal tendencies linger in the grammar we still use today, and perhaps contribute to the male-dominated world order.

By Maddie Stoll