Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome. By Anthony Corbeill. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2015. Pp. 204.

2016 ◽  
Vol 111 (4) ◽  
pp. 474-478
Author(s):  
Amy Richlin
Keyword(s):  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Biological Sex ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
The World

Introduction

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Corbeill
Keyword(s):  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
Biological Sex ◽  
Linguistic Convention ◽  
Latin Language ◽  
The World ◽  
Sexual Characteristics ◽  
Sex And Sexuality

This book presents some evidence from ancient Rome to dispute the notion that the grammatical gender of inanimate objects is a convenient linguistic convention, having no correspondence with any sort of imagined sexual characteristics of those objects in the real world. It argues that in the world of Latin grammatical gender, the sex and sexuality behind a given gender was always available for exploitation by the learned speaker. The book provides a historical perspective to the ongoing debate over the extent to which the structure of language affects perception of the world. Using the stable data of the Latin language and Latin literature, it examines the consistent overlap, and even occasional identification, of grammatical gender with biological sex by speakers in ancient Rome, and shows that this overlap finds an analogue in the Latin nouns commonly used to denote “gender” and “sex.”

Roman Scholars on Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Corbeill
Keyword(s):  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Scholarly Activity ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Biological Sex ◽  
The World ◽  
Roman Culture ◽  
Greek Tradition ◽  
And Gender

This chapter considers how the Romans imagined that the earliest Latin speakers employed grammatical gender. From as early as Varro, scholars and grammarians occupied themselves with cataloguing the peculiarities of grammatical gender—instances, for example, when gender assignment seems counterintuitive, or where one noun can vary between masculine, feminine, and neuter. This scholarly activity, with little extant precedent in Greek tradition, finds Latin grammarians consistently placing great importance upon the identification of grammatical gender with biological sex. The chapter explains this fascination with “sex and gender” by analyzing the reasons posited for the fluid gender of nouns as well as the commonest practitioners of grammatical gender bending (in particular Vergil). It shows that by dividing the world into discrete sexual categories, Latin vocabulary works to encourage the pervasive heterosexualization of Roman culture.

Gender

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Audring
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Feminine Gender ◽  
Biological Sex ◽  
The World ◽  
Broad Variety ◽  
Formal Properties ◽  
Gender System

Gender is a grammatical feature, in a family with person, number, and case. In the languages that have grammatical gender—according to a representative typological sample, almost half of the languages in the world—it is a property that separates nouns into classes. These classes are often meaningful and often linked to biological sex, which is why many languages are said to have a “masculine” and a “feminine” gender. A typical example is Italian, which has masculine words for male persons (il bambino “the.m little boy”) and feminine words for female persons (la bambina “the.f little girl”). However, gender systems may be based on other semantic distinctions or may reflect formal properties of the noun. In all cases, the defining property is agreement: the behavior of associated words. In Italian, the masculine gender of the noun bambino matches its meaning as well as its form—the noun ends in –o and inflects like a regular –o class noun—but the true indicator of gender is the form of the article. This can be seen in words like la mano “the.f hand,” which is feminine despite its final -o, and il soprano “the.m soprano,” which is masculine, although it usually refers to a woman. For the same reasons, we speak of grammatical gender only if the distinction is reflected in syntax; a language that has words for male and female persons or animals does not necessarily have a gender system. Across the languages of the world, gender systems vary widely. They differ in the number of classes, in the underlying assignment rules, and in how and where gender is marked. Since agreement is a definitional property, gender is generally absent in isolating languages as well as in young languages with little bound morphology, including sign languages. Therefore, gender is considered a mature phenomenon in language. Gender interacts in various ways with other grammatical features. For example, it may be limited to the singular number or the third person, and it may be crosscut by case distinctions. These and other interrelations can complicate the task of figuring out a gender system in first or second language acquisition. Yet, children master gender early, making use of a broad variety of cues. By contrast, gender is famously difficult for second-language learners. This is especially true for adults and for learners whose first language does not have a gender system. Nevertheless, tests show that even for this group, native-like competence is possible to attain.

Sexing the World

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Corbeill
Keyword(s):  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Tree Bark ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Roman Religion ◽  
Biological Sex ◽  
Religion And State ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Many

From the moment a child in ancient Rome began to speak Latin, the surrounding world became populated with objects possessing grammatical gender—masculine eyes (oculi), feminine trees (arbores), neuter bodies (corpora). This book surveys the many ways in which grammatical gender enabled Latin speakers to organize aspects of their society into sexual categories, and how this identification of grammatical gender with biological sex affected Roman perceptions of Latin poetry, divine power, and human hermaphrodites. Beginning with the ancient grammarians, the book examines how these scholars used the gender of nouns to identify the sex of the object being signified, regardless of whether that object was animate or inanimate. This informed the Roman poets who, for a time, changed at whim the grammatical gender for words as seemingly lifeless as “dust” (pulvis) or “tree bark” (cortex). The book then applies the idea of fluid grammatical gender to the basic tenets of Roman religion and state politics. It looks at how the ancients tended to construct Rome's earliest divinities as related male and female pairs, a tendency that waned in later periods. An analogous change characterized the dual-sexed hermaphrodite, whose sacred and political significance declined as the republican government became an autocracy. The book shows that the fluid boundaries of sex and gender became increasingly fixed into opposing and exclusive categories.

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