Okay - apparently there are some of you out there wondering how my new job is going. Coming out of "retirement" after my SAHM years has been... an... adjustment. I will say though that I'm glad that I'm doing what I do!
So what DO I do??? well, sometimes I am driving around between schools, sometimes I am sitting IN schools being a literacy tutor, sometimes I am sitting at my office chatting with the other people there (and sometimes I'm even getting WORK done there). The BEST part of what I do though comes after school - our team goes to a number of the local elementary and intermediate schools to run an afterschool Media Literacy Lab... where we help the kids write scripts, take pictures, etc... Can I admit that I've learned WAY more from these kids than I've been able to teach them??? Remember when I was trying to cram PhotoShop and MovieMaker and a few other programs into my head in a short time period???
yeah... didn't work so well... but I'm getting the hang of them now!
But I'm telling you these kids are AWESOME! They have come up with some amazing photography, claymation, live action, paper animation, etc...
So here's where I'm asking a favor... because these kids have a crazy goal in mind... and because I luv them SO much I'm willing to give it a go... there are a number of places to view their work - but for today we'll focus on Facebook because that's what the goal is all about!
THIS should take you straight there... I hope.
you can also subscribe to the free monthly podcast - because that makes the kids smile... but there are FAR more videos up on facebook... and these crazy kids have it stuck in their little heads that we can get 1,000 fans by the end of the school year. and no, I didn't type an extra zero!
SOoooo... I promise not to stalk the "fans" of media literacy lab - and I'm probably giving up ALL sorts of personal privacy since I'm one of the admins of that fan page... but do a girl a favor. Better yet - do a girl and those passel o' kids a favor :) just click the "become a fan" button... but, as long as you're there check out a few funny videos - I can only claim credit for the Monster Mash one - but hey, I'm new to this insanity :)
All in all, I love my job... it's keeping me UBER busy and has probably forced them to remove my name from the "mom of the year" nominees for the 14th year running - but we do good work - and we make kids happy - and SHOCK - I learn things
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Friday, November 6, 2009
Finger Foods...
So... the $64,000 question... how IS that new job of mine going???
just Peachy Keen... as long as by "peachy" you mean stressy and by "keen" you mean ugh...
okay, so it's really not all that bad - the schedule is getting solidified - I have actually managed to work in a twice weekly lunch with my kindergarten girl... which is technically what I'm doing right now... except she REALLY just wanted to watch Wishbone... whatever.
I do work with some fun people... some of whom might actually drop by here so I can't compare anyone to characters from The Office... I don't even really HAVE to compare them myself since we can all take that facebook quiz... I'm pretty sure our office is fully of Ryans and Michaels... with a Pam or two... Oh - and definitely one poor Phyllis and Andy type...
great - now I'm going to get in trouble...
oh well, since I'm in trouble let me just tell you that last week I grabbed a Wendy's Salad and headed back to the office where I finally got to eat my lunch at 2:00... only the Fork part of my salad had not made it all the way to the office... being the resourceful person I am I made sure my hands were clean before declaring to everyone present (Phyliis and Andy included) that chicken strips, lettuce, and mandarin chicken slices are now finger food. I'm sure there were a few snickers amongst those in the office but can I mention how annoyed I was later when I was putting away stuff in closets (that I've never before opened) and found a bag FULL of forks... so I ask *phyllis* about them... and get this response:
"oh yeah - I wondered why you were eating with your fingers, but I didn't want to insult your intelligence..."
ugh...
oh well, now I know, and I can forget my fork about 144 times before I have to stress about it.
roy/elisabeth dean said...
hahaha....aren't chicken strips, lettuce and mandarin oranges finger foods?
Wendy's usually leaves out my dressing for my salads, or my fries for my burger, or my spoon for my frosty! But, I keep going back....dang 99cent menu (couldn't find a "cent" sign...is there one? Never needed it before!)
Have a great day~
just Peachy Keen... as long as by "peachy" you mean stressy and by "keen" you mean ugh...
okay, so it's really not all that bad - the schedule is getting solidified - I have actually managed to work in a twice weekly lunch with my kindergarten girl... which is technically what I'm doing right now... except she REALLY just wanted to watch Wishbone... whatever.
I do work with some fun people... some of whom might actually drop by here so I can't compare anyone to characters from The Office... I don't even really HAVE to compare them myself since we can all take that facebook quiz... I'm pretty sure our office is fully of Ryans and Michaels... with a Pam or two... Oh - and definitely one poor Phyllis and Andy type...
great - now I'm going to get in trouble...
oh well, since I'm in trouble let me just tell you that last week I grabbed a Wendy's Salad and headed back to the office where I finally got to eat my lunch at 2:00... only the Fork part of my salad had not made it all the way to the office... being the resourceful person I am I made sure my hands were clean before declaring to everyone present (Phyliis and Andy included) that chicken strips, lettuce, and mandarin chicken slices are now finger food. I'm sure there were a few snickers amongst those in the office but can I mention how annoyed I was later when I was putting away stuff in closets (that I've never before opened) and found a bag FULL of forks... so I ask *phyllis* about them... and get this response:
"oh yeah - I wondered why you were eating with your fingers, but I didn't want to insult your intelligence..."
ugh...
oh well, now I know, and I can forget my fork about 144 times before I have to stress about it.
roy/elisabeth dean said...
hahaha....aren't chicken strips, lettuce and mandarin oranges finger foods?
Wendy's usually leaves out my dressing for my salads, or my fries for my burger, or my spoon for my frosty! But, I keep going back....dang 99cent menu (couldn't find a "cent" sign...is there one? Never needed it before!)
Have a great day~
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Biography
Classical forms
A biography is real. Ancient Greeks developed the biographical tradition which we have inherited, although until the 5th century AD, when the word 'biographia' first appears, in Damascius' Life of Isodorus, biographical pieces were called simply "lives" (βιοι: "bioi"). It is quite likely that the Greeks were drawing on a pre-existing eastern tradition; certainly Herodotus' Histories contains more detailed biographical information on Persian kings and subjects than on anyone else, implying he had a Persian source for it..
The earliest surviving pieces which we would identify as biographical are Isocrates' Life of Evagoras and Xenophon's Life of Agesilaos, both from the fifth century BC. Both identified themselves as encomia, or works of praise, and that biography was regarded as a discrete entity from historiography is evidenced by the fact that Xenophon treated King Agesilaos of Sparta twice in his works, once in the above-mentioned encomium and once in his Greek History; evidently the two genres were conceived as making different demands of authors who enrolled in them. Xenophon could present his Cyropaedia, an account of the childhood of the Persian King Cyrus the Great now regarded as so fabulous that it falls rather into a novelistic tradition than a biographical one, as a serious work, without any disclaimers or caveats.
Whereas Thucydides set the benchmark for a historiographical tradition comprising 'conclusions ... drawn from proofs quoted ... [which] may safely be relied upon' (Thuc. 1.21), and offering little explicit judgement on the people with whom he dealt, biographers were quite often more concerned with drawing a moral point from their investigations of their subjects. Parallel Lives by Plutarch, a Greek writing under the Roman empire, is a series of short biographies of eminent men, ancient and contemporary, arranged in pairs comprising one Greek, one Roman, in order that a broad educative point might be extracted from the comparison (for example Mark Antony and Demetrius were paradigms of tyranny, Lysander and Sulla examples of great men degenerating into blood-thirsty corruption).
However, although their moralizing approach is not in fashion in the current intellectual climate, Greek biographies still have much to offer the modern reader, and for the most part it is reasonable to assume that while authors may have suppressed details which did not fall in with the general theme which they wished to convey, they are unlikely to have fabricated much. Not least, they were instrumental in developing the modern idea of the person. The traditional Greek attitude to individuals was to 'reduce them to types'; the Peripatetic tradition records various categories into which men might fall: the flatterer, the superstitious man and so on. Greek rhetorical handbooks give advice on 'ethopoia', that is creating a character, one of a recognised type, to win favour in the law courts.
The biographical tradition does draw on these types, but it also gives explicit recognition to the importance of individual idiosyncrasies in defining a man, and places the emphasis firmly on a man's personality rather than merely listing his accomplishments. As Plutarch says in the introduction to his Life of Alexander the Great, 'in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue and vice, but a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation than battles where thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities'. Thus the individual is recognised as having some value and interest irrespective of the impact of his actions on the broader sweep of history.
Under the Roman Empire, the biographical and historiographical traditions converged somewhat, likely due to the nature of government, whereby the state was dominated by a single emperor with totalitarian power and whose character and actions set the tone for the period; Tacitus's History and his Annals, as well as Dio's History contain much of the same material as the biographer Suetonius's Lives of the Twelve Caesars. However, although Tacitus in particular was extremely critical of the regime, his disapproval emerges in subtle characterisation and arrangement of his material, in contrast with Suetonius' vicious authorial comment.
Middle Ages and Renaissance
The Early Middle Ages (AD 400 to 1450) saw a decline in awareness of classical culture. During this time, the only repositories of knowledge and records of early history in Europe was the Roman Catholic Church. Hermits, monks and priests used this historic period to write the first modern biographies. Their subjects were usually restricted to church fathers, martyrs, popes and saints. Their works were meant to be inspirational to people, vehicles for conversion to Christianity. See hagiography. One significant example of biography from this period which does not exactly fit into that mold is the life of Charlemagne as written by his courtier Einhard.
By the late Middle Ages, biographies became less church-oriented as biographies of kings, knights and tyrants began to appear. The most famous of these such biographies was 'Le Morte d'Arthur' by Sir Thomas Malory. The book was an account of the life of the fabled King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.
Following Malory, the new emphasis on humanism during the Renaissance promoted a focus on secular subjects such as artists and poets, and encouraged writing in the vernacular. Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1550) was a landmark biography focusing on secular lives. Vasari created celebrities of his subjects, as the Lives became an early "best seller." Two other developments are noteworthy: the development of the printing press in the fifteenth century and the gradual increase in literacy.
Biographies in the English language began appearing during the reign of Henry VIII. John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), better known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, essentially was the first dictionary of biography, followed by Thomas Fuller’s The History of the Worthies of England (1662), with a distinct focus on public life.
Modern biography
The "Golden Age" of English biography emerged in the late eighteenth century, the century in which the terms "biography" and "autobiography" entered the English lexicon. The classic works of the period were Samuel Johnson's Critic material and letting the subject "speak for itself." While Boswell compiled, Samuel Johnson composed. Johnson did not follow a chronological narration of the subject's life but used anecdotes and incidents selectively. Johnson rejected the notion that facts revealed truth. He suggested that biographers should seek their subject in "domestic privacies", to find little known facts or anecdotes which revealed character. (Casper, 1999)
The romantic biographers disputed many of Johnson's judgments. Jean Jacques Rousseau's Confessions (1781-88) exploited the romantic point of view and the confessional mode. The tradition of testimony and confession was brought to the New World by Puritan and Quaker memoirists and journal-keepers where the form continued to be influential. Benjamin Franklin's autobiography (1791) would provide the archetype for the American success story. (Stone, 1982) Autobiography would remain an influential form of biographical writing.
Generally American biography followed the English model, while incorporating Thomas Carlyle's view that biography was a part of history. Carlyle asserted that the lives of great human beings were essential to understanding society and its institutions. While the historical impulse would remain a strong element in early American biography, American writers carved out their own distinct approach. What emerged was a rather didactic form of biography which sought to shape individual character of the reader in the process of defining national character. (Casper, 1999)
The distinction between mass biography and literary biography which had formed by the middle of the nineteenth century reflected a breach between high culture and middle-class culture. This division would endure for the remainder of the century. Biography began to flower thanks to new publishing technologies and an expanding reading public. This revolution in publishing made books available to a larger audience of readers. Almost ten times as many American biographies appeared from 1840 to 1860 than had appeared in the first two decades of the century. In addition, affordable paperback editions of popular biographies were published for the first time. Also, American periodicals began publishing series of biographical sketches. (Casper, 1999) The topical emphasis shifted from republican heroes to self-made men and women.
Much of late 19th-century biography remained formulaic. Notably, few autobiographies had been written in the 19th century. The following century witnessed a renaissance of autobiography beginning with Booker T. Washington's, Up From Slavery (1901) and followed by Henry Adams' Education (1907), a chronicle of self-defined failure which ran counter to the predominant American success story. The publication of socially significant autobiographies by both men and women began to flourish. (Stone, 1982)
The authority of psychology and sociology was ascendant and would make its mark on the new century’s biographies. (Stone, 1982) The demise of the "great man" theory of history was indicative of the emerging mindset. Human behavior would be explained through Darwinian theories. "Sociological" biographies conceived of their subjects' actions as the result of the environment, and tended to downplay individuality. The development of psychoanalysis led to a more penetrating and comprehensive understanding of the biographical subject, and induced biographers to give more emphasis to childhood and adolescence. Clearly, psychological ideas were changing the way Americans read and wrote biographies, as a culture of autobiography developed in which the telling of one's own story became a form of therapy. (Casper, 1999)
The conventional concept of national heroes and narratives of success disappeared in the obsession with psychological explorations of personality. The new school of biography featured iconoclasts, scientific analysts, and fictional biographers. This wave included Lytton Strachey, André Maurois, and Emil Ludwig among others. Strachey's biographies had an influence similar to that which Samuel Johnson had enjoyed earlier. In the 1920s and '30s, biographical writers sought to capitalize on Strachey's popularity and imitate his style. Robert Graves (I, Claudius, 1934) stood out among those following Strachey's model of "debunking biographies." The trend in literary biography was accompanied in popular biography by a sort of "celebrity voyeurism." in the early decades of the century. This latter form's appeal to readers was based on curiosity more than morality or patriotism.
By World War I, cheap hard-cover reprints had become popular. The decades of the 1920s witnessed a biographical "boom." In 1929, nearly 700 biographies were published in the United States, and the first dictionary of American biography appeared. In the decade that followed, numerous biographies continued to be published despite the economic depression. They reached a growing audience through inexpensive formats and via public libraries.
According to the scholar Caroyln Heilbrun, women's biographies were revolutionized during the second wave of feminist activism in the 1970s. At this time women began to be portrayed more accurately, even if it downplayed the achievements or integrity of a man (Heilbrun 12).
Multi-media forms
With the technological advancements created in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, multi-media forms of biography became much more popular than literary forms of personality. The popularity of these forms of biography culminated in the creation of such cable and satellite television networks as A&E, The Biography Channel, The History Channel and History International. Along with documentary film biographies, Hollywood produced numerous commercial films based on the lives of famous people. Also, new web 2.0 applications such as annoknips.com enable users all over the world to compile their own biography and illustrate it with other people's photos.
More recently, CD-ROM and online biographies are appearing. Unlike books and films, they often do not tell a chronological story; instead, they are archives of many discrete media elements related to an individual person, including video clips, photographs, and text articles. Media scholar Lev Manovich says that such archives exemplify the database form, allowing users to navigate the materials in many ways (Manovich 220).
A biography is real. Ancient Greeks developed the biographical tradition which we have inherited, although until the 5th century AD, when the word 'biographia' first appears, in Damascius' Life of Isodorus, biographical pieces were called simply "lives" (βιοι: "bioi"). It is quite likely that the Greeks were drawing on a pre-existing eastern tradition; certainly Herodotus' Histories contains more detailed biographical information on Persian kings and subjects than on anyone else, implying he had a Persian source for it..
The earliest surviving pieces which we would identify as biographical are Isocrates' Life of Evagoras and Xenophon's Life of Agesilaos, both from the fifth century BC. Both identified themselves as encomia, or works of praise, and that biography was regarded as a discrete entity from historiography is evidenced by the fact that Xenophon treated King Agesilaos of Sparta twice in his works, once in the above-mentioned encomium and once in his Greek History; evidently the two genres were conceived as making different demands of authors who enrolled in them. Xenophon could present his Cyropaedia, an account of the childhood of the Persian King Cyrus the Great now regarded as so fabulous that it falls rather into a novelistic tradition than a biographical one, as a serious work, without any disclaimers or caveats.
Whereas Thucydides set the benchmark for a historiographical tradition comprising 'conclusions ... drawn from proofs quoted ... [which] may safely be relied upon' (Thuc. 1.21), and offering little explicit judgement on the people with whom he dealt, biographers were quite often more concerned with drawing a moral point from their investigations of their subjects. Parallel Lives by Plutarch, a Greek writing under the Roman empire, is a series of short biographies of eminent men, ancient and contemporary, arranged in pairs comprising one Greek, one Roman, in order that a broad educative point might be extracted from the comparison (for example Mark Antony and Demetrius were paradigms of tyranny, Lysander and Sulla examples of great men degenerating into blood-thirsty corruption).
However, although their moralizing approach is not in fashion in the current intellectual climate, Greek biographies still have much to offer the modern reader, and for the most part it is reasonable to assume that while authors may have suppressed details which did not fall in with the general theme which they wished to convey, they are unlikely to have fabricated much. Not least, they were instrumental in developing the modern idea of the person. The traditional Greek attitude to individuals was to 'reduce them to types'; the Peripatetic tradition records various categories into which men might fall: the flatterer, the superstitious man and so on. Greek rhetorical handbooks give advice on 'ethopoia', that is creating a character, one of a recognised type, to win favour in the law courts.
The biographical tradition does draw on these types, but it also gives explicit recognition to the importance of individual idiosyncrasies in defining a man, and places the emphasis firmly on a man's personality rather than merely listing his accomplishments. As Plutarch says in the introduction to his Life of Alexander the Great, 'in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue and vice, but a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation than battles where thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities'. Thus the individual is recognised as having some value and interest irrespective of the impact of his actions on the broader sweep of history.
Under the Roman Empire, the biographical and historiographical traditions converged somewhat, likely due to the nature of government, whereby the state was dominated by a single emperor with totalitarian power and whose character and actions set the tone for the period; Tacitus's History and his Annals, as well as Dio's History contain much of the same material as the biographer Suetonius's Lives of the Twelve Caesars. However, although Tacitus in particular was extremely critical of the regime, his disapproval emerges in subtle characterisation and arrangement of his material, in contrast with Suetonius' vicious authorial comment.
Middle Ages and Renaissance
The Early Middle Ages (AD 400 to 1450) saw a decline in awareness of classical culture. During this time, the only repositories of knowledge and records of early history in Europe was the Roman Catholic Church. Hermits, monks and priests used this historic period to write the first modern biographies. Their subjects were usually restricted to church fathers, martyrs, popes and saints. Their works were meant to be inspirational to people, vehicles for conversion to Christianity. See hagiography. One significant example of biography from this period which does not exactly fit into that mold is the life of Charlemagne as written by his courtier Einhard.
By the late Middle Ages, biographies became less church-oriented as biographies of kings, knights and tyrants began to appear. The most famous of these such biographies was 'Le Morte d'Arthur' by Sir Thomas Malory. The book was an account of the life of the fabled King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.
Following Malory, the new emphasis on humanism during the Renaissance promoted a focus on secular subjects such as artists and poets, and encouraged writing in the vernacular. Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1550) was a landmark biography focusing on secular lives. Vasari created celebrities of his subjects, as the Lives became an early "best seller." Two other developments are noteworthy: the development of the printing press in the fifteenth century and the gradual increase in literacy.
Biographies in the English language began appearing during the reign of Henry VIII. John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), better known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, essentially was the first dictionary of biography, followed by Thomas Fuller’s The History of the Worthies of England (1662), with a distinct focus on public life.
Modern biography
The "Golden Age" of English biography emerged in the late eighteenth century, the century in which the terms "biography" and "autobiography" entered the English lexicon. The classic works of the period were Samuel Johnson's Critic material and letting the subject "speak for itself." While Boswell compiled, Samuel Johnson composed. Johnson did not follow a chronological narration of the subject's life but used anecdotes and incidents selectively. Johnson rejected the notion that facts revealed truth. He suggested that biographers should seek their subject in "domestic privacies", to find little known facts or anecdotes which revealed character. (Casper, 1999)
The romantic biographers disputed many of Johnson's judgments. Jean Jacques Rousseau's Confessions (1781-88) exploited the romantic point of view and the confessional mode. The tradition of testimony and confession was brought to the New World by Puritan and Quaker memoirists and journal-keepers where the form continued to be influential. Benjamin Franklin's autobiography (1791) would provide the archetype for the American success story. (Stone, 1982) Autobiography would remain an influential form of biographical writing.
Generally American biography followed the English model, while incorporating Thomas Carlyle's view that biography was a part of history. Carlyle asserted that the lives of great human beings were essential to understanding society and its institutions. While the historical impulse would remain a strong element in early American biography, American writers carved out their own distinct approach. What emerged was a rather didactic form of biography which sought to shape individual character of the reader in the process of defining national character. (Casper, 1999)
The distinction between mass biography and literary biography which had formed by the middle of the nineteenth century reflected a breach between high culture and middle-class culture. This division would endure for the remainder of the century. Biography began to flower thanks to new publishing technologies and an expanding reading public. This revolution in publishing made books available to a larger audience of readers. Almost ten times as many American biographies appeared from 1840 to 1860 than had appeared in the first two decades of the century. In addition, affordable paperback editions of popular biographies were published for the first time. Also, American periodicals began publishing series of biographical sketches. (Casper, 1999) The topical emphasis shifted from republican heroes to self-made men and women.
Much of late 19th-century biography remained formulaic. Notably, few autobiographies had been written in the 19th century. The following century witnessed a renaissance of autobiography beginning with Booker T. Washington's, Up From Slavery (1901) and followed by Henry Adams' Education (1907), a chronicle of self-defined failure which ran counter to the predominant American success story. The publication of socially significant autobiographies by both men and women began to flourish. (Stone, 1982)
The authority of psychology and sociology was ascendant and would make its mark on the new century’s biographies. (Stone, 1982) The demise of the "great man" theory of history was indicative of the emerging mindset. Human behavior would be explained through Darwinian theories. "Sociological" biographies conceived of their subjects' actions as the result of the environment, and tended to downplay individuality. The development of psychoanalysis led to a more penetrating and comprehensive understanding of the biographical subject, and induced biographers to give more emphasis to childhood and adolescence. Clearly, psychological ideas were changing the way Americans read and wrote biographies, as a culture of autobiography developed in which the telling of one's own story became a form of therapy. (Casper, 1999)
The conventional concept of national heroes and narratives of success disappeared in the obsession with psychological explorations of personality. The new school of biography featured iconoclasts, scientific analysts, and fictional biographers. This wave included Lytton Strachey, André Maurois, and Emil Ludwig among others. Strachey's biographies had an influence similar to that which Samuel Johnson had enjoyed earlier. In the 1920s and '30s, biographical writers sought to capitalize on Strachey's popularity and imitate his style. Robert Graves (I, Claudius, 1934) stood out among those following Strachey's model of "debunking biographies." The trend in literary biography was accompanied in popular biography by a sort of "celebrity voyeurism." in the early decades of the century. This latter form's appeal to readers was based on curiosity more than morality or patriotism.
By World War I, cheap hard-cover reprints had become popular. The decades of the 1920s witnessed a biographical "boom." In 1929, nearly 700 biographies were published in the United States, and the first dictionary of American biography appeared. In the decade that followed, numerous biographies continued to be published despite the economic depression. They reached a growing audience through inexpensive formats and via public libraries.
According to the scholar Caroyln Heilbrun, women's biographies were revolutionized during the second wave of feminist activism in the 1970s. At this time women began to be portrayed more accurately, even if it downplayed the achievements or integrity of a man (Heilbrun 12).
Multi-media forms
With the technological advancements created in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, multi-media forms of biography became much more popular than literary forms of personality. The popularity of these forms of biography culminated in the creation of such cable and satellite television networks as A&E, The Biography Channel, The History Channel and History International. Along with documentary film biographies, Hollywood produced numerous commercial films based on the lives of famous people. Also, new web 2.0 applications such as annoknips.com enable users all over the world to compile their own biography and illustrate it with other people's photos.
More recently, CD-ROM and online biographies are appearing. Unlike books and films, they often do not tell a chronological story; instead, they are archives of many discrete media elements related to an individual person, including video clips, photographs, and text articles. Media scholar Lev Manovich says that such archives exemplify the database form, allowing users to navigate the materials in many ways (Manovich 220).
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Gender in English
In linguistics, grammatical genders, sometimes also called noun classes, are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words; every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be very few which belong to several classes at once.[1][2]
If a language distinguishes between masculine and feminine gender, for instance, then each noun belongs to one of those two genders; in order to correctly decline any noun and any modifier or other type of word affecting that noun, one must identify whether the noun is feminine or masculine. The term "grammatical gender" is mostly used for Indo-European languages, many of which follow the pattern just described. Modern English, however, is normally described as lacking grammatical gender.[3]
The linguistic notion of grammatical gender is distinguished from the biological and social notion of natural gender, although they interact closely in many languages. Both grammatical and natural gender can have linguistic effects in a given language.
Although some authors use the term "noun class" as a synonym or an extension of "grammatical gender", for others they are separate concepts. OverviewMany languages place each noun into one of three gender classes (or simply "genders"):
Masculine gender: includes most words that refer to males;
Feminine gender: includes most words that refer to females;
Neuter gender: includes mostly words that do not refer to males or females
For example, in their nominative singular forms Polish nouns are typically feminine if they have the ending -a, neuter when they end with -o, -e, or -ę, and masculine if they have no gender suffix (null morpheme). Thus, encyklopedia "encyclopaedia" is feminine, krzesło "chair" is neuter, and ręcznik "towel" is masculine. When the adjective duży "big" is combined with these nouns in phrases, it changes form according to their grammatical gender:
Gender Noun Phrase Meaning
Masculine ręcznik duży ręcznik big towel
Feminine encyklopedia duża encyklopedia big encyclopaedia
Neuter krzesło duże krzesło big chair
As can be seen, the neuter gender does not include all nouns that correspond to genderless realities. Some of these may be designated by nouns that are grammatically masculine or feminine. Also, some nouns that refer to males or females may have a different grammatical gender. In general, the boundaries of noun classes are rather arbitrary, although there are rules of thumb in many languages. In this context, the terms "masculine", "feminine" and "neuter" should be understood merely as convenient labels. They are suggestive class descriptors, but not every member of a class is well described by its label.
Gender marking is not substantial in modern English. However, distinctions in personal pronouns have been inherited from Old English which can be used to give a flavour of how grammatical gender works.
John insisted that he would pay for his own dinner.
Jane insisted that she would pay for her own dinner.
Here, the gender of the subject is marked both on the personal pronouns (he/she) and on the possessive adjectives (his/her). Marking of gender on the possessive form can be considered redundant in these examples, since his own and her own must refer to their respective antecedents, he and she, which are already unambiguously marked for gender.
A full system of grammatical gender involves two phenomena:
Inflection: Many words have different forms for different genders, and certain morphological markers are characteristic of each gender.
Agreement: Every noun is associated with one gender class. In a phrase or clause, words that refer to a given noun inflect to match the gender of that noun.
Note that some words, called epicene, may have identical forms for different genders. For example, in Spanish estudiante "student" and grande "big" can be masculine or feminine.
Spanish is also an example of a language with only two genders, masculine and feminine; it has no neuter noun class. Nouns that designate entities with no natural gender, such as objects or abstractions, are distributed among the masculine and the feminine. In a few other languages, notably Germanic languages like Swedish, the former masculine and feminine genders have become indistinguishable with time, merging into a new class called the common gender, which however remains distinct from the neuter gender.[4]
Common gender: includes most words that refer to males or females, but is distinct from the neuter gender.
Other languages still, like English, are regarded as not having grammatical gender, since they do not make gender distinctions through inflection, and do not generally require gender agreement between related words.
Some authors have extended the concept of "grammatical gender" to the expression of other types of natural, individual characteristics through inflection, such as animacy. See the section on gender across languages, below.
Grammatical gender (with masculine and/or feminine categories) is commonly found in Afro-Asiatic, Dravidian, Indo-European, Northeast Caucasian, and several Australian aboriginal languages. It is mostly absent in the Altaic, Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan, and Uralic language families. The Niger-Congo languages typically have an extensive system of noun classes, which some authors regard as a type of grammatical gender, but others describe as something completely different. Gender inflectionIn many languages, gender is marked quite profusely, surfacing in contexts where an English speaker might not expect it.
"I love you" in Arabic:
: said to a male: uħibbuka (أُحِبُّكََ)
: said to a female: uħibbuki (أُحِبُّكِ)
"Thank you very much" in Portuguese:
: said by a male: muito obrigado
: said by a female: muito obrigada
The switch from one gender to the other is typically achieved by inflecting appropriate words, the object suffix of the verb uħibbu-ka/ki in the Arabic example,[5] and the subject suffix in the past participle (or adjective) obrig-ado/a in the Portuguese example.
In Spanish, most masculine nouns and modifiers end with the suffix -o or with a consonant, while the suffix -a is characteristic of feminine nouns (though there are exceptions). Thus, niño means “boy”, and niña means “girl”. This paradigm is regularly exploited for making neologisms: from the masculine nouns abogado "lawyer", diputado "member of parliament" and doctor "doctor", it was straightforward to make the feminine equivalents abogada, diputada, and doctora.
Sometimes, gender is expressed in more subtle ways. On the whole, gender marking has been lost in Welsh, both on the noun, and, often, on the adjective. However, it has the peculiar feature of initial mutation, where the first consonant of a word changes into another in certain syntactical conditions. Gender is one of the factors that can cause mutation, especially the so-called soft mutation. For instance, the word merch, which means girl or daughter, changes into ferch after the definite article. This only occurs with feminine nouns; for example, mab "son" remains unchanged after the definite article. Adjectives are affected by gender in a similar way.
Gender Default After definite article With adjective
Masculine mab son y mab the son y mab mawr the big son
Feminine merch girl y ferch the girl y ferch fawr the big girl
Personal names
Main article: Personal name
Personal names are frequently constructed with language-specific affixes that identify the gender of the bearer. Common feminine suffixes used in English names are -a, of Latin or Romance origin (cf. Robert and Roberta) and -e, of French origin (cf. Justin and Justine). Although gender inflections may be used to construct cognate nouns for people of opposite genders in languages that have grammatical gender, this alone does not constitute grammatical gender. Distinct names for men and women are also common in languages where gender is not grammatical.
Personal pronouns
Main articles: Gender-specific pronoun and Gender-neutral pronoun
Personal pronouns often have different forms based on gender. Even though it has lost grammatical gender, English still distinguishes between "he" (generally applied to a male person), "she" (female person), and "it" (object, abstraction, or animal). But this also does not guarantee the existence of grammatical gender. There is a spoken form, "they", which although not part of the standard literary language, is cosmopolitan in the English-speaking world and is used when the gender of a person being referred to is not known. Gendered pronouns and their corresponding inflections vary considerably across languages. In languages that never had grammatical gender, there is normally just one word for "he" and "she", like hän in Finnish and ő in Hungarian. These languages have different pronouns and inflections in the third person only to differentiate between people and inanimate objects (and even this distinction is commonly waived in spoken Finnish).
Dummy pronouns
In languages with only a masculine and a feminine gender, the default dummy pronoun is usually the masculine third person singular. For example, the French sentence for "It's raining" is Il pleut, literally "He rains". There are some exceptions: the corresponding sentence in Welsh is Mae hi'n bwrw glaw, literally "She's raining". Gender agreementIn the French sentences Il est un grand acteur "He is a great actor" and Elle est une grande actrice "She is a great actress", almost every word changes to match the gender of the subject. The noun acteur inflects by changing the masculine suffix -eur into the feminine suffix -rice, the personal pronoun il "he" changes to elle "she", and the feminine suffix -e is added to the article (un → une) and to the adjective (grand → grande). Only the verb est "is" remains unchanged.
Curzan illustrates gender agreement in Old English with the following “highly contrived” example:
Old English Seo brade lind wæs tilu and ic hire lufod.
Literal translation That broad shield was good and I her loved.
Modern English That broad shield was good and I loved it.
The word hire "her" refers to lind "shield". Since this noun was grammatically feminine, the adjectives brade "broad" and tilu "good", as well as the pronouns seo "the/that" and hire "her", which referred to lind, must also appear in their feminine forms. Old English had three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, but gender inflections were greatly simplified by sound changes, and then completely lost (as well as number inflections, to a lesser extent).
In modern English, by contrast, the noun "shield" takes the neuter pronoun "it", since it designates a genderless object. In a sense, the neuter gender has grown to encompass most nouns, including many that were masculine or feminine in Old English. If one were to replace the phrase "broad shield" with "brave man" or "kind woman", the only change to the rest of the sentence would be in the pronoun at the end, which would become "him" or "her", respectively. Grammatical vs. natural genderThe grammatical gender of a word doesn't always coincide with real gender of its referent. An often cited example is the German word Mädchen, which means "girl", but is treated grammatically as neuter. This is because it was constructed as the diminutive of Magd (archaic nowadays), and the diminutive suffix -chen conventionally places nouns in the "neuter" noun class. A few more examples:
German die Frau (feminine) and das Weib (neuter) both mean "the woman".
Irish cailín "girl" is masculine, while stail "stallion" is feminine.
Normally, such exceptions are a small minority. However, in some local dialects of German all nouns for female persons have shifted to the neuter gender (presumably further influenced by the standard word Weib), but the feminine gender remains for some words denoting objects.
Indeterminate gender
In languages with a masculine and feminine gender (and possibly a neuter), the masculine is usually employed by default to refer to persons of unknown gender. This is still done sometimes in English, although an alternative is to use the singular "they". Another alternative is to use two nouns, as in the phrase "ladies and gentlemen" (hendiadys).
In the plural, the masculine is also employed by default to refer to a mixed group of people. Thus, in French the feminine pronoun elles always designates an all-female group of people, but the masculine pronoun ils may refer to a group of males, to a mixed group, or to a group of people of unknown genders. In English, this issue does not arise with pronouns, since there is only one plural third person pronoun, "they". However, a group of actors and actresses would still be described as a group of "actors".
In all these cases, one says that the feminine gender is semantically marked, while the masculine gender is unmarked.
Animals
Often, the masculine/feminine classification is only followed carefully for human beings. For animals, the relation between real and grammatical gender tends to be more arbitrary. In Spanish, for instance, a cheetah is always un guepardo (masculine) and a zebra is always una cebra (feminine), regardless of their biological sex. If it becomes necessary to specify the sex of the animal, an adjective is added, as in un guepardo hembra (a female cheetah), or una cebra macho (a male zebra). Different names for the male and the female of a species are more frequent for common pets or farm animals, eg. English horse and mare, Spanish vaca "cow" and toro "bull". Vegetables are typically grouped with inanimate objects.
In English, individual speakers may prefer one gender or another for animals of unknown sex, depending on species — for instance, a tendency to refer more often to dogs as "he" and to cats as "she".
Objects and abstractions
Since all nouns must belong to some noun class, many end up with genders which are purely conventional. For instance, in Latin and in the Romance languages derived from it the word Sol "Sun" is masculine and the word Luna "Moon" is feminine, but in German and other Germanic languages the opposite occurs: Sonne "Sun" is feminine, while Mond "Moon" is masculine. Two nouns denoting the same concept can also differ in gender in closely related languages, or within a single language. For instance, in Polish the word księżyc "Moon" is masculine, but its Russian counterpart луна is feminine. The Russian word for the Sun Солнце (Solntse) is neither masculine nor feminine but neuter). Also, in Russian the word собака "dog" is feminine, but its Ukrainian counterpart (with the same spelling and almost identical pronunciation) is masculine.
Polish księżyc Moon masculine
Russian луна Moon feminine
Russian картофель potato masculine
Russian картошка spud feminine[6]
There is nothing inherent about the Moon or a potato which makes them objectively "male" or "female". In these cases, gender is quite independent of meaning, and a property of the nouns themselves, rather than of their referents.
Sometimes the gender switches: Russian тополь (poplar) is now masculine, but less than 200 years ago (in writings of Lermontov) it was feminine. The modern loanword виски (from whisky/whiskey) was originally feminine (in a translation of Jack London stories, 1915), then masculine (in a song of Alexander Vertinsky, 1920s or 1930s), and finally it is neuter (today the masculine variant is typically considered archaic, and feminine one is completely forgotten). Gender assignmentThere are three main ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into genders: according to logical or symbolic similarities in their meaning (semantic criterion), by grouping them with other nouns that have similar form (morphology), or through an arbitrary convention (possibly rooted in the language's history). Usually, a combination of the three types of criteria is used, though one is more prevalent.
Semantics
In Alamblak, a Sepik Hill language spoken in Papua New Guinea, the masculine gender includes males and things which are tall or long and slender, or narrow such as fish, crocodile, long snakes, arrows, spears and tall slender trees, and the feminine gender includes females and things which are short, squat or wide, such as turtles, frogs, houses, fighting shields, and trees that are typically more round and squat than others. A more or less discernible correlation between noun gender and the shape of the respective object is found in some languages even in the Indo-European family.
Sometimes, semantics prevails over the formal assignment of grammatical gender (agreement in sensu). In Latin, for example, nauta "sailor" is masculine, and nurus "daughter-in-law" is feminine, even though the endings -a and -us are normally associated with the feminine and the masculine, respectively. In Polish, the nouns mężczyzna "man" and książę "prince" are masculine, even though words with the ending -a are normally feminine and words that end with -ę are usually neuter. See also Synesis.
Morphology
In Spanish, grammatical gender is overwhelmingly determined by noun morphology. Since nouns that refer to male persons usually end in -o or a consonant and nouns that refer to female persons usually end in -a, most other nouns that end in -o or a consonant are also treated as masculine, and most nouns that end in -a are treated as feminine, whatever their meaning. (Nouns that end in some other vowel are assigned a gender either according to etymology, by analogy, or by some other convention.) Morphology may in fact override meaning, in some cases. The noun miembro "member" is always masculine, even when it refers to a woman, but persona "person" is always feminine, even when it refers to a man.
In German also, diminutives with the endings -chen and -lein (cognates of English -kin and -ling meaning little, young) are always neuter, which is why Mädchen "girl" and Fräulein "young woman" are neuter. Another ending, the nominalizing suffix -ling, can be used to make countable nouns from uncountable nouns (Teig "dough" → Teigling "piece of dough"), or personal nouns from abstract nouns (Lehre "teaching", Strafe "punishment" → Lehrling "apprentice", Sträfling "convict") or adjectives (feige "cowardly" → Feigling "coward"), always producing masculine nouns.
On the other hand, the correlation between grammatical gender and morphology is usually not perfect: problema "problem" is masculine in Spanish (this is for etymological reasons), and radio "radio station" is feminine (because it is a shortening of estación de radio, a phrase whose head is the feminine noun estación).
Convention
In some languages, gender markers have been so eroded by time that they are no longer recognizable, even to native speakers. Most German nouns give no morphological or semantic clue as to their gender. It must simply be memorized. The conventional aspect of grammatical gender is also clear when one considers that there is nothing objective about a table which makes it feminine as French table, masculine as German Tisch, or neuter as Norwegian bord. The learner of such languages should regard gender as an integral part of each noun. A frequent recommendation is to memorize a modifier along with the noun as a unit, usually a definite article, i.e. memorizing la table — where la is the French feminine singular definite article — der Tisch - where der is the German masculine singular nominative definite article — and bordet — where the suffix -et indicates the definite neuter singular in Norwegian.
Whether a distant ancestor of French, German, Norwegian, and English had a semantic value for genders is of course a different matter. Some authors have speculated that archaic Proto-Indo-European had two noun classes with the semantic values of animate and inanimate. Gender in EnglishMain article: Gender in English
While grammatical gender was a fully productive inflectional category in Old English, Modern English has a much less pervasive gender system, primarily based on natural gender.[3]
There are a few traces of gender marking in Modern English:
Some foreign nouns inflect according to gender, such as actor/actress, where the suffix -or denotes the masculine, and the suffix -ress denotes the feminine.
The third person singular pronouns (and their possessive forms) are gender specific: "he/his" (masculine gender, overall used for males), "she/her(s)" (feminine gender, for females), "it/its" (neuter gender, mainly for objects and abstractions), "one/one's" (common gender, for anyone or anything), and "who/whose" (subordinate/vocative gender, for someone in question).
A glint of gender endings live on in the cultural memory of novel terms such as fella from "fellow" or blonde from "blond". Neuter genders tend to end in t: that, it, might.
But these are insignificant features compared to a typical language with grammatical gender:
English has no live productive gender markers. An example is the suffix -ette (of French provenance) in rockette, from rocket, or trollette, from troll, but it is seldom used, and mostly with disparaging or humorous intent.
The English nouns that inflect for gender are a very small minority, typically loanwords from non-Germanic languages (the suffix -ress in the word "actress", for instance, derives from Latin -rix via French -rice). In languages with grammatical gender, there are typically thousands of words which inflect for gender.
The third-person singular forms of the personal pronouns are the only modifiers that inflect according to gender.
It is also noteworthy that, with few exceptions, the gender of an English pronoun coincides with the real gender of its referent, rather than with the grammatical gender of its antecedent, frequently different from the former in languages with true grammatical gender. The choice between "he", "she" and "it" invariably comes down to whether they designate a human male, a human female, or something else.
Some exceptions:
Animals, which can go either way, being referred to according to their sex, or as "it".
The pronoun "she" is sometimes used to refer to things which contain people such as countries, ships, and cars, or to refer to machines. This, however, is considered a stylistically marked, optional figure of speech. This usage is furthermore in decline and advised against by most journalistic style guides such as the Chicago Manual of Style.[7]
The absence of grammatical gender is unusual for an Indo-European language, though common in other language families. Gender across language familiesOther types of gender classifications
Some languages have gender-like noun classifications unrelated to gender identity. Particularly common are languages with animate and inanimate categories. The term "grammatical genders" is also used by extension in this case, although many authors prefer "noun classes" when none of the inflections in a language relate to sexuality. Note however that the word "gender" derives from Latin genus (also the root of genre) originally meant "kind", so it does not necessarily have a sexual meaning. For further information, see Animacy.
Australian Aboriginal languages
The Dyirbal language is well known for its system of four noun classes, which tend to be divided along the following semantic lines:
I — animate objects, men
II — women, water, fire, violence
III — edible fruit and vegetables
IV — miscellaneous (includes things not classifiable in the first three)
The class usually labeled "feminine", for instance, includes the word for fire and nouns relating to fire, as well as all dangerous creatures and phenomena. This inspired the title of the George Lakoff book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (ISBN 0-226-46804-6).
The Ngangikurrunggurr language has noun classes reserved for canines, and hunting weapons, and the Anindilyakwa language has a noun class for things that reflect light. The Diyari language distinguishes only between female and other objects. Perhaps the most noun classes in any Australian language are found in Yanyuwa, which has 16 noun classes.
Caucasian languages
Some members of the Northwest Caucasian family, and almost all of the Northeast Caucasian languages, manifest noun class. In the Northeast Caucasian family, only Lezgi, Udi, and Aghul do not have noun classes. Some languages have only two classes, while the Bats language has eight. The most widespread system, however, has four classes, for male, female, animate beings and certain objects, and finally a class for the remaining nouns. The Andi language has a noun class reserved for insects.
Among Northwest Caucasian languages, Abkhaz shows a masculine-feminine-neuter distinction. Ubykh shows some inflections along the same lines, but only in some instances, and in some of these instances inflection for noun class is not even obligatory.
In all Caucasian languages that manifest class, it is not marked on the noun itself but on the dependent verbs, adjectives, pronouns and prepositions.
Indo-European
Many linguists think the earliest stages of Proto-Indo-European had two genders, animate and inanimate, as did Hittite, but the inanimate gender later split into neuter and feminine, originating the classical three-way classification into masculine, feminine, and neuter which most of its descendants inherited.[8][9] Many Indo-European languages kept these three genders. Such is the case of most Slavic languages, classical Latin, Sanskrit, and Greek, for instance. Other Indo-European languages reduced the number of genders to two, either by losing the neuter (like most Romance languages and the Celtic languages), or by having the feminine and the masculine merge with one another into a common gender (as has happened, or is in the process of happening, to several Germanic languages). Some, like English and Afrikaans, have all but lost grammatical gender. On the other hand, a few Slavic languages have arguably added new genders to the classical three.
Exceptionally for a Romance language, Romanian has preserved the three genders of Latin, although the neuter has been reduced to a combination of the other two, in the sense that neuter nouns have masculine endings in the singular, but feminine endings in the plural. As a consequence, adjectives, pronouns, and pronominal adjectives only have two forms, both in the singular and in the plural. The same happens in Italian, to a lesser extent. Moreover the Italian third-person singular pronouns have a "neuter" form to refer to inanimate subjects (egli/ella vs. esso/essa).
Some Slavic languages, including Russian and Czech, make grammatical distinctions between animate and inanimate nouns (in Czech only in the masculine gender; in Russian only in masculine singular, but in the plural in all genders). Another example is Polish, which can be said to distinguish five genders: personal masculine (referring to male humans), animate non-personal masculine, inanimate masculine, feminine, and neuter.
masculine translation
animate inanimate
personal impersonal
Polish To jest
dobry nauczyciel. To jest
dobry pies. To jest
dobry ser. It's a good teacher
/ a good dog / good cheese.
Widzę
dobrego nauczyciela. Widzę
dobrego psa. Widzę
dobry ser. I see a good teacher
/ a good dog / good cheese.
Widzę
dobrych nauczycieli. Widzę
dobre psy. Widzę
dobre sery. I see good teachers
/ good dogs / good cheeses.
Slovene To je
dober učitelj / dober pes. To je
dober sir. It's a good teacher
/ a good dog / good cheese.
Vidim
dobrega učitelja / dobrega psa. Vidim
dober sir. I see a good teacher
/ a good dog / good cheese.
Even in those languages where the original three genders have been mostly lost or reduced, there is sometimes a trace of them in some parts of speech.
English: he — she — it (personal pronouns)
Spanish: el — la — lo the (definite articles)
Spanish: este — esta — esto this, this one (demonstratives)
Portuguese: todo — toda — tudo all of him/her/it (indefinite pronouns)
The Spanish neuter definite article lo, for example, is used with nouns that denote abstractions, eg. lo único "the only thing"; lo mismo "the same thing". In Portuguese, a distinction is made between está todo molhado "he's all wet", está toda molhada "she's all wet", and está tudo molhado "it's all wet" (used for unspecified objects). In terms of agreement, however, these "neuter" words count as masculine: both Spanish lo mismo and Portuguese tudo take masculine adjectives. English modifiers do not generally inflect with gender.
See , Gender in Dutch grammar, and Polish language: Grammar, for further information.
Niger-Congo languages
The Zande language distinguishes four noun classes:
Criterion Example Gloss
male human kumba man
female human dia wife
animate nya beast
other bambu house
There are about 80 inanimate nouns which are in the animate class, including nouns denoting heavenly objects (moon, rainbow), metal objects (hammer, ring), edible plants (sweet potato, pea), and non-metallic objects (whistle, ball). Many of the exceptions have a round shape, and some can be explained by the role they play in Zande mythology. Auxiliary and constructed languagesMany constructed languages have natural gender systems similar to that of English. Animate nouns can have distinct forms reflecting natural gender, and personal pronouns are selected according to natural gender. There is no gender agreement on modifiers. The first three languages below fall into this category.
Esperanto features the female suffix -ino, which can be used for instance to change patro "father" into patrino "mother". This particular suffix is extremely productive (there is no atomic term for "mother" in Esperanto). The personal pronouns li "he" and ŝi "she" and their possessive forms lia "his" and ŝia "her" are used for male and female antecedents, while ĝi "it" (possessive form ĝia "its") is used to refer to a non-personal antecedent, or as an epicene pronoun.
Ido has the masculine infix -ul and the feminine infix -in for animate beings. Both are optional and are used only if it is necessary to avoid ambiguity. Thus: kato "a cat", katulo "a tom-cat", katino "a she-cat". There are third person singular and plural pronouns for all three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter, but also gender-free pronouns.
Interlingua has no grammatical gender. It indicates only natural gender, as in matre "mother" and patre "father". Interlingua speakers may use feminine endings. For example, -a may be used in place of -o in catto, producing catta "she-cat". Professora may be used to denote a professor who is female, and actrice may be used to mean "actress". As in Ido, inflections marking gender are optional, although some gender-specific nouns such as femina, "woman", happen to end in -a or -o. Interlingua has feminine pronouns, and its general pronoun forms are also used as masculine pronouns.
The Klingon language has three genders: capable of speaking, body part and other.
See also Gender-neutrality in languages with grammatical gender: International auxiliary languages, and Gender-neutral pronoun: Constructed languages. Male and female speechSome natural languages have intricate systems of gender-specific vocabulary, which are not the same as grammatical gender. The oldest recorded language is Sumerian. The Sumerians lived in what is now southern Iraq about 5,000 years ago. Sumerian women had a special language called Emesal, distinct from the main language, Emegir, spoken by both genders. The women's language had a distinct vocabulary, found in the records of religious rituals to be performed by women, also in the speech of goddesses in mythological texts.[10]
For a significant period of time in the history of the ancient languages of India, after the formal language Sanskrit diverged from the popular language Prakrit, some texts recorded the speech of women in Prakrit, distinct from the Sanskrit of male speakers.[11]
More recently, Thai shows evidence of similar features, where women have vocabulary items used in common speech, but typically distinct ones to be used among themselves.[12]
The indigenous Australian language Yanyula has separate dialects for men and women. There are 15 noun classes, including nouns associated with food, trees and abstractions, in addition to separate classes for men and masculine things, women and feminine things. In the men's dialect, the classes for men and for masculine things have simplified to a single class, marked the same way as the women's dialect marker reserved exclusively for men.[13]
In Japanese also, certain synonyms are used by men and women with different frequency, or conveying different connotations. However, there is no systematic inflectional relation between male and female words, nor any form of agreement, and their literal meaning does not change with gender. See Gender differences in spoken Japanese, for further information. ClassifiersSome languages, such as Japanese, Chinese and the Tai languages, have elaborate systems of particles which classify nouns based on shape and function, but are free morphemes rather than affixes. Because the classes defined by these classifying words are not generally distinguished in other contexts, many if not most linguists take the view that they do not create grammatical genders. See Classifier, for further information List of languages by type of grammatical gendersIt may never be fully completed or, depending on its its nature, it may be that it can never be completed. However, new and revised entries in the list are always welcome.
Masculine and feminine
Albanian The neuter has almost disappeared.
Akkadian
Ancient Egyptian
Arabic However, Arabic distinguishes masculine and feminine in the singular and the dual. In the plural it distinguishes between male humans, female humans and non-human plurals (including collectives of humans, such as "nation," "people," etc.), non-human plurals being feminine singular, no matter their gender in the singular.
Aramaic
Catalan
Coptic
French
Galician
Hebrew
Hindi
Irish''
Italian There is a trace of the neuter in some nouns and personal pronouns.
Latvian
Lithuanian There is a neuter gender for adjectives with very limited usage and set of forms.
Manchu Used vowel harmony in gender inflections.
Occitan
Portuguese There is a trace of the neuter in the demonstratives and some indefinite pronouns.
Punjabi
Scottish Gaelic
Spanish There is a neuter of sorts, though generally expressed only with the definite article lo, used with nouns denoting abstract categories: lo bueno.
Tamazight (Berber)
Telugu
Urdu
Welsh
Common and neuter
Danish
Dutch The masculine and the feminine have merged into a common gender in standard Dutch, but a distinction is still made by many when using pronouns, and in some dialects: see gender in Dutch grammar.
Low German
Norwegian (Riksmål, and the dialect of Bergen)
Swedish
Animate and inanimate
Hittite
Many Native American languages, such as Navajo and Mapudungun
Sumerian
Basque: two different paradigms of noun declension are used. Adjectives and demonstratives do not show gender however.
Masculine, feminine, and neuter
Belarusian
Bengali
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Croatian
Czech
Dutch The masculine and the feminine have merged into a common gender in standard Dutch, but a distinction is still made by many when using pronouns, and in some dialects: see gender in Dutch grammar.
Faroese
German
Greek
Gujarati
Icelandic
Kannada
Latin
Marathi
Norwegian
Old English
Old Prussian
Polish
Romanian
Russian
Sanskrit
Serbian
Serbo-Croatian
Slovak
Slovenian
Sorbian
Tamil
Ukrainian
Yiddish
If a language distinguishes between masculine and feminine gender, for instance, then each noun belongs to one of those two genders; in order to correctly decline any noun and any modifier or other type of word affecting that noun, one must identify whether the noun is feminine or masculine. The term "grammatical gender" is mostly used for Indo-European languages, many of which follow the pattern just described. Modern English, however, is normally described as lacking grammatical gender.[3]
The linguistic notion of grammatical gender is distinguished from the biological and social notion of natural gender, although they interact closely in many languages. Both grammatical and natural gender can have linguistic effects in a given language.
Although some authors use the term "noun class" as a synonym or an extension of "grammatical gender", for others they are separate concepts. OverviewMany languages place each noun into one of three gender classes (or simply "genders"):
Masculine gender: includes most words that refer to males;
Feminine gender: includes most words that refer to females;
Neuter gender: includes mostly words that do not refer to males or females
For example, in their nominative singular forms Polish nouns are typically feminine if they have the ending -a, neuter when they end with -o, -e, or -ę, and masculine if they have no gender suffix (null morpheme). Thus, encyklopedia "encyclopaedia" is feminine, krzesło "chair" is neuter, and ręcznik "towel" is masculine. When the adjective duży "big" is combined with these nouns in phrases, it changes form according to their grammatical gender:
Gender Noun Phrase Meaning
Masculine ręcznik duży ręcznik big towel
Feminine encyklopedia duża encyklopedia big encyclopaedia
Neuter krzesło duże krzesło big chair
As can be seen, the neuter gender does not include all nouns that correspond to genderless realities. Some of these may be designated by nouns that are grammatically masculine or feminine. Also, some nouns that refer to males or females may have a different grammatical gender. In general, the boundaries of noun classes are rather arbitrary, although there are rules of thumb in many languages. In this context, the terms "masculine", "feminine" and "neuter" should be understood merely as convenient labels. They are suggestive class descriptors, but not every member of a class is well described by its label.
Gender marking is not substantial in modern English. However, distinctions in personal pronouns have been inherited from Old English which can be used to give a flavour of how grammatical gender works.
John insisted that he would pay for his own dinner.
Jane insisted that she would pay for her own dinner.
Here, the gender of the subject is marked both on the personal pronouns (he/she) and on the possessive adjectives (his/her). Marking of gender on the possessive form can be considered redundant in these examples, since his own and her own must refer to their respective antecedents, he and she, which are already unambiguously marked for gender.
A full system of grammatical gender involves two phenomena:
Inflection: Many words have different forms for different genders, and certain morphological markers are characteristic of each gender.
Agreement: Every noun is associated with one gender class. In a phrase or clause, words that refer to a given noun inflect to match the gender of that noun.
Note that some words, called epicene, may have identical forms for different genders. For example, in Spanish estudiante "student" and grande "big" can be masculine or feminine.
Spanish is also an example of a language with only two genders, masculine and feminine; it has no neuter noun class. Nouns that designate entities with no natural gender, such as objects or abstractions, are distributed among the masculine and the feminine. In a few other languages, notably Germanic languages like Swedish, the former masculine and feminine genders have become indistinguishable with time, merging into a new class called the common gender, which however remains distinct from the neuter gender.[4]
Common gender: includes most words that refer to males or females, but is distinct from the neuter gender.
Other languages still, like English, are regarded as not having grammatical gender, since they do not make gender distinctions through inflection, and do not generally require gender agreement between related words.
Some authors have extended the concept of "grammatical gender" to the expression of other types of natural, individual characteristics through inflection, such as animacy. See the section on gender across languages, below.
Grammatical gender (with masculine and/or feminine categories) is commonly found in Afro-Asiatic, Dravidian, Indo-European, Northeast Caucasian, and several Australian aboriginal languages. It is mostly absent in the Altaic, Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan, and Uralic language families. The Niger-Congo languages typically have an extensive system of noun classes, which some authors regard as a type of grammatical gender, but others describe as something completely different. Gender inflectionIn many languages, gender is marked quite profusely, surfacing in contexts where an English speaker might not expect it.
"I love you" in Arabic:
: said to a male: uħibbuka (أُحِبُّكََ)
: said to a female: uħibbuki (أُحِبُّكِ)
"Thank you very much" in Portuguese:
: said by a male: muito obrigado
: said by a female: muito obrigada
The switch from one gender to the other is typically achieved by inflecting appropriate words, the object suffix of the verb uħibbu-ka/ki in the Arabic example,[5] and the subject suffix in the past participle (or adjective) obrig-ado/a in the Portuguese example.
In Spanish, most masculine nouns and modifiers end with the suffix -o or with a consonant, while the suffix -a is characteristic of feminine nouns (though there are exceptions). Thus, niño means “boy”, and niña means “girl”. This paradigm is regularly exploited for making neologisms: from the masculine nouns abogado "lawyer", diputado "member of parliament" and doctor "doctor", it was straightforward to make the feminine equivalents abogada, diputada, and doctora.
Sometimes, gender is expressed in more subtle ways. On the whole, gender marking has been lost in Welsh, both on the noun, and, often, on the adjective. However, it has the peculiar feature of initial mutation, where the first consonant of a word changes into another in certain syntactical conditions. Gender is one of the factors that can cause mutation, especially the so-called soft mutation. For instance, the word merch, which means girl or daughter, changes into ferch after the definite article. This only occurs with feminine nouns; for example, mab "son" remains unchanged after the definite article. Adjectives are affected by gender in a similar way.
Gender Default After definite article With adjective
Masculine mab son y mab the son y mab mawr the big son
Feminine merch girl y ferch the girl y ferch fawr the big girl
Personal names
Main article: Personal name
Personal names are frequently constructed with language-specific affixes that identify the gender of the bearer. Common feminine suffixes used in English names are -a, of Latin or Romance origin (cf. Robert and Roberta) and -e, of French origin (cf. Justin and Justine). Although gender inflections may be used to construct cognate nouns for people of opposite genders in languages that have grammatical gender, this alone does not constitute grammatical gender. Distinct names for men and women are also common in languages where gender is not grammatical.
Personal pronouns
Main articles: Gender-specific pronoun and Gender-neutral pronoun
Personal pronouns often have different forms based on gender. Even though it has lost grammatical gender, English still distinguishes between "he" (generally applied to a male person), "she" (female person), and "it" (object, abstraction, or animal). But this also does not guarantee the existence of grammatical gender. There is a spoken form, "they", which although not part of the standard literary language, is cosmopolitan in the English-speaking world and is used when the gender of a person being referred to is not known. Gendered pronouns and their corresponding inflections vary considerably across languages. In languages that never had grammatical gender, there is normally just one word for "he" and "she", like hän in Finnish and ő in Hungarian. These languages have different pronouns and inflections in the third person only to differentiate between people and inanimate objects (and even this distinction is commonly waived in spoken Finnish).
Dummy pronouns
In languages with only a masculine and a feminine gender, the default dummy pronoun is usually the masculine third person singular. For example, the French sentence for "It's raining" is Il pleut, literally "He rains". There are some exceptions: the corresponding sentence in Welsh is Mae hi'n bwrw glaw, literally "She's raining". Gender agreementIn the French sentences Il est un grand acteur "He is a great actor" and Elle est une grande actrice "She is a great actress", almost every word changes to match the gender of the subject. The noun acteur inflects by changing the masculine suffix -eur into the feminine suffix -rice, the personal pronoun il "he" changes to elle "she", and the feminine suffix -e is added to the article (un → une) and to the adjective (grand → grande). Only the verb est "is" remains unchanged.
Curzan illustrates gender agreement in Old English with the following “highly contrived” example:
Old English Seo brade lind wæs tilu and ic hire lufod.
Literal translation That broad shield was good and I her loved.
Modern English That broad shield was good and I loved it.
The word hire "her" refers to lind "shield". Since this noun was grammatically feminine, the adjectives brade "broad" and tilu "good", as well as the pronouns seo "the/that" and hire "her", which referred to lind, must also appear in their feminine forms. Old English had three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, but gender inflections were greatly simplified by sound changes, and then completely lost (as well as number inflections, to a lesser extent).
In modern English, by contrast, the noun "shield" takes the neuter pronoun "it", since it designates a genderless object. In a sense, the neuter gender has grown to encompass most nouns, including many that were masculine or feminine in Old English. If one were to replace the phrase "broad shield" with "brave man" or "kind woman", the only change to the rest of the sentence would be in the pronoun at the end, which would become "him" or "her", respectively. Grammatical vs. natural genderThe grammatical gender of a word doesn't always coincide with real gender of its referent. An often cited example is the German word Mädchen, which means "girl", but is treated grammatically as neuter. This is because it was constructed as the diminutive of Magd (archaic nowadays), and the diminutive suffix -chen conventionally places nouns in the "neuter" noun class. A few more examples:
German die Frau (feminine) and das Weib (neuter) both mean "the woman".
Irish cailín "girl" is masculine, while stail "stallion" is feminine.
Normally, such exceptions are a small minority. However, in some local dialects of German all nouns for female persons have shifted to the neuter gender (presumably further influenced by the standard word Weib), but the feminine gender remains for some words denoting objects.
Indeterminate gender
In languages with a masculine and feminine gender (and possibly a neuter), the masculine is usually employed by default to refer to persons of unknown gender. This is still done sometimes in English, although an alternative is to use the singular "they". Another alternative is to use two nouns, as in the phrase "ladies and gentlemen" (hendiadys).
In the plural, the masculine is also employed by default to refer to a mixed group of people. Thus, in French the feminine pronoun elles always designates an all-female group of people, but the masculine pronoun ils may refer to a group of males, to a mixed group, or to a group of people of unknown genders. In English, this issue does not arise with pronouns, since there is only one plural third person pronoun, "they". However, a group of actors and actresses would still be described as a group of "actors".
In all these cases, one says that the feminine gender is semantically marked, while the masculine gender is unmarked.
Animals
Often, the masculine/feminine classification is only followed carefully for human beings. For animals, the relation between real and grammatical gender tends to be more arbitrary. In Spanish, for instance, a cheetah is always un guepardo (masculine) and a zebra is always una cebra (feminine), regardless of their biological sex. If it becomes necessary to specify the sex of the animal, an adjective is added, as in un guepardo hembra (a female cheetah), or una cebra macho (a male zebra). Different names for the male and the female of a species are more frequent for common pets or farm animals, eg. English horse and mare, Spanish vaca "cow" and toro "bull". Vegetables are typically grouped with inanimate objects.
In English, individual speakers may prefer one gender or another for animals of unknown sex, depending on species — for instance, a tendency to refer more often to dogs as "he" and to cats as "she".
Objects and abstractions
Since all nouns must belong to some noun class, many end up with genders which are purely conventional. For instance, in Latin and in the Romance languages derived from it the word Sol "Sun" is masculine and the word Luna "Moon" is feminine, but in German and other Germanic languages the opposite occurs: Sonne "Sun" is feminine, while Mond "Moon" is masculine. Two nouns denoting the same concept can also differ in gender in closely related languages, or within a single language. For instance, in Polish the word księżyc "Moon" is masculine, but its Russian counterpart луна is feminine. The Russian word for the Sun Солнце (Solntse) is neither masculine nor feminine but neuter). Also, in Russian the word собака "dog" is feminine, but its Ukrainian counterpart (with the same spelling and almost identical pronunciation) is masculine.
Polish księżyc Moon masculine
Russian луна Moon feminine
Russian картофель potato masculine
Russian картошка spud feminine[6]
There is nothing inherent about the Moon or a potato which makes them objectively "male" or "female". In these cases, gender is quite independent of meaning, and a property of the nouns themselves, rather than of their referents.
Sometimes the gender switches: Russian тополь (poplar) is now masculine, but less than 200 years ago (in writings of Lermontov) it was feminine. The modern loanword виски (from whisky/whiskey) was originally feminine (in a translation of Jack London stories, 1915), then masculine (in a song of Alexander Vertinsky, 1920s or 1930s), and finally it is neuter (today the masculine variant is typically considered archaic, and feminine one is completely forgotten). Gender assignmentThere are three main ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into genders: according to logical or symbolic similarities in their meaning (semantic criterion), by grouping them with other nouns that have similar form (morphology), or through an arbitrary convention (possibly rooted in the language's history). Usually, a combination of the three types of criteria is used, though one is more prevalent.
Semantics
In Alamblak, a Sepik Hill language spoken in Papua New Guinea, the masculine gender includes males and things which are tall or long and slender, or narrow such as fish, crocodile, long snakes, arrows, spears and tall slender trees, and the feminine gender includes females and things which are short, squat or wide, such as turtles, frogs, houses, fighting shields, and trees that are typically more round and squat than others. A more or less discernible correlation between noun gender and the shape of the respective object is found in some languages even in the Indo-European family.
Sometimes, semantics prevails over the formal assignment of grammatical gender (agreement in sensu). In Latin, for example, nauta "sailor" is masculine, and nurus "daughter-in-law" is feminine, even though the endings -a and -us are normally associated with the feminine and the masculine, respectively. In Polish, the nouns mężczyzna "man" and książę "prince" are masculine, even though words with the ending -a are normally feminine and words that end with -ę are usually neuter. See also Synesis.
Morphology
In Spanish, grammatical gender is overwhelmingly determined by noun morphology. Since nouns that refer to male persons usually end in -o or a consonant and nouns that refer to female persons usually end in -a, most other nouns that end in -o or a consonant are also treated as masculine, and most nouns that end in -a are treated as feminine, whatever their meaning. (Nouns that end in some other vowel are assigned a gender either according to etymology, by analogy, or by some other convention.) Morphology may in fact override meaning, in some cases. The noun miembro "member" is always masculine, even when it refers to a woman, but persona "person" is always feminine, even when it refers to a man.
In German also, diminutives with the endings -chen and -lein (cognates of English -kin and -ling meaning little, young) are always neuter, which is why Mädchen "girl" and Fräulein "young woman" are neuter. Another ending, the nominalizing suffix -ling, can be used to make countable nouns from uncountable nouns (Teig "dough" → Teigling "piece of dough"), or personal nouns from abstract nouns (Lehre "teaching", Strafe "punishment" → Lehrling "apprentice", Sträfling "convict") or adjectives (feige "cowardly" → Feigling "coward"), always producing masculine nouns.
On the other hand, the correlation between grammatical gender and morphology is usually not perfect: problema "problem" is masculine in Spanish (this is for etymological reasons), and radio "radio station" is feminine (because it is a shortening of estación de radio, a phrase whose head is the feminine noun estación).
Convention
In some languages, gender markers have been so eroded by time that they are no longer recognizable, even to native speakers. Most German nouns give no morphological or semantic clue as to their gender. It must simply be memorized. The conventional aspect of grammatical gender is also clear when one considers that there is nothing objective about a table which makes it feminine as French table, masculine as German Tisch, or neuter as Norwegian bord. The learner of such languages should regard gender as an integral part of each noun. A frequent recommendation is to memorize a modifier along with the noun as a unit, usually a definite article, i.e. memorizing la table — where la is the French feminine singular definite article — der Tisch - where der is the German masculine singular nominative definite article — and bordet — where the suffix -et indicates the definite neuter singular in Norwegian.
Whether a distant ancestor of French, German, Norwegian, and English had a semantic value for genders is of course a different matter. Some authors have speculated that archaic Proto-Indo-European had two noun classes with the semantic values of animate and inanimate. Gender in EnglishMain article: Gender in English
While grammatical gender was a fully productive inflectional category in Old English, Modern English has a much less pervasive gender system, primarily based on natural gender.[3]
There are a few traces of gender marking in Modern English:
Some foreign nouns inflect according to gender, such as actor/actress, where the suffix -or denotes the masculine, and the suffix -ress denotes the feminine.
The third person singular pronouns (and their possessive forms) are gender specific: "he/his" (masculine gender, overall used for males), "she/her(s)" (feminine gender, for females), "it/its" (neuter gender, mainly for objects and abstractions), "one/one's" (common gender, for anyone or anything), and "who/whose" (subordinate/vocative gender, for someone in question).
A glint of gender endings live on in the cultural memory of novel terms such as fella from "fellow" or blonde from "blond". Neuter genders tend to end in t: that, it, might.
But these are insignificant features compared to a typical language with grammatical gender:
English has no live productive gender markers. An example is the suffix -ette (of French provenance) in rockette, from rocket, or trollette, from troll, but it is seldom used, and mostly with disparaging or humorous intent.
The English nouns that inflect for gender are a very small minority, typically loanwords from non-Germanic languages (the suffix -ress in the word "actress", for instance, derives from Latin -rix via French -rice). In languages with grammatical gender, there are typically thousands of words which inflect for gender.
The third-person singular forms of the personal pronouns are the only modifiers that inflect according to gender.
It is also noteworthy that, with few exceptions, the gender of an English pronoun coincides with the real gender of its referent, rather than with the grammatical gender of its antecedent, frequently different from the former in languages with true grammatical gender. The choice between "he", "she" and "it" invariably comes down to whether they designate a human male, a human female, or something else.
Some exceptions:
Animals, which can go either way, being referred to according to their sex, or as "it".
The pronoun "she" is sometimes used to refer to things which contain people such as countries, ships, and cars, or to refer to machines. This, however, is considered a stylistically marked, optional figure of speech. This usage is furthermore in decline and advised against by most journalistic style guides such as the Chicago Manual of Style.[7]
The absence of grammatical gender is unusual for an Indo-European language, though common in other language families. Gender across language familiesOther types of gender classifications
Some languages have gender-like noun classifications unrelated to gender identity. Particularly common are languages with animate and inanimate categories. The term "grammatical genders" is also used by extension in this case, although many authors prefer "noun classes" when none of the inflections in a language relate to sexuality. Note however that the word "gender" derives from Latin genus (also the root of genre) originally meant "kind", so it does not necessarily have a sexual meaning. For further information, see Animacy.
Australian Aboriginal languages
The Dyirbal language is well known for its system of four noun classes, which tend to be divided along the following semantic lines:
I — animate objects, men
II — women, water, fire, violence
III — edible fruit and vegetables
IV — miscellaneous (includes things not classifiable in the first three)
The class usually labeled "feminine", for instance, includes the word for fire and nouns relating to fire, as well as all dangerous creatures and phenomena. This inspired the title of the George Lakoff book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (ISBN 0-226-46804-6).
The Ngangikurrunggurr language has noun classes reserved for canines, and hunting weapons, and the Anindilyakwa language has a noun class for things that reflect light. The Diyari language distinguishes only between female and other objects. Perhaps the most noun classes in any Australian language are found in Yanyuwa, which has 16 noun classes.
Caucasian languages
Some members of the Northwest Caucasian family, and almost all of the Northeast Caucasian languages, manifest noun class. In the Northeast Caucasian family, only Lezgi, Udi, and Aghul do not have noun classes. Some languages have only two classes, while the Bats language has eight. The most widespread system, however, has four classes, for male, female, animate beings and certain objects, and finally a class for the remaining nouns. The Andi language has a noun class reserved for insects.
Among Northwest Caucasian languages, Abkhaz shows a masculine-feminine-neuter distinction. Ubykh shows some inflections along the same lines, but only in some instances, and in some of these instances inflection for noun class is not even obligatory.
In all Caucasian languages that manifest class, it is not marked on the noun itself but on the dependent verbs, adjectives, pronouns and prepositions.
Indo-European
Many linguists think the earliest stages of Proto-Indo-European had two genders, animate and inanimate, as did Hittite, but the inanimate gender later split into neuter and feminine, originating the classical three-way classification into masculine, feminine, and neuter which most of its descendants inherited.[8][9] Many Indo-European languages kept these three genders. Such is the case of most Slavic languages, classical Latin, Sanskrit, and Greek, for instance. Other Indo-European languages reduced the number of genders to two, either by losing the neuter (like most Romance languages and the Celtic languages), or by having the feminine and the masculine merge with one another into a common gender (as has happened, or is in the process of happening, to several Germanic languages). Some, like English and Afrikaans, have all but lost grammatical gender. On the other hand, a few Slavic languages have arguably added new genders to the classical three.
Exceptionally for a Romance language, Romanian has preserved the three genders of Latin, although the neuter has been reduced to a combination of the other two, in the sense that neuter nouns have masculine endings in the singular, but feminine endings in the plural. As a consequence, adjectives, pronouns, and pronominal adjectives only have two forms, both in the singular and in the plural. The same happens in Italian, to a lesser extent. Moreover the Italian third-person singular pronouns have a "neuter" form to refer to inanimate subjects (egli/ella vs. esso/essa).
Some Slavic languages, including Russian and Czech, make grammatical distinctions between animate and inanimate nouns (in Czech only in the masculine gender; in Russian only in masculine singular, but in the plural in all genders). Another example is Polish, which can be said to distinguish five genders: personal masculine (referring to male humans), animate non-personal masculine, inanimate masculine, feminine, and neuter.
masculine translation
animate inanimate
personal impersonal
Polish To jest
dobry nauczyciel. To jest
dobry pies. To jest
dobry ser. It's a good teacher
/ a good dog / good cheese.
Widzę
dobrego nauczyciela. Widzę
dobrego psa. Widzę
dobry ser. I see a good teacher
/ a good dog / good cheese.
Widzę
dobrych nauczycieli. Widzę
dobre psy. Widzę
dobre sery. I see good teachers
/ good dogs / good cheeses.
Slovene To je
dober učitelj / dober pes. To je
dober sir. It's a good teacher
/ a good dog / good cheese.
Vidim
dobrega učitelja / dobrega psa. Vidim
dober sir. I see a good teacher
/ a good dog / good cheese.
Even in those languages where the original three genders have been mostly lost or reduced, there is sometimes a trace of them in some parts of speech.
English: he — she — it (personal pronouns)
Spanish: el — la — lo the (definite articles)
Spanish: este — esta — esto this, this one (demonstratives)
Portuguese: todo — toda — tudo all of him/her/it (indefinite pronouns)
The Spanish neuter definite article lo, for example, is used with nouns that denote abstractions, eg. lo único "the only thing"; lo mismo "the same thing". In Portuguese, a distinction is made between está todo molhado "he's all wet", está toda molhada "she's all wet", and está tudo molhado "it's all wet" (used for unspecified objects). In terms of agreement, however, these "neuter" words count as masculine: both Spanish lo mismo and Portuguese tudo take masculine adjectives. English modifiers do not generally inflect with gender.
See , Gender in Dutch grammar, and Polish language: Grammar, for further information.
Niger-Congo languages
The Zande language distinguishes four noun classes:
Criterion Example Gloss
male human kumba man
female human dia wife
animate nya beast
other bambu house
There are about 80 inanimate nouns which are in the animate class, including nouns denoting heavenly objects (moon, rainbow), metal objects (hammer, ring), edible plants (sweet potato, pea), and non-metallic objects (whistle, ball). Many of the exceptions have a round shape, and some can be explained by the role they play in Zande mythology. Auxiliary and constructed languagesMany constructed languages have natural gender systems similar to that of English. Animate nouns can have distinct forms reflecting natural gender, and personal pronouns are selected according to natural gender. There is no gender agreement on modifiers. The first three languages below fall into this category.
Esperanto features the female suffix -ino, which can be used for instance to change patro "father" into patrino "mother". This particular suffix is extremely productive (there is no atomic term for "mother" in Esperanto). The personal pronouns li "he" and ŝi "she" and their possessive forms lia "his" and ŝia "her" are used for male and female antecedents, while ĝi "it" (possessive form ĝia "its") is used to refer to a non-personal antecedent, or as an epicene pronoun.
Ido has the masculine infix -ul and the feminine infix -in for animate beings. Both are optional and are used only if it is necessary to avoid ambiguity. Thus: kato "a cat", katulo "a tom-cat", katino "a she-cat". There are third person singular and plural pronouns for all three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter, but also gender-free pronouns.
Interlingua has no grammatical gender. It indicates only natural gender, as in matre "mother" and patre "father". Interlingua speakers may use feminine endings. For example, -a may be used in place of -o in catto, producing catta "she-cat". Professora may be used to denote a professor who is female, and actrice may be used to mean "actress". As in Ido, inflections marking gender are optional, although some gender-specific nouns such as femina, "woman", happen to end in -a or -o. Interlingua has feminine pronouns, and its general pronoun forms are also used as masculine pronouns.
The Klingon language has three genders: capable of speaking, body part and other.
See also Gender-neutrality in languages with grammatical gender: International auxiliary languages, and Gender-neutral pronoun: Constructed languages. Male and female speechSome natural languages have intricate systems of gender-specific vocabulary, which are not the same as grammatical gender. The oldest recorded language is Sumerian. The Sumerians lived in what is now southern Iraq about 5,000 years ago. Sumerian women had a special language called Emesal, distinct from the main language, Emegir, spoken by both genders. The women's language had a distinct vocabulary, found in the records of religious rituals to be performed by women, also in the speech of goddesses in mythological texts.[10]
For a significant period of time in the history of the ancient languages of India, after the formal language Sanskrit diverged from the popular language Prakrit, some texts recorded the speech of women in Prakrit, distinct from the Sanskrit of male speakers.[11]
More recently, Thai shows evidence of similar features, where women have vocabulary items used in common speech, but typically distinct ones to be used among themselves.[12]
The indigenous Australian language Yanyula has separate dialects for men and women. There are 15 noun classes, including nouns associated with food, trees and abstractions, in addition to separate classes for men and masculine things, women and feminine things. In the men's dialect, the classes for men and for masculine things have simplified to a single class, marked the same way as the women's dialect marker reserved exclusively for men.[13]
In Japanese also, certain synonyms are used by men and women with different frequency, or conveying different connotations. However, there is no systematic inflectional relation between male and female words, nor any form of agreement, and their literal meaning does not change with gender. See Gender differences in spoken Japanese, for further information. ClassifiersSome languages, such as Japanese, Chinese and the Tai languages, have elaborate systems of particles which classify nouns based on shape and function, but are free morphemes rather than affixes. Because the classes defined by these classifying words are not generally distinguished in other contexts, many if not most linguists take the view that they do not create grammatical genders. See Classifier, for further information List of languages by type of grammatical gendersIt may never be fully completed or, depending on its its nature, it may be that it can never be completed. However, new and revised entries in the list are always welcome.
Masculine and feminine
Albanian The neuter has almost disappeared.
Akkadian
Ancient Egyptian
Arabic However, Arabic distinguishes masculine and feminine in the singular and the dual. In the plural it distinguishes between male humans, female humans and non-human plurals (including collectives of humans, such as "nation," "people," etc.), non-human plurals being feminine singular, no matter their gender in the singular.
Aramaic
Catalan
Coptic
French
Galician
Hebrew
Hindi
Irish''
Italian There is a trace of the neuter in some nouns and personal pronouns.
Latvian
Lithuanian There is a neuter gender for adjectives with very limited usage and set of forms.
Manchu Used vowel harmony in gender inflections.
Occitan
Portuguese There is a trace of the neuter in the demonstratives and some indefinite pronouns.
Punjabi
Scottish Gaelic
Spanish There is a neuter of sorts, though generally expressed only with the definite article lo, used with nouns denoting abstract categories: lo bueno.
Tamazight (Berber)
Telugu
Urdu
Welsh
Common and neuter
Danish
Dutch The masculine and the feminine have merged into a common gender in standard Dutch, but a distinction is still made by many when using pronouns, and in some dialects: see gender in Dutch grammar.
Low German
Norwegian (Riksmål, and the dialect of Bergen)
Swedish
Animate and inanimate
Hittite
Many Native American languages, such as Navajo and Mapudungun
Sumerian
Basque: two different paradigms of noun declension are used. Adjectives and demonstratives do not show gender however.
Masculine, feminine, and neuter
Belarusian
Bengali
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Croatian
Czech
Dutch The masculine and the feminine have merged into a common gender in standard Dutch, but a distinction is still made by many when using pronouns, and in some dialects: see gender in Dutch grammar.
Faroese
German
Greek
Gujarati
Icelandic
Kannada
Latin
Marathi
Norwegian
Old English
Old Prussian
Polish
Romanian
Russian
Sanskrit
Serbian
Serbo-Croatian
Slovak
Slovenian
Sorbian
Tamil
Ukrainian
Yiddish
Mythology
Mythology is the study of myths and or of a body of myths.[1] For example, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures,[2] whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece. The term "myth" is often used colloquially to refer to a false story;[3][4] however, the academic use of the term generally does not refer to truth or falsity.[4][5] In the study of folklore, a myth is a sacred narrative explaining how the world and humankind came to be in their present form.[6][5][7] Many scholars in other fields use the term "myth" in somewhat different ways.[7][8][9] In a very broad sense, the word can refer to any traditional story
Nature of myths
Typical characteristics
The main characters in myths are usually gods or supernatural heroes.[11][12][13] As sacred stories, myths are often endorsed by rulers and priests and closely linked to religion.[11] In the society in which it is told, a myth is usually regarded as a true account of the remote past.[11][14][15][12] In fact, many societies have two categories of traditional narrative—(1) "true stories", or myths, and (2) "false stories", or fables.[16] Myths generally take place in a primordial age, when the world had not yet achieved its current form.[11] They explain how the world gained its current form[17][18][7][19] and how customs, institutions, and taboos were established.[11][19]
Related concepts
Closely related to myth are legend and folktale. Myths, legends, and folktales are different types of traditional story.[20] Unlike myths, folktales can take place at any time and any place, and they are not considered true or sacred even by the societies that tell them.[11] Like myths, legends are stories that are traditionally considered true; however, they are set in a more recent time, when the world was much as it is today.[11] Also, legends generally feature humans as their main characters, whereas myths generally focus on superhuman characters.[11]
The distinction between myth, legend, and folktale is meant simply as a useful tool for grouping traditional stories.[21] In many cultures, it is hard to draw a sharp line between myths and legends.[22] Instead of dividing their traditional stories into myths, legends, and folktales, some cultures divide them into two categories — one that roughly corresponds to folktales, and one that combines myths and legends.[23] Even myths and folktales are not completely distinct: a story may be considered true — and therefore a myth — in one society, but considered fictional — and therefore a folktale — in another society.[24][25] In fact, when a myth loses its status as part of a religious system, it often takes on traits more typical of folktales, with its formerly divine characters reinterpreted as human heroes, giants, or fairies.[12]
Myth, legend, and folktale are only a few of the categories of traditional stories. Other categories include anecdotes and some kinds of jokes.[21] Traditional stories, in turn, are only one category within folklore, which also includes items such as gestures, costumes, and music.[25]
Origins of myth
Euhemerism
Main article: Euhemerus
One theory claims that myths are distorted accounts of real historical events.[26][27] According to this theory, storytellers repeatedly elaborated upon historical accounts until the figures in those accounts gained the status of gods.[26][27] For example, one might argue that the myth of the wind-god Aeolus evolved from a historical account of a king who taught his people to use sails and interpret the winds.[26] Herodotus and Prodicus made claims of this kind.[27] This theory is named "euhemerism" after the novelist Euhemerus (c.320 BC), who suggested that the Greek gods developed from legends about human beings.[28][27]
Allegory
Some theories propose that myths began as allegories. According to one theory, myths began as allegories for natural phenomena: Apollo represents fire, Poseidon represents water, and so on.[27] According to another theory, myths began as allegories for philosophical or spiritual concepts: Athena represents wise judgment, Aphrodite represents desire, etc.[27] The 19th century Sanskritist Max Muller supported an allegorical theory of myth. He believed that myths began as allegorical descriptions of nature, but gradually came to be interpreted literally: for example, a poetic description of the sea as "raging" was eventually taken literally, and the sea was then thought of as a raging god.[29]
Personification
Some thinkers believe that myths resulted from the personification of inanimate objects and forces. According to these thinkers, the ancients worshipped natural phenomena such as fire and air, gradually coming to describe them as gods.[30] For example, according to the theory of mythopoeic thought, the ancients tended to view things as persons, not as mere objects;[31] thus, they described natural events as acts of personal gods, thus giving rise to myths.[32]
Mythopoeic thought
The myth-ritual theory
According to the myth-ritual theory, the existence of myth is tied to ritual.[33] In its most extreme form, this theory claims that myths arose to explain rituals.[34] This claim was first put forward by the biblical scholar William Robertson Smith.[35] According to Smith, people begin performing rituals for some reason that is not related to myth; later, after they have forgotten the original reason for a ritual, they try to account for the ritual by inventing a myth and claiming that the ritual commemorates the events described in that myth.[36] The anthropologist James Frazer had a similar theory. Frazer believed that primitive man starts out with a belief in magical laws; later, when man begins to lose faith in magic, he invents myths about gods and claims that his formerly magical rituals are religious rituals intended to appease the gods.[37]
Myth and ritual
Functions of myth
One of the foremost functions of myth is to establish models for behavior.[38][39] The figures described in myth are sacred and are therefore worthy role models for human beings.[39] Thus, myths often function to uphold current social structures and institutions: they justify these customs by claiming that they were established by sacred beings.[40][41]
Another function is to provide people with a religious experience. By retelling myths, human beings detach themselves from the present and return to the mythical age, thereby bringing themselves closer to the divine.[14][42][39] In fact, in some cases, a society will reenact a myth in an attempt to reproduce the conditions of the mythical age: for example, it will reenact the healing performed by a god at the beginning of time in order to heal someone in the present.[43]
The study of mythology: a historical overview
Historically, the important approaches to the study of mythology have been those of Vico, Schelling, Schiller, Jung, Freud, Lévy-Bruhl, Levi-Strauss, Frye, the Soviet school, and the Myth and Ritual School.[44]
This section describes trends in the interpretation of mythology in general. For interpretations of specific similarities and parallels between the myths of different cultures, see Comparative mythology.
Pre-modern theories
The critical interpretation of myth goes back as far as the Presocratics.[45] Euhemerus was one of the most important pre-modern mythologists. He interpreted myths as accounts of actual historical events, distorted over many retellings.
Varro distinguished three aspects of theology, besides political (social) and natural (physical) approaches to the divine allowing for a mythical theology.[citation needed]
Interest in polytheistic mythology revived in the Renaissance, with early works on mythography appearing in the 16th century, such as the Theologia mythologica (1532).
19th-century theories
The first scholarly theories of myth appeared during the second half of the 19th century.[46] In general, these 19th-century theories framed myth as a failed or obsolete mode of thought, often by interpreting myth as the primitive counterpart of modern science.[47]
For example, E. B. Tylor interpreted myth as an attempt at a literal explanation for natural phenomena: unable to conceive of impersonal natural laws, early man tried to explain natural phenomena by attributing souls to inanimate objects, giving rise to animism.[48] According to Tylor, human thought evolves through various stages, starting with mythological ideas and gradually progressing to scientific ideas. Not all scholars — not even all 19th century scholars — have agreed with this view. For example, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl claimed that "the primitive mentality is a condition of the human mind, and not a stage in its historical development."[49]
Max Muller called myth a "disease of language". He speculated that myths arose due to the lack of abstract nouns and neuter gender in ancient languages: anthropomorphic figures of speech, necessary in such languages, were eventually taken literally, leading to the idea that natural phenomena were conscious beings, gods.[50]
The anthropologist James Frazer saw myths as a misinterpretation of magical rituals, which were themselves based on a mistaken idea of natural law.[51] According to Frazer, man begins with an unfounded belief in impersonal magical laws. When he realizes that his applications of these laws don't work, he gives up his belief in natural law, in favor of a belief in personal gods controlling nature — thus giving rise to religious myths. Meanwhile, man continues practicing formerly magical rituals through force of habit, reinterpreting them as reenactments of mythical events. Finally, Frazer contends, man realizes that nature does follow natural laws, but now he discovers their true nature through science. Here, again, science makes myth obsolete: as Frazer puts it, man progresses "from magic through religion to science".[52]
By pitting mythical thought against modern scientific thought, such theories implied that modern man must abandon myth.[53]
20th-century theories
Many 20th-century theories of myth rejected the 19th-century theories' opposition of myth and science. In general, "twentieth-century theories have tended to see myth as almost anything but an outdated counterpart to science […] Consequently, moderns are not obliged to abandon myth for science."[54]
Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1873-1961) and his followers tried to understand the psychology behind world myths. Jung argued that all humans share certain innate unconscious psychological forces, which he called archetypes. These universal archetypes express themselves in the similarities between the myths of different cultures.[55]
Following Jung, Joseph Campbell believed that insights about one’s psychology, gained from reading myths, can be beneficially applied to one’s own life.
Like Jung and Campbell, Claude Levi-Strauss believed that myths reflect patterns in the mind. However, he saw those patterns more as fixed mental structures — specifically, pairs of oppositions (for example raw vs cooked, nature vs culture) — than as unconscious feelings or urges.[56]
In his appendix to Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, and in The Myth of the Eternal Return, Mircea Eliade attributed modern man’s anxieties to his rejection of myths and the sense of the sacred.
Mythopoeia is a term coined by J. R. R. Tolkien for the conscious attempt to create fiction styled like myths.
In the 1950s, Roland Barthes published a series of essays examining modern myths and the process of their creation in his book Mythologies.
Comparative mythology
Nature of myths
Typical characteristics
The main characters in myths are usually gods or supernatural heroes.[11][12][13] As sacred stories, myths are often endorsed by rulers and priests and closely linked to religion.[11] In the society in which it is told, a myth is usually regarded as a true account of the remote past.[11][14][15][12] In fact, many societies have two categories of traditional narrative—(1) "true stories", or myths, and (2) "false stories", or fables.[16] Myths generally take place in a primordial age, when the world had not yet achieved its current form.[11] They explain how the world gained its current form[17][18][7][19] and how customs, institutions, and taboos were established.[11][19]
Related concepts
Closely related to myth are legend and folktale. Myths, legends, and folktales are different types of traditional story.[20] Unlike myths, folktales can take place at any time and any place, and they are not considered true or sacred even by the societies that tell them.[11] Like myths, legends are stories that are traditionally considered true; however, they are set in a more recent time, when the world was much as it is today.[11] Also, legends generally feature humans as their main characters, whereas myths generally focus on superhuman characters.[11]
The distinction between myth, legend, and folktale is meant simply as a useful tool for grouping traditional stories.[21] In many cultures, it is hard to draw a sharp line between myths and legends.[22] Instead of dividing their traditional stories into myths, legends, and folktales, some cultures divide them into two categories — one that roughly corresponds to folktales, and one that combines myths and legends.[23] Even myths and folktales are not completely distinct: a story may be considered true — and therefore a myth — in one society, but considered fictional — and therefore a folktale — in another society.[24][25] In fact, when a myth loses its status as part of a religious system, it often takes on traits more typical of folktales, with its formerly divine characters reinterpreted as human heroes, giants, or fairies.[12]
Myth, legend, and folktale are only a few of the categories of traditional stories. Other categories include anecdotes and some kinds of jokes.[21] Traditional stories, in turn, are only one category within folklore, which also includes items such as gestures, costumes, and music.[25]
Origins of myth
Euhemerism
Main article: Euhemerus
One theory claims that myths are distorted accounts of real historical events.[26][27] According to this theory, storytellers repeatedly elaborated upon historical accounts until the figures in those accounts gained the status of gods.[26][27] For example, one might argue that the myth of the wind-god Aeolus evolved from a historical account of a king who taught his people to use sails and interpret the winds.[26] Herodotus and Prodicus made claims of this kind.[27] This theory is named "euhemerism" after the novelist Euhemerus (c.320 BC), who suggested that the Greek gods developed from legends about human beings.[28][27]
Allegory
Some theories propose that myths began as allegories. According to one theory, myths began as allegories for natural phenomena: Apollo represents fire, Poseidon represents water, and so on.[27] According to another theory, myths began as allegories for philosophical or spiritual concepts: Athena represents wise judgment, Aphrodite represents desire, etc.[27] The 19th century Sanskritist Max Muller supported an allegorical theory of myth. He believed that myths began as allegorical descriptions of nature, but gradually came to be interpreted literally: for example, a poetic description of the sea as "raging" was eventually taken literally, and the sea was then thought of as a raging god.[29]
Personification
Some thinkers believe that myths resulted from the personification of inanimate objects and forces. According to these thinkers, the ancients worshipped natural phenomena such as fire and air, gradually coming to describe them as gods.[30] For example, according to the theory of mythopoeic thought, the ancients tended to view things as persons, not as mere objects;[31] thus, they described natural events as acts of personal gods, thus giving rise to myths.[32]
Mythopoeic thought
The myth-ritual theory
According to the myth-ritual theory, the existence of myth is tied to ritual.[33] In its most extreme form, this theory claims that myths arose to explain rituals.[34] This claim was first put forward by the biblical scholar William Robertson Smith.[35] According to Smith, people begin performing rituals for some reason that is not related to myth; later, after they have forgotten the original reason for a ritual, they try to account for the ritual by inventing a myth and claiming that the ritual commemorates the events described in that myth.[36] The anthropologist James Frazer had a similar theory. Frazer believed that primitive man starts out with a belief in magical laws; later, when man begins to lose faith in magic, he invents myths about gods and claims that his formerly magical rituals are religious rituals intended to appease the gods.[37]
Myth and ritual
Functions of myth
One of the foremost functions of myth is to establish models for behavior.[38][39] The figures described in myth are sacred and are therefore worthy role models for human beings.[39] Thus, myths often function to uphold current social structures and institutions: they justify these customs by claiming that they were established by sacred beings.[40][41]
Another function is to provide people with a religious experience. By retelling myths, human beings detach themselves from the present and return to the mythical age, thereby bringing themselves closer to the divine.[14][42][39] In fact, in some cases, a society will reenact a myth in an attempt to reproduce the conditions of the mythical age: for example, it will reenact the healing performed by a god at the beginning of time in order to heal someone in the present.[43]
The study of mythology: a historical overview
Historically, the important approaches to the study of mythology have been those of Vico, Schelling, Schiller, Jung, Freud, Lévy-Bruhl, Levi-Strauss, Frye, the Soviet school, and the Myth and Ritual School.[44]
This section describes trends in the interpretation of mythology in general. For interpretations of specific similarities and parallels between the myths of different cultures, see Comparative mythology.
Pre-modern theories
The critical interpretation of myth goes back as far as the Presocratics.[45] Euhemerus was one of the most important pre-modern mythologists. He interpreted myths as accounts of actual historical events, distorted over many retellings.
Varro distinguished three aspects of theology, besides political (social) and natural (physical) approaches to the divine allowing for a mythical theology.[citation needed]
Interest in polytheistic mythology revived in the Renaissance, with early works on mythography appearing in the 16th century, such as the Theologia mythologica (1532).
19th-century theories
The first scholarly theories of myth appeared during the second half of the 19th century.[46] In general, these 19th-century theories framed myth as a failed or obsolete mode of thought, often by interpreting myth as the primitive counterpart of modern science.[47]
For example, E. B. Tylor interpreted myth as an attempt at a literal explanation for natural phenomena: unable to conceive of impersonal natural laws, early man tried to explain natural phenomena by attributing souls to inanimate objects, giving rise to animism.[48] According to Tylor, human thought evolves through various stages, starting with mythological ideas and gradually progressing to scientific ideas. Not all scholars — not even all 19th century scholars — have agreed with this view. For example, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl claimed that "the primitive mentality is a condition of the human mind, and not a stage in its historical development."[49]
Max Muller called myth a "disease of language". He speculated that myths arose due to the lack of abstract nouns and neuter gender in ancient languages: anthropomorphic figures of speech, necessary in such languages, were eventually taken literally, leading to the idea that natural phenomena were conscious beings, gods.[50]
The anthropologist James Frazer saw myths as a misinterpretation of magical rituals, which were themselves based on a mistaken idea of natural law.[51] According to Frazer, man begins with an unfounded belief in impersonal magical laws. When he realizes that his applications of these laws don't work, he gives up his belief in natural law, in favor of a belief in personal gods controlling nature — thus giving rise to religious myths. Meanwhile, man continues practicing formerly magical rituals through force of habit, reinterpreting them as reenactments of mythical events. Finally, Frazer contends, man realizes that nature does follow natural laws, but now he discovers their true nature through science. Here, again, science makes myth obsolete: as Frazer puts it, man progresses "from magic through religion to science".[52]
By pitting mythical thought against modern scientific thought, such theories implied that modern man must abandon myth.[53]
20th-century theories
Many 20th-century theories of myth rejected the 19th-century theories' opposition of myth and science. In general, "twentieth-century theories have tended to see myth as almost anything but an outdated counterpart to science […] Consequently, moderns are not obliged to abandon myth for science."[54]
Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1873-1961) and his followers tried to understand the psychology behind world myths. Jung argued that all humans share certain innate unconscious psychological forces, which he called archetypes. These universal archetypes express themselves in the similarities between the myths of different cultures.[55]
Following Jung, Joseph Campbell believed that insights about one’s psychology, gained from reading myths, can be beneficially applied to one’s own life.
Like Jung and Campbell, Claude Levi-Strauss believed that myths reflect patterns in the mind. However, he saw those patterns more as fixed mental structures — specifically, pairs of oppositions (for example raw vs cooked, nature vs culture) — than as unconscious feelings or urges.[56]
In his appendix to Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, and in The Myth of the Eternal Return, Mircea Eliade attributed modern man’s anxieties to his rejection of myths and the sense of the sacred.
Mythopoeia is a term coined by J. R. R. Tolkien for the conscious attempt to create fiction styled like myths.
In the 1950s, Roland Barthes published a series of essays examining modern myths and the process of their creation in his book Mythologies.
Comparative mythology
Mahayana Buddhism
Mahayana (Sanskrit: महायान, mahāyāna literally 'Great Vehicle') is one of the two main existing branches of Buddhism and a term for classification of Buddhist philosophies and practice. It was founded in India. The name Mahayana is used in three main senses:
As a living tradition, Mahayana is the larger of the two major traditions of Buddhism existing today, the other being Theravada. This classification is largely undisputed by all Buddhist schools.
According to the Mahayana method of classification of Buddhist philosophies, Mahayana refers to a level of spiritual motivation[1] (also known as Bodhisattvayana[2]). According to this classification, the alternative approach is called Hinayana, or Shravakayana. It is also recognized by Theravada Buddhism, but is not considered very relevant for practice.[3]
According to the Vajrayana scheme of classification of practice paths, Mahayana refers to one of the three routes to enlightenment, the other two being Hinayana and Vajrayana. This classification is the teachings of Vajrayana Buddhism, and is not recognized by Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism.
Although the Mahayana movement traces its origin to Gautama Buddha, scholars believe that it originated in India in the 1st century CE,[4][5] or the 1st century BCE.[6][7] Scholars think that Mahayana only became a mainstream movement in India in the fifth century CE, since that is when Mahayanic inscriptions started to appear in epigraphic records in India.[8] Before the 11th century CE (while Mahayana was still present in India), the Mahayana Sutras were still in the process of being revised. Thus, several different versions may have survived of the same sutra. These different versions are invaluable to scholars attempting to reconstruct the history of Mahayana.
In the course of its history, Mahayana spread throughout East Asia. The main countries in which it is practiced today are China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam and worldwide amongst Tibetan Buddhist practitioners as a result of the Himalayan diaspora following the Chinese invasion of Tibet. The main schools of Mahayana Buddhism today are Pure Land, Zen (Chan), Nichiren Buddhism, Shingon, Tibetan Buddhism and Tendai. The latter three schools have both Mahayana and Vajrayana practice traditions.
As a living tradition, Mahayana is the larger of the two major traditions of Buddhism existing today, the other being Theravada. This classification is largely undisputed by all Buddhist schools.
According to the Mahayana method of classification of Buddhist philosophies, Mahayana refers to a level of spiritual motivation[1] (also known as Bodhisattvayana[2]). According to this classification, the alternative approach is called Hinayana, or Shravakayana. It is also recognized by Theravada Buddhism, but is not considered very relevant for practice.[3]
According to the Vajrayana scheme of classification of practice paths, Mahayana refers to one of the three routes to enlightenment, the other two being Hinayana and Vajrayana. This classification is the teachings of Vajrayana Buddhism, and is not recognized by Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism.
Although the Mahayana movement traces its origin to Gautama Buddha, scholars believe that it originated in India in the 1st century CE,[4][5] or the 1st century BCE.[6][7] Scholars think that Mahayana only became a mainstream movement in India in the fifth century CE, since that is when Mahayanic inscriptions started to appear in epigraphic records in India.[8] Before the 11th century CE (while Mahayana was still present in India), the Mahayana Sutras were still in the process of being revised. Thus, several different versions may have survived of the same sutra. These different versions are invaluable to scholars attempting to reconstruct the history of Mahayana.
In the course of its history, Mahayana spread throughout East Asia. The main countries in which it is practiced today are China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam and worldwide amongst Tibetan Buddhist practitioners as a result of the Himalayan diaspora following the Chinese invasion of Tibet. The main schools of Mahayana Buddhism today are Pure Land, Zen (Chan), Nichiren Buddhism, Shingon, Tibetan Buddhism and Tendai. The latter three schools have both Mahayana and Vajrayana practice traditions.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Confessions of a Haloween Seamstress
like to pretend I can sew. Why??? yeah, I wonder myself sometimes - but I think that in my heart of hearts (or maybe it's the spleen?) I equate sewing with being a good mom. When reality breaks back in I remember that buying my kids clothes is MUCH much MUCH more time efficient and (dare I say it?) "cheaper" than making them myself! Yes, I've made a number of dresses for the girls and before M.O.T.H. forbade it I even made a cute outfit or two for those boys (when they were much younger)
Now that the girls are getting older my dresses don't quite cut the mustard...
Why? you ask??? (you did, didn't you???)
It's because I am what is affectionately called a "Halloween Seamstress"
There are three things you must understand about your typical Halloween Costume:
1- it's going to be worn ONCE, maybe 2 or 3 times if you're really lucky... how good do those seams have to be??
2- if you live somewhere North of... well, me... when those kids go out to trick or treat they are going to need something to wear over the costume... light jacket, heavy parka... whatever - the point being that you could probably skip the costume entirely and just do a funky hairdo, maybe a little make-up - and ta-dah... grab that pillow case and get out there!
3- it's dark when you're trick or treating - nobody is looking closely at your seams - and especially nobody is checking out the uber-crooked zipper on the back of the Cinderella Dress that you slaved over.
See - when you're a Halloween Seamstress you can get away with a TON of little errors. What? you say you made the puffed Cinderella sleeves out of backing fabric??? Pshaw... it'll make it through the night right??? Heck yeah - it actually made it through the next year too!
So there you have it - I'm a Halloween Seamstress... I sew, but only enough to make it look good for a day or two. You want REAL skills??? yeah, talk to Sue Q or Tracey... because if I ever want something that will look nice, I'm going to get THEM to do it :)
(and this is where I USED to have the description of the kids and their costumes... it was very witty... but it disappeared into the ether...)
To sum up: #1 - The Waffler - from Mystery Men... yeah, nobody at school knew either...
#2 - Road Kill... same as last year - no skill involved in driving over some stuffies and shirts.
#3 - Draco Malfoy - made that costume when Harry Potter 3 was released!
#4 - Pirate - picked up that costume 3 years ago on a 90% off after Halloween sale - ch'ching!
#5 - a cheerleader - proof that borrowing is better than sewing - a neighbor had this costume in her costume box completely unused... and it fit perfectly! (well, after a tuck here and there because little M is such a skinny-mini!
and thus begins our holiday season... I'm not ready at all... are you???
Now that the girls are getting older my dresses don't quite cut the mustard...
Why? you ask??? (you did, didn't you???)
It's because I am what is affectionately called a "Halloween Seamstress"
There are three things you must understand about your typical Halloween Costume:
1- it's going to be worn ONCE, maybe 2 or 3 times if you're really lucky... how good do those seams have to be??
2- if you live somewhere North of... well, me... when those kids go out to trick or treat they are going to need something to wear over the costume... light jacket, heavy parka... whatever - the point being that you could probably skip the costume entirely and just do a funky hairdo, maybe a little make-up - and ta-dah... grab that pillow case and get out there!
3- it's dark when you're trick or treating - nobody is looking closely at your seams - and especially nobody is checking out the uber-crooked zipper on the back of the Cinderella Dress that you slaved over.
See - when you're a Halloween Seamstress you can get away with a TON of little errors. What? you say you made the puffed Cinderella sleeves out of backing fabric??? Pshaw... it'll make it through the night right??? Heck yeah - it actually made it through the next year too!
So there you have it - I'm a Halloween Seamstress... I sew, but only enough to make it look good for a day or two. You want REAL skills??? yeah, talk to Sue Q or Tracey... because if I ever want something that will look nice, I'm going to get THEM to do it :)
(and this is where I USED to have the description of the kids and their costumes... it was very witty... but it disappeared into the ether...)
To sum up: #1 - The Waffler - from Mystery Men... yeah, nobody at school knew either...
#2 - Road Kill... same as last year - no skill involved in driving over some stuffies and shirts.
#3 - Draco Malfoy - made that costume when Harry Potter 3 was released!
#4 - Pirate - picked up that costume 3 years ago on a 90% off after Halloween sale - ch'ching!
#5 - a cheerleader - proof that borrowing is better than sewing - a neighbor had this costume in her costume box completely unused... and it fit perfectly! (well, after a tuck here and there because little M is such a skinny-mini!
and thus begins our holiday season... I'm not ready at all... are you???
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