How did the generic masculine emerge?

Question

In an essay for school I recently claimed the generic masculine was caused by sexism, but my teacher complained that I hadn't given a reason for this. Assuming my hypothesis is correct, how did this develop (I'm not asking about a gender system or sexism – the web has a lot on these – but on the generic masculine)? At least to me (who has always known of its existence) it's obvious that the male form would be also linguistically preferred, but I can't come up with any mechanism for this.

When I tried to search the web for it, I only found that prescriptivism (together with sexism of course) has significantly accelerated it in the English language once it already existed somewhat, but not how it started in English nor how it worked in any language that actually has a real genus system (like my native language German, or Latin).

Why are you assuming that your hypothesis is correct? It feels a lot like you've made up a theory that conforms to your world view, and now you've gone looking for evidence to substantiate it. — Brondahl, Feb 16 '23 at 09:23
I'd also like to see some elaboration on how this is sexism, as it may help shed light on the issue at hand. In many modern Romance languages, for instance, the "masculine" is both masculine and neutral, and the feminine is just that. While this is a clear "men are default, women are different", is that sexist in the negative sense, and not just in the "differentiation based on sex" sense, and, if so, against whom? Would the logic change if women were the default and men got a special case to themselves? — Aos Sidhe, Feb 16 '23 at 17:08
In french, there are grammatic rules promoting the masculine as the generic gender that are known to have been created by the Académie Française for explicitly sexist reasons; see for example https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A8gle_de_proximit%C3%A9 — Plop, Feb 17 '23 at 08:32
A datapoint you may find interesting is that Romanian seems to have feminine for default — Omar and Lorraine, Feb 17 '23 at 15:34
You are onto something here! Turkish doesn't have the distinction of grammatical gender and therefore in Turkish society women have been treated as equals forever. The notion that grammatical gender is the same as or even related to the biological sex is the actual issue. And that laypeople (in terms of linguistics) -- those voicing the "issue" extra loud -- have been allowed to take over and make up rules based on an equally made up pseudo-science in which the result is known before the research, much like in your essay and question, it seems. — 0xC0000022L, Feb 18 '23 at 20:47
"there are grammatic rules" is grammar rules. Il y a des règles de grammaire. — Lambie, Feb 18 '23 at 21:31
@Brondahl Sorry for responding so late, but just for the record I still want to answer you all. Isn't science supposed to be about making hypotheses and then check if they are true? Of course my world view informs the kind of hypotheses I make, but as long as I listen to contrary evidence and let people who disagree with me form their own hypotheses I see no problems. — zvavybir, Mar 29 '23 at 11:19
@ErnestBredar no worries :) Thank you for engaging with the counter-question :). Isn't science about making hypotheses and then checking if they are true. Yes, I agree, it is. ... but I don't agree that that's what this question is doing :D . The "check" in that phrase means "perform an experiment whose outcome will distinguish between between the two cases 'this is true' and 'this is false'". It doesn't mean "make up some explanation for why it could be true" (I can't come up with any mechanism for this), or "go and look specifically for evidence that is consistent with it being true". — Brondahl, Mar 29 '23 at 11:27
@AosSidhe In the end we just argue about definitions here, so there is no objective right or wrong, but according to the definition of sexism that I use (but not the one that you use, which is totally fine) every unjustified difference of treatment caused by sex or gender (or genus just to be complete :) ) is sexism, not only when someone/women suffer(s) under it. As I said definitions aren't right or wrong, there are more or less useful but I happen to believe that my definition is more useful, since usually it's very difficult to treat two people differently, but still neither one worse. — zvavybir, Mar 29 '23 at 11:27
Asking a neutral question about the anthropologically known origins of the generic masculine would have been that sort of check ... but by starting the question with your premise you (IMO) push the question away from neutrality. Not very far, but enough for me to raise the counter-question :) — Brondahl, Mar 29 '23 at 11:28
@Героямслава In fact you are correct, I do find that very interesting :) Thank you!! — zvavybir, Mar 29 '23 at 11:28
@0xC0000022L Not every single little instance of sexism is necessary for a society to still be sexist :). And about sexus != genus. Obviously, but there is still a connection and about your second point: As you yourself wrote, I'm not the first one to come up with the idea (and in fact I did not come up with it, I just heard it somewhere), so it's not a completely outlandish idea. I also think that you probably prefer that I ask about it and check whether it's correct (even if maybe the question is leading or badly written), then that I just believe it and maybe even force it on others. — zvavybir, Mar 29 '23 at 11:35
@Brondahl Fair enough, you're right, I did phrase it a bit leading. I'm sorry. — zvavybir, Mar 29 '23 at 11:38

score 46 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 15 '23 at 17:21

46

In many Indo-European languages, like Latin, the masculine is less "marked" than the feminine, meaning that it's the more basic or fundamental form: the one you use by default unless there's a reason to do otherwise. While sexism might play a role in this (certainly the ancient Romans weren't particularly feminist), there's also a more mundane historical reason. The feminine gender seems to have been a later development in the history of Proto-Indo-European, which made it more marked than the masculine or the neuter—in other words, the three genders were originally "animate", "inanimate", and "this special new marking for specifically-feminine things". If something wasn't specifically feminine, it didn't get the special new marking. This seems to have led to the convention that was inherited by Latin, that groups of people and generic individuals used the masculine gender.

Of course, this was thousands of years ago. The generic masculine in modern English is a recent development, as you noted: English used the non-gendered "they" for groups of people and hypothetical/non-specific individuals until prescriptive efforts arose to make it more like Latin. (You can find lots of traces of these prescriptive efforts in modern English: "don't split infinitives" and "don't strand prepositions" are similar rules imposed to make English more like Latin, which are still taught in schools but most people don't really follow.)

Other languages may have the convention for other reasons. In Proto-Afro-Asiatic, there seems to have been a two-way masculine/feminine gender distinction—but when using an adjective generically, this changed to an animate/inanimate (or sometimes concrete/abstract) split. So while "good man" would be masculine and "good woman" feminine, "some good person" would also be masculine, and "some good thing" or "quality of goodness" would be feminine. This is the system that appears in Ancient Egyptian and Akkadian, and likely also in some modern Semitic languages (though I don't know any of them in enough detail to say for sure). This leads to a "generic masculine" convention, but for fairly arbitrary reasons: repurposing their existing morphology to distinguish between "good person" and "quality of goodness".

Tl;dr this happened for different reasons in different languages; sexism may well have had something to do with it, but there are other (often-arbitrary) historical forces in play.

answered Feb 15 '23 at 17:21

Draconis

65,972
3
141
215

1

Thanks a lot for help! Now just the question remains why PIE made a new gender distinction for female. – zvavybir Feb 15 '23 at 17:30
… and how that distinction came to be applied to other things. – ˈvʀ̩ʦl̩ˌpʀm̩ft Feb 15 '23 at 17:51
Quite possibly connected to division of labor issues; when population grows, duties get very specific, often ritualized. Food preparation and supply, child care, bureaucracy, ... The list is endless. – jlawler Feb 15 '23 at 17:54
10

@ErnestBredar Not entirely clear, unfortunately. One theory is that animal husbandry became increasingly important so a different grammatical marking (the "collective") got repurposed for sex distinctions. The oldest attested IE languages (the Anatolian branch) only have an animate/inanimate distinction, which is probably because m/f marking hadn't developed yet when that branch split off, but some linguists argue that the distinction existed before then and was lost in that branch. – Draconis Feb 15 '23 at 17:56
14

"The generic masculine in modern English is a recent development" how recent, and do you have a citation? In your next sentence you seem to be arguing that we can see this to be the case due to the historical use of singular "they" (which appears in e.g. Shakespeare), but this seems like a non-sequitur to me, since clearly generic "he" and singular "they" can both exist in the language at the same time (as they have done throughout our lifetimes!). Efforts to ban singular "they" may be "recent" in some sense but that doesn't at all mean use of generic "he" is also recent. – Mark Amery Feb 16 '23 at 18:04
Also curious about the timing of generic "he." – Azor Ahai -him- Feb 17 '23 at 19:28
@MarkAmery I'm not sure about Old English, but Old Norse uses a generic (singular) neuter – Tristan Feb 18 '23 at 13:43
1

@MarkAmery Great question! I'd actually recommend asking it as a new question on the site, so that it can get a full and proper answer. But my understanding is that generic "he" existed in Old English as part of the grammatical gender system; as this system disappeared, it steadily lost ground in Middle English times in favor of the North Germanic borrowing "they", but became prescribed once the original grammatical reasons for it were gone (i.e. once nouns stopped having grammatical gender). – Draconis Feb 18 '23 at 17:10
I thought the linguistic term for what you call "more marked" is iconicity?! If it is, it'd probably make sense to at least mention the concept. In terms of the question "Geschäftsführerin" would be what you call more marked, because of the -in, denoting that it refers to a female (in the biological sense) "Geschäftsführer". – 0xC0000022L Feb 18 '23 at 20:55
@0xC0000022L Nope, I'm talking about markedness, in the Chomskyan sense. There's nothing especially iconic about "-in"; you could just as easily have a language where "-in" means masculine. – Draconis Feb 18 '23 at 21:09
Fair enough. I have seen learned linguists to this trait as iconicity, though. Thanks for the pointer to the article. – 0xC0000022L Feb 19 '23 at 21:07
"While sexism might play a role in this..." Is there a way to confirm that the actual gender being used was indeed "masculine", or was it just a neuter default and the introduction of a "feminine" construct caused the default to be used in "masculine" senses by.. well.. default? – user2320861 Feb 23 '23 at 16:21
@user2320861 Unfortunately it's difficult to confirm that for languages that were spoken so long ago. I suspect it's a mix of linguistic issues (the new "feminine" form led to a distinction between "feminine" and "default") and sociological ones (ancient Romans certainly prioritized men more than women in their social structures, which could lead to men being seen as the default type of human and women as unusual). But without living ancient Romans to experiment on, it's hard to do more than speculate. – Draconis Feb 23 '23 at 17:16

How did the generic masculine emerge?

1 Answers1