Linguistic Change by Fiat

 

 

 

 

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

 

“The dictionary is not the language.  It is a treatise upon the language.”

 

Noah Webster (1755-1843)

 

 

 

I saw in a newspaper article that in Argentina the legislature recently passed a law forbidding the use of contrived gender-inclusive language in the public schools.  By “contrived” I mean new words especially invented to avoid the explicit gender distinctions embedded in what I shall call traditional or normative language.  In English-speaking countries, we have seen a certain amount of discussion about the use of the personal pronouns in the third person singular, he and she.  Various artificial substitutes have been suggested, manufactured explicitly to avoid sexual differentiation--such as zhi.  There are undoubtedly similar concerns regarding numerous other world languages.  Discussions of such topics tend to the polemical, and to become skirmishes in what we have come to call the “culture wars”.  As a person interested in languages, and especially in the history of our own language, I am hoping in this essay to stick to philology and eschew culture war.

 

It is not polemical, however, to  acknowledge  that the motive underlying such linguistic innovation is clearly political, reflecting the desire of acknowledging the real or hoped-for transition of transgenderism from the realm of the exotic and the marginal to that of the socially commonplace.  Gender differentiation is under attack on various grounds.  The legislative backlash is manifestly political.  The personal pronouns are not the only words in the arena of debate.  English is no longer as highly gendered as it once was, but a few fossilized nominal forms have survived long enough to excite controversy.  The most prominent of these was the pairing m(a/i)ster/mistress.  Oddly enough, the controversy centered not on the sexual distinction embedded in the terms, but on two distinct meanings arising in the feminine form.  The term for a younger woman was Miss, that for an older Mistress.  As Mistress suggested real or potential executive power within the family, it came to mean a married woman.  The word was commonly pronounced Missus and abbreviated Mrs.  Under the influence of late twentieth-century feminism the distinction between married and unmarried, thought to imply unwelcome social implications,  the distinct forms Miss and Mrs were elided into the abbreviation Ms.   Mr was retained, so we still have forms of address marked by sexual distinction.  Of great interest to me, however, is what happens with the pronunciation.  The second letter in Ms is pronounced as a z (alveolar, lung sound) rather than an s (“hissing” sibilant)—fancy phonetical terms referring to their anatomical origins in the vocal system.  That had to be to create phonic as well as graphic distinction between them.  It has not been a clean sweep.  Mrs and even Miss continue to be used by many English speakers in various countries.  There seems little debate here; any woman is free to choose her form of address.  There have been earlier erasures of sexual distinction as well.  In earlier English many occupational names had both masculine and feminine forms.  A man who produced bread for your table was a baker.  A woman who did so was a baxter.  The latter survives now only as a surname.  A male thespian was an actor, a female thespian an actress.  For reasons unclear to me the latter is becoming seriously politically incorrect among the same people who are happy enough to use long-winded specifications such as “the first black woman on the Supreme Court", or “our first African-American and Asian-American Vice President.”  Do we really expect as lengthy a line of this subgroup as there were Kings named Louis in France?   Airline stewardesses got neutralized to flight attendants, though not by all passengers.  Queens, princesses, and duchesses are at least temporarily safe because of the strange American fascination with British royalty.  Sex continues to triumph over politics with heterosexual husbands and wives.  All married gay women are wives and all married gay men are husbands, curiously continuing at one remove the “binary” ostensibly overthrown.

 

The national language of Argentina is Spanish.  Unlike English nouns, all Spanish nouns have one of two grammatical genders, feminine or masculine.  Many masculine nouns end in -o.  And as in English most plural nouns end in -s.  Here is what the Times says about the Argentinian innovations: “Instead of ‘amigos,’ the Spanish word for ‘friends,’ some Spanish speakers use ‘amigues.’ In place of ‘todos,” or ‘all,’ some write ‘todxs.’ And some signs that would say ‘bienvenidos,’ or ‘welcome,’ now say ‘bienvenid@s’.”  Since nearly all human beings are either male or female,  subgroups of humans can be composed of one or the other or (quite likely) both.  Some of these Spanish innovations are plausible, but others not.  The ending -ues as an ambiguous, ungendered plural would work with most Spanish nouns.  On the other hand, written words that cannot be pronounced are absurd.  This is as true of our LatinX as of Argentinian todxs.  And how, exactly, does one pronounce bienvenid@s in a fashion to achieve its genderless, inclusive intentions?  How does one pronounce it at all?  In the Renaissance, learned scholars greatly increased the English vocabulary through the introduction of so-called “inkhorn terms,” words dragged half-digested from the lexicons of Greek and Latin.  Many of these seemed so exotic that they fell by the wayside; but inkhorn terms caught on in the learned professions of the law, medicine, and academic theology.  “LatinX” is a rather different phenomenon from “Ms.”  I think it is unlikely that it will gain traction except as a marker of a specialized political jargon.

 

In cases of mixed-sex groups all the Romance languages follow the ancient Latin convention of using the masculine plural.  The linguistic tradition probably does reflect an ancient “gender bias,” but the solution most frequently used to address it—“if a candidate secures sufficient votes, he or she….”—violates a very useful principle of linguistic economy.  In theory the perceived inequity could be remedied by switching to a feminine default, except that such a solution stymies the presumed goal of equality or “neutrality”.  What I now notice in some academic writing, and even some journalism, is a contrived alternation of pronouns.  “The reader who is willing to give his full attention to the text is likely to find herself surprised by….”

 

The early Germanic languages, of which Old English was one, had three genders in its nominal system: feminine, masculine, and neuter.  The pronouns of the third person singulars were he (masc.), heo (fem.) and hit (neut.).  The later feminine form poses a mystery worth puzzling over.  Where did she of modern he, she, and it come from?  The Old English feminine singular definite article seo appears a likely suspect, but how and especially why?  If you have nothing better to do—and how could anyone possibly?—take some time out and read the erudite essay (s.v. “she”) in the Oxford English Dictionary. Perhaps some of our current cultural discontents might have been avoided if we still had a robust neuter.  It was this simplifying evolution that has left us with an apparently controversial “binary”.  But the correlations of biological sexuality and grammatical gender in our languages are less rigorous than one might at first suppose.  Common sense triumphs in most instances, but by no means all.  The German word for “maiden,” i.e., a virgin female, Mädchen, is neuter.  A German place setting is comprised of a neuter knife, a feminine fork, and a masculine spoon.  My search for a socio-politico-historical allegory in this triad has been fruitless.

 

            But one source of linguistic change is indeed political coercion.  I recently was reading Bulgakov’s wonderful novel The Master and Margarita, which has among its many strands some guarded satirical swipes at Soviet literary culture in Stalin’s Moscow of the 1930s.  One of the important characters is a kind of literary commissar in charge of the writers’ union—called MASSOLIT, that is, something like “Literature for the Masses”.  Such grotesque terms, usually formed from compound abbreviations, became very common in “political” Russian and a distinctive feature of the “new” language.  The linguistic gesture involved seems to be a natural reflex of bureaucratic groups, such as our military and various branches of our Federal Government.

 

Linguistic change is constant--quite slow on the phonetic side (alteration of sound), much faster on the semantic (meaning) side and in the borrowing of foreign words and the invention of many new ones.  The phonetic change in our own tongue since the first arrival of English speakers in America has been dramatic.  Contemporary native English as spoken in various parts of the world, despite powerful homogenizing cultural pressures, is of an astonishing variety in what we usually call “accent” and “vocabulary”.  To study Chaucer, a master of English who died in 1400, requires a little introductory preparation.  To read Beowulf, written by a master who may have died as late as about 1000, demands more work than a Duolingo course in contemporary Dutch or German.  The purpose of language is to allow human beings to live effectively in an accurately described and evolutionary world.   Whether language is the principal cause or merely the extraordinary characteristic feature of the human domination of the animal world is perhaps debatable, but the evolutionary impulse of our own English, still by far the most important channel of global verbal communication, is and must be aimed toward ever greater clarity, specificity, and precision.  Imposed changes designed to express particular social or political views of social or cultural reality, especially if they vehemently challenge and contest  a world-wide consensus of a few thousand years, are unlikely to get much traction except on university campuses or in the editorial rooms of journals and newspapers.