Masculine, Feminine, or Neuter?

It would have been helpful to point out when first posting that this is another guest post from Georgia. It was in the post tags, but not in the body text...

Recently I’ve been pondering some possible sexism. Those of you who know me will be aware that I do this a lot. You’ll also be aware that often little things irritate me, which, on their own seem to be insignificant. My argument is always that those little things either contribute or attest to a wider problem.

My latest irritation is just how often, linguistically, masculine is placed before feminine. I know, I know, no biggie. That’s just the way it is. I’ll get onto that in a bit, (though, historically speaking, "That’s just the way it is", can be a bad excuse for continuing to do something bad).  But first, let me illustrate my point.

It made sense to write “Dear Sir or Madam” when we lived in a time where few women worked - but why do we still always list the masculine first. ‘Ah-hah!’ I hear you say, ‘what about “Ladies and Gentlemen”, eh?’ To which, my response is, the laydeez wouldn’t come first if there were any lords around, it’s just that lords are pretty rare at the moment.

What about the fact that male people just get to be Mr (or ‘Master’, if you’re splitting hairs, but that is (a) increasingly falling out of use and (b) a purely age-based differentiator), but female people spend their lives making people feel uncomfortable as they try to guess whether they are Miss, Mrs, or Ms. (I forgot: Dr!)

Does anybody ever write “Mrs and Mr So-and-So” when addressing envelopes or joint emails?  In fact, as a female person, you never, ever get to be first on any tick-box list or survey. ‘Mr’ is always the default setting. As a young, female person you only get to be third (Miss), as opposed to your brothers and male friends who are first for all their lives. As you get older, you have the option of marrying someone and changing your name to move up to second place or (as I did, aged seventeen) decide your marital status ain’t nobody’s business and become a Ms for life (editor’s note: ‘Ms fo’ life, yo’). Or, you could spend years studying for a PhD; then you could be fourth!

“Mother and Father” is the only exception I can think of, but the sceptic in me feels that that order is probably due to women being traditionally (i.e. in terms of centuries/millenia) more involved in parenting than men. Plus, pater is still listed regularly in Latin grammar books - mater doesn’t feature at all!  In fact, looking at Kennedy’s Primer, masculine noun examples which are human beings include: judge, king, soldier, chieftain, consul and father. Feminine nouns: virgin. That’s it.

Let’s get down to linguistic brass tacks. What about “je suis, tu es, il est, elle est”. Or, for my own personal irritation, and a much more deeply discussed example, read on:

[Skip this ‘Ancient Languages 101’ section if you already know some Latin/Greek.]

In Latin and Greek, the function of a word in a sentence (subject, object etc.) is marked by the endings of the word. For example, with nouns, -m often shows the object:

puella feminam amat            The girl loves the woman

puellam femina amat   The woman loves the girl

This is great because it means you can put your words in *any* order you want - so useful for exciting prose or poetry! It also means that there are a bunch of different words with a bunch of different endings and to make it easy to learn/recognise these, words are sorted into different groups.

[Hey Skippy! Here’s where you start reading again.]

The first declension (set of nouns grouped by endings) is overwhelmingly populated by feminine nouns. Not sure why, but it is. The second declension consists of masculine and neuter nouns - whose endings are largely the same (masculine endings differ from neuter in only two cases). So why is it, when any word which can be masculine, feminine or neuter is listed, it is always listed in that order? Why, when the feminine formation is the first declension, and the masculine and neuter are so similar, do we insist on putting them in such an order? This happens with adjectives, pronouns, participles, the definite article (in Greek), it happens in German, there’s no neuter in modern Romance languages but masculine still comes before feminine… In the Latin GCSE defined vocabularies, instead of giving the fourth principal part as the supine (a formation which looks neuter) they give it as masculine (because pupils learn perfect participles but not the supine, and the first version of a perfect participle is masculine - then feminine, then neuter).

Whhhhhyyyyyy??? Is language inherently prejudiced in favour of the masculine? Does the masculine always come first? Whhhhhhyyy?

It’s easy to say that these things have always been done in that order, but does that mean we still have to keep it that way? Does the fact that, in languages, the masculine comes before the feminine, have a subconscious effect on men and women, boys and girls (ooh, look, there it goes again!)?

For example, is the phenomenon of young female students being far more reticent to volunteer than young male students (widely noted anecdotally by teachers) influenced by young women learning that they come second (third!) from a young age?  Am I the only woman who gets frustrated *waiting* for all the men to get out of the Jitsu circle so that I can get in to attack? Is there a deeper reason why George wrote his name on the lease first (even though I am older than him and have a slightly better degree, not to mention bigger ears)? Who knows! Maybe it’s something to think about though. Especially since I (a self-confessed, active feminist) had to actively think about putting “young female students” first in that first sentence and call myself a “woman” rather than a “girl” in the second one...and it felt *weird* doing so.

I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts and examples that support or contradict the theory that language privileges the masculine over the feminine. So, ladies, lords and gentlemen, girls and boys: what do you think?