Title?
In the English language, a crack pipe is a crack pipe, and a dishrag is a dishrag. As David
Sedaris points out in his creative essay, “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” other languages aren’t so
simple: many languages assign gender to inanimate objects. Sedaris’s narrator “find[s] it
ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an
occasional fool of itself,” and proceeds to wonder: “Why refer to Lady Crack Pipe or Good Sir
Dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied” (51)? This creates
confusion for this narrator, who’s been thrust into a world that speaks a different language, but
this distinction is more complex than Sedaris makes it: more than something that confuses nonnative speakers of the language, it’s suggestive of something deeper in the culture that has
developed the language.
[At this point, I don’t have a thesis. This is a decent introduction, and it’s building to
something, but at this point in writing the introduction, I don’t know what it’s building to. This
means that while I won’t write a question in the introduction, I’m going to proceed to do research
based on a question. My questions at this point are: What does the assignment of genders to
inanimate objects say about the cultures whose languages do this? Which languages do this?
How were they developed? I will begin researching in an attempt to answer these questions.]
Gabe Bokor, the president and co-owner of a translation company named “Accurapid,”
establishes that “Most Western languages have some form of distinction between masculine and
feminine nouns, with some of them adding neuter for good measure” in his Internet article,
“Gender and Language,” and further mentions that “a French child (enfant) is masculine, unless
the speaker wishes to emphasize its femaleness, in which case it becomes feminine.”
[At this point, I’ve found a source that backs up my claim about other languages doing
this and have found a focused on a particular language, French, so two questions remain: What
does the assignment of genders to inanimate objects say about the cultures whose languages do
this? How were they developed? I will proceed to research based on this.]
Dalia Ayoun, in her article, “Corpus Data,” states that the gender assigned to inanimate
nouns “is usually referred to as arbitrary” (119). She backs this up with A. Deutsch and M.
Dank’s article, “Conflicting cues and competition between notional and grammatical factors in
producing number and gender agreement: evidence from Hebrew,” which states that
“grammatical gender for inanimate nouns has no conceptual basis” (119).
[This seems like a pretty good source, and it’s defeated my question. This suggests that it
has nothing to do with culture. I doubt this, but I need to refine my question, so I change it to
wonder: do gendered nouns in other languages affect culture? I’ve switched my question
around. Instead of thinking about how culture affected gendered nouns, I think about the fact
that there are gendered nouns and how that might impact culture. I’ve found a source that
discusses this very thing.]
This being the case, Benjamin D. Wasserman and Allyson J. Weseley, in their article,
“¿Qué? Quoi? Do Languages with Grammatical Gender Promote Sexist Attitudes?,” introduce “a
theory known as linguistic determinism, the idea that language may determine thought” (634).
While culture may or may not have influenced the shaping of particular nouns to particular
genders, this theory suggests that the genders of these nouns are shaping the thoughts of those
who speak languages with gendered nouns.
Elisabeth Leue’s article, “X,” discusses how the German language
has incorporated more feminine words. The studies in the article
determined that few Germans are using them because they don’t think
it’s important to do so. Wasserman and Weseley’s article, “Y,” argues
for how important non-sexist language is, and that women learning the
language “may be more vulnerable to the effect of such languages on
sexist attitudes due to a desire to fit in.” This emphasizes the importance
of using non-sexist language because, even though Germans might not
see the importance, it has a clear effect on the attitudes of those learning
the language. This suggests that German attitudes need to change.
Grammatical gender influences sexual attitudes. Two sources suggest this: Elisabeth
Leue’s article, “X,” and Wasserman and Weseley’s article, “Y.” Leue suggests that in the mid70s, feminists determined that language is used to discriminate against women. This
discrimination