Living in a Bilingual World (Serenade)

I am still trudging through Simone de Beauvoir's feminist masterpiece 'The Second Sex' (see navigation bar on the right handside of the blog) and it's funny how I have fallen hook, line and sinker in the linguistic traps that the French writer has unintentionally placed on my path.

In Part 3, 'Myths', Chapter 1, 'Dreams, Fears and Idols', de Beauvoir addresses the feminine attributes that one usually sees cities, nations and abstract entities attired with. Obviously this bold approach set my linguistic pulse racing and with two dictionaries in hand (French and German) I ventured forth, attempting to understand the examples she numbers in her book.

Simone's exegesis includes the words: Church, Synagogue, Republic, Humanity, Peace, War, Liberty, Revolution and Victory. In her own words, 'Man feminizes the ideal he sets up before him as the essential Other, because woman is the material representation of alterity; that is why almost all allegories, in language as in pictorial representation, are women'. In short, the fact that man places these lofty ideals on a pedestal makes woman unreachable and unattainable, a perfect excuse to deny her her right to be a human being. What cannot be touched, cannot be experienced, other than through quasi-religious contact.

And is it any wonder that, in de Beauvoir's own words, this is a phenomenon encouraged mainly by the Christian world? No, it shouldn't be surprising because in Christian imagery 'Woman is the Soul and Idea, but she also is a mediatrix between them: she is the divine Grace, leading the Christian towards God, she is Beatrice guiding Dante in the beyond, Laura summoning Petrarch to the lofty summits of poetry' (op. cit.).

The curious element here, though, is that out of the four languages I analysed, three proved de Beauvoir's theory with a couple of exceptions.

The Church - La Iglesia (Spa) - L'Église (Fr) - Die Kirche (Ger)

The Synagogue - La Sinagoga - La Synagogue - Die Synanoge

The Republic - La República - La République - Die Republik

The Humanity - La Humanidad - L’Humanité - Die Menschlichkeit
The Peace - La Paz - La Paix - Die Friede

The War - La Guerra - La Guerre - Der Krieg (masculine, one of two exceptions to the rule)

The Liberty - La Libertad - La Liberté - Die Freiheit

The Revolution - La Revolución - La Révolution - Die Revolution

The Victory - La Victoria - La Victoire - Der Sieg (the other exception)

As you can see there's only one language that escapes this categorisation. And yes, my dear readers, you guessed it right. English.

This linguistic hybrid, the result of Anglo-Saxon-Jute migration from Denmark and northern Germany plus some French and Latin thrown in for good measure, is the only lexicon of the six more popular modern languages (Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Italian and English) to have a neutral definite pronoun regardless of gender and number. A cause for celebration? Or a reason to despair? As a non-native speaker I find this fact comforting. It is a soft cushion aimed at protecting me against the grammatical rigour imposed by the other five.

And yet... yet... yet, as I continued to read 'The Second Sex' I could not help wondering whether despite this linguistic peculiarity English speakers still saw the nouns listed above in a feminine way rather than in their neutral natural form.

So, this is your homework for this week, my dear English speakers (and the rest, too, of course). When you think of 'Peace' and 'Liberty', just to use two of the examples above, do you see the female of the species or do you see neutrality?

Copyright 2008