Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang
Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang
Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang
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. Second type of gender deviance: semantic perspective<br />
Gender assignment in Old English 9<br />
Effective as it might appear, <strong>the</strong> predominance of referential gender over lexical<br />
gender cannot account for <strong>the</strong> second type of gender deviance in Old English,<br />
where <strong>the</strong> same lexemes or groups of etymologically and formally related words<br />
show different genders completely unrelated to <strong>the</strong> natural gender of <strong>the</strong>ir referents.<br />
Although less frequent, this phenomenon is intriguing, especially because it<br />
is found in Proto-Indo-European and all <strong>the</strong> o<strong>the</strong>r Old Germanic languages.<br />
This type of gender variation concerns cases such as <strong>the</strong> triad lig (m.) – liget<br />
(n.) – ligetu (f.) or <strong>the</strong> pair list (f.) – list (m.), where <strong>the</strong>re seems to be no semantic<br />
difference in correspondence to gender fluctuation. Looking directly at <strong>the</strong>ir textual<br />
occurrences, however, it is possible to discern a slight, but consistent variation<br />
in meaning. Substantially, although, for instance, lig (m.) – liget (n.) – ligetu (f.) are<br />
all related to <strong>the</strong> idea of ‘fire’, not all of <strong>the</strong>m express ‘fire’: lig (m.) appears to refer to<br />
‘flame’, whereas liget (n.) specifically means ‘fire’ and ligetu (f.) denotes ‘lightening’.<br />
Similar differentiation of meanings turns up in pairs like tungol (n.) – tungol (m.),<br />
where <strong>the</strong> noun, if masculine, denominates <strong>the</strong> single items, i.e., ‘star, planet’, that<br />
constitute <strong>the</strong> entity, i.e., ‘constellation, firmament’, referred to by <strong>the</strong> same noun<br />
but in neuter gender. The alternation may involve both animate genders: for example,<br />
leod (f.) ‘people, nation’ – leod (m.) ‘man’, mircels (f.) ‘seal’ – mircels (m.) ‘mark’,<br />
list (f.) ‘cleverness, art’ – list (m.) ‘skill’, or traht (f.) ‘exposition, treatise’ – traht (m.)<br />
‘passage’. Here, again, <strong>the</strong> masculine gender turns out to express a single example of<br />
<strong>the</strong> general concept, whereas <strong>the</strong> feminine expresses a collective view. 12<br />
This linguistic fact is observable in o<strong>the</strong>r Old Germanic languages: in Old Norse<br />
(Gordon 1988) grunnr (m.) means ‘ground or sea floor, bottom’ whereas grunn (n.)<br />
indicates ‘shallows’ and grund (f.) a ‘grassy area, ground’; in Old High German<br />
(Leiss 2003) luft may have different meanings, namely luft (f.) ‘sky’, luft (m.) ‘gentle<br />
breeze’ and luft (n.) ‘air’ or felis (m.) ‘piece of rock’ and felisa (f.) ‘rock as substance’.<br />
Such correspondence between different genders and different meanings was<br />
not unknown in <strong>the</strong> old stages of Indo-European languages: it was already noticed<br />
by Schmidt (1889) and Brugmann (1889) who related it to <strong>the</strong> origin of grammatical<br />
gender in Indo-European. In this line of arguing, Delbrück (1893: 117) claimed<br />
that “Die häufige Doppelgeschlechtigkeit dürfte sich darus erklären, dass in der<br />
Urzeit der Prozess der Nachahmung noch nicht derart abgeschlossen war, dass<br />
für jedes Wort ein festes Geschlecht bestimmt gewesen wäre.” Hence, instability<br />
1 . Here, we are not confronted with such cases as those cross-linguistically observed where<br />
different genders correspond to different meanings. In Ojibwa mettik means ‘tree’ and is animate,<br />
or it can mean ‘piece of wood’ and is <strong>the</strong>n inanimate (Bloomfield 1957: 31–2). In <strong>the</strong> Old English<br />
instance, <strong>the</strong>re is only one ‘idea’, but different perspectives <strong>from</strong> which it is conceptualised.