alice wrote:A pertinent question might be: are there any languages with grammatical gender in which at least one noun with a male referent is of female gender, and vice versa? In German, Weib and Töchter are neuter, which is as close as I can think of right now.
German has
der Rogner which means ‘female fish’ but is grammatically masculine and also
die Drohne ‘drone’ for male bees, wasps, etc. For the latter term, there exists also a masculine Form (
der Drohn), but the feminine
Drohne is more common, at least among people who aren't entomologists.
However, while there is undeniably a mismatch between grammatical gender and biological sex in these two cases, one could plausibly argue that in the case of fish and insects all animals are perceived as not specifically gendered semantically, as sexual roles and dimorphism are very much different in fish and insects than in humans and mammals.
More unambiguous cases can be found in the domain of sexual behaviour and insults. There, German has
die Tunte,
die Tucke,
die Schwuchtel, which can all roughly be translated as ‘faggot’ and unambiguously refer to a male homosexual or crossdresser but are grammatically feminine. There also is
die Memme ‘sissy’, which isn't usually used to refer to women.
Die Pussy has been borrowed from English with the same meaning, ie ‘sissy’ and referring to men. Semantically, all of them clearly have in common that they are an attack against their referent's masculinity. Also, at least
Tunte (probably from
Tante ‘aunt’),
Memme (originally the female breast), and
Pussy originally all meant some kind of female person or female sexual organs.
In the other direction there is
der Vamp ‘vamp’ for a femme fatale. Again, the common element is that the behaviour of a
Vamp is not in accordance with traditional, socially expected gender roles.
A different case are nouns which are normally indifferent with respect to semantic gender. Normally, the masculine is the generic gender, and words like
der Student ‘student’ or
der Lehrer ‘teacher’ are used both for specifically male students and teachers as well as generically. To refer to specifically female students or teachers, one would use the derived feminine forms
die Studentin and
die Lehrerin.
In some cases, however, there is no feminine form.
Der Mensch ‘human being’, for example, is always masculine:
| Er ist ein Mensch. |
| He is a human being. |
and
| Sie ist ein Mensch. |
| She is a human being. |
but not
Sie ist *eine Menschin.
The only way to make it explicity that somebody is a female human being would be to use an adjective (
ein weiblicher Mensch ‘a female human being’) or a compound form like
Menschenfrau (
Mensch +
Frau ‘woman’).
This is more common in cases where the generic form is feminine, for example
die Person ‘person’ or
die Fachkraft ‘specialist’. The reason is likely that while the feminizing suffix
-in is very productive in German, masculine nouns derived from feminine nouns are very rare in general, and even though German has a masculinizing suffix in
-erich it is barely productive anymore.
More socially controversial cases are job titles for men in traditional female jobs, like
(die) Krankenschwester ‘nurse’ (which contains
Schwester ‘sister’ as part of the compound) or
(die) Hebamme ‘midwife’ which are both grammatically and semantically feminine. Officially, the problem has been solved for
Krankenschwester by creating the new compound
Krankenpfleger as its masculine variant. Recently, the feminine form derived from it (
Krankenpflegerin) has even replaced the original
Krankenschwester as the legal job title for newly graduated female nurses, though female nurses who graduated before the change may still call themselves
Krankenschwester and in colloquial usage, people of course don't care about it either.
For male midwives, German authorities took a similar route and created the word
Entbindungspfleger for male midwives. The feminine variant
Entbindungspflegerin ist not in use however; a female midwife is still a
Hebamme. Legalese aside, a lot of people will have never heard of the term
Entbindungspfleger, probably because it is of little practical relevance, as there are less than five certified male midwives in all of Germany. If you asked random Germans how a male midwife is called, most of them would probably answer something like
(der) Hebammer or
(der) Hebammerich (both in use colloquially, usually somewhat jokingly) or simply
(die) männliche Hebamme ‘male midwife’. In fact, in Austria
Hebamme is also the official job title for a male midwife.
In the other direction, this usually isn't a problem as female job titles are easilly derived with
-in from male ones in most cases. One interesting counter example is
(der) Ober, a somewhat formal term for ‘(male) waiter’, which is also used as a polite way to address your waiter as in
Herr Ober. While the more general term for waiter,
(der) Kellner, has a long-established female form,
(die) Kellnerin ‘waitress’, it would not be proper to address your waiter or waitress as
Herr Kellner or
Frau Kellnerin. Unfortunately, the intuitive
Frau Oberin to address a waitress is ruled out, because that is already how you address an abbess. It seems the form
Frau Ober is slowly asserting itself, which would make this another case of a masculine noun with semantically female referents.
The main difference between examples like
der Rogner or
die Drohne is that the latter are always of the ‘wrong’ gender, while more common cases of mismatches, as in
die Hebamme for a male midwife, have the ‘wrong’ gender only as a secondary possibility, resulting from an expansion of the word's original scope.
Salmoneus wrote:The example I was going to give looks more complicated than I thought. I remember "pirata", Latin for 'pirate', as being feminine. However, wiktionary claims that although it's a first declension noun that looks and declines like a feminine, it's really masculine. I don't know, however, how they define gender. Does it take the masculine pronoun (and does it do so even for a female pirate?)? What about adjectival declension? I don't know.
Latin first declension nouns (
a-stems) are overwhelmingly feminine, but a few of them have masculine, like your example
pirata, or
agricola ‘farmer’,
poeta ‘poet’, or
nauta ‘sailor’. That they are masculine is evident because masculine pronouns and adjectives agree with them:
A dead (male) pirate is a
pirata mortuus, not a
*pirata mortua. A great sailor is a
nauta magnus, not a
*nauta magna. And it is
hic acgricola ‘this farmer’, not
*haec agricola.