The Sex of Language: Jacob Grimm on Grammatical Gender

Abstract

The Sex of Language:Jacob Grimm on Grammatical Gender Sophie Salvo (bio) In 1831, Jacob Grimm issued a study of grammatical gender, that structure which famously made Mark Twain, some fifty years later, call German the most "slipshod and slippery" of languages (252). For Twain, classifying nouns into the categories "masculine," "feminine," and "neuter" was ridiculous; to take gender seriously led to the absurd contention that "a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has" (259). For Grimm, however, grammatical gender appeared not absurd, but deeply meaningful. As it becomes clear in volume III of his Deutsche Grammatik, Grimm considered gender to be an eminently sensible structure: one must simply suss out the relationship between a noun's referent and certain sexed characteristics. "Hand" is feminine, Grimm suggests, whereas "fuß" is masculine, because hands are smaller and more delicate than feet (403). In the Germanic languages, Grimm furthermore explains, "tree trunk" is masculine because a trunk is "gleichsam dem vater und erhalter des ganzen baums" (410), while many words for insects are feminine because insects are small and weak (365). This detailed, speculative practice—which Grimm continues throughout his chapter on grammatical gender—is made possible by two important assertions: first, that grammatical gender derives from the first speakers' animation of the world through language; and second, that when our ancestors enlivened objects, they saw them as sexed beings, male or female. According to Deutsche Grammatik, objects were designated masculine if they were thought to possess the qualities of activity, movement, virility, or largeness, while those that corresponded to passivity, smallness, weakness, receptivity, or materiality [End Page 770] were rendered feminine (358–9). Grimm finds the origin of the neuter somewhat harder to explain—it corresponds to "das erzeugte, gewirkte, stoffartige, generelle, unentwickelte, collective" (359), but may also designate a perceived "mischung" or "verbindung" of masculine and feminine (311), or refer to an object in which sex is perceived to be latent, like a fetus (318). One of the founders of the nineteenth-century discipline of Sprachwissenschaft, or language science, Grimm studies grammatical gender in order to understand the historical development of Germanic languages such as Gothic and Old High German. Yet he also, along the way, affirms gender as the necessary expression of sexual difference in language. Gender is "eine, aber im frühsten zustande der sprache schon vorgegangene anwendung oder übertragung des natürlichen auf alle und jede nomina" (317). By insisting not only on an original connection between grammatical gender and biological sex, but also that this connection is fundamentally intelligible to the modern speaker, Grimm exemplifies an approach to grammatical gender that emerges in the late eighteenth century. Whereas Enlightenment grammarians considered gender to be a capricious structure with little semantic value, scholars of language from the 1770s onwards took gender to be a meaningful—and legible—category. In the century that followed, grammatical gender became a prized structure because it could provide insight into the culturally-specific mindset of its creators. The fact that nouns have different genders in different languages, it was believed, revealed the uniqueness of each culture's worldview. That an era so invested in the idea of linguistic relativity among nations should take recourse to this notion to explain grammatical gender is perhaps not surprising. What is less well known—and what this article will investigate—is how texts on grammatical gender also used this structure to construct fantasies of masculinity and femininity, turning gender into a proxy for debating the centrality of sexual difference to human identity. Indeed, nineteenth-century theories of grammatical gender have much to tell us about how that period understood the complicated nexus of sex, language, and the activity of being human. I We might suppose that the constellation noted above—sex, gender, language, human identity—is more the preoccupation of our own century than of Grimm's. The past fifty years have witnessed a sustained focus, in the United States and Western Europe, on the interrelation [End Page 771] of language and sexual difference. From feminist theories of the 1970s, which posited a specifically feminine relation to language (e.g. Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Mary Daly), to sociolinguistic studies of the ways...