All Boats Are Female

The assignment: from a list of Polish cities, deduce the ‘gender’ of each.

So the work progresses in language class, under the assertion that determining and using the correct grammatical gender is vital to proper language usage.

The English language long ago dropped the concept of grammatical gender, sparing native English speakers and learners of English as an alternate means of communication the painful, often confusing exercise of learning which objects are designated masculine and which are feminine.

Note: it has little or nothing to do with an object’s characteristics.

For those of you wildly interested in linguistic history or just crazy for cool facts, the use of grammatical gender all but disappeared from English by the 13^th century but no one really knows why because not very many written accounts of that time have survived.

The ones that do still exist reflect diminished usage in the later era, while those from the 11^th century are replete with instances of such. 

Grammatical gender is very much a component of learning any Romance language or Slavic tongue and, to compound the difficulty, some make use of only two – male and female, while others employ yet another to describe gender-neutral words.

German and Polish make use of three genders.

What’s really puzzling is how any given object is assigned their ‘gender’. For example:

In French, a fork is feminine: une fourchette (a pitchfork is also feminine, by the way: la fourche). Conversely, a knife is masculine: un couteau.

Un, une; le and la are articles that denote ‘a’ or ‘the’ and indicate the objects’s gender in French.

In German, you have no fewer than 9 ways to say ‘a’, but only three to say ‘the’; each one corresponds to a gender.

Curiously enough, whereas a forks are female in French and in German, spoons are masculine in German but feminine in French and knives are neutral in German but masculine in French.

And, as though that weren’t confusing enough, some words have more than one gender!

The German word for ‘lake’ - See (pronounced zeh) is masculine. That same word, with the same pronunciation and spelling, preceded by a feminine article, represents ‘sea’.

No linguist alive knows the reason for assigning any object in any language its gender but plenty of theories abound.

In Polish, you have ‘ten’, ‘ta’ and ‘to’ to indicate the three genders and you’d better get them right or your language teacher will pounce on you and fill you with a sense of worthlessness at your inability to master a concept she has used all of her life!

By contrast, in Mandarin, reputed to be one of the most complicated languages to learn, there is no grammatical gender at all! Ah, for the simplicity of Mandarin grammar...  

A Language Learner Puzzles...

With no hubris intended, I aver I have been a language learner all of my life – as have we all... that is why I gloat not.

Still, my head is stuffed with the ability of speaking more than one language, all of them learned on the fly: through full immersion into the culture that language represents.

I have been very lucky to have had the opportunity of living in different countries throughout my life.

Now, for the first time in my language learning experience, I am taking lessons.They are onerous.

Repetitive grammar exercises, the recycling of terms and concepts not necessarily useful in daily life... I now know multiple ways of saying hello and goodbye but cannot yet negotiate a simple transaction unless the person I’m dealing with speaks one of the other languages I speak.   

These lessons recall to me the bewilderment and futility I felt in grade school, diagramming sentences and conjugating verbs.

Then as now, I reflect: starting from infancy, people learn to speak their native tongue by speaking it. Granted, they make mistakes but, generally, attentive caregivers correct such errors and, soon, the speaker is on his/her way to mistake-free language usage.

Obviously, the method is effective; otherwise we would all be mute until our primary education starts, after which well-trained teachers would divulge the secrets of proper grammar and, somewhere in our 10^th year of life, we would all be adept at expressing ourselves correctly.

If using a language is in fact the best way to learn it, I wonder why language classes all over the world spend so much time on grammar exercises and on drilling in grammar rules, and far too little time on letting learners get the feel of the language by hearing it and speaking it.

Enabling Sprachgefühl

Sprachgefühl is a German term that expresses humans’ ability for getting the feel of a language; indeed  it translates directly into ‘language feeling’. Too bad there is no direct translation for this concept in English!

I contend that one’s capacity for sprachgefühl is directly proportionate to their teacher’s capacity to enable their learning.

Humans have an innate ability to communicate and it really doesn’t take much, initially – a bit of vocabulary and a few ground rules, to let them go at it.

Yet, in my language efforts, both in teaching and as a student, I constantly encounter teachers who prefer intimidating their charges and restricting their natural aptitude for language acquisition.

In China, so many of my students were afraid to make use of their language skills (at college level!) because their teachers constantly told them that English is so very difficult to master.

Now, as a student of Polish, my teacher constantly intones how difficult her language is and how it will take me years to master it; how my mouth doesn’t move the right way, how my ear is not properly trained...

She once told me that her Russian and Ukrainian students felt they might grasp Polish quickly because those languages all have the same root. They were quickly dissuaded, ridiculed by the assertion that Polish is nothing like Russian or Ukrainian.

This is all very discouraging.

Back to the assignment that started this topic, now...

Identifying which Polish cities are masculine, feminine or neutral was actually a fairly easy exercise once you know the rules:

1.      Any city ending with -a is feminine

2.      Any city ending with a consonant is masculine

3.      Any city ending in any vowel besides -a is neutral.

Note: the same rules apply to nouns.

That makes Lublin, Poznan and our recently visited Gdansk male cities.

Warsaw (Polish spelling Warszawa), Green Mountain (Zielona Góra) and Gdynia are all feminine and Opole and Zakopane are neutral.   

The only mistake I made doing this activity was mis-gendering Lodz. I couldn’t understand why: it ends with a consonant and I put it in the ‘male’ column...

Come to find out,  Łódź literally means ‘boat’. Inhabitants of that city are nicknamed ‘boat people’ and their city flag contains a depiction of a boat with an oar.

Are Boats Really Feminine?

·         In French and Spanish, they are masculine: un bateau or le bateau; el barco

·         In German, they are neutral: das boot, ein boot.

·         In Mandarin as in English, there is no gender assignment

·         In Polish, they are feminine: ta łódź (pronounced woo-tch)

Clearly, there is some ambiguity, among the various cultures, over whether boats should be masculine, feminine or neutral.

However, one thing is clear: it is very common, some might say traditional, to christen a boat with a feminine name.

There are boats named after men, of course; especially military vessels, but overwhelmingly, searfaring craft bear women’s names.  

However, every boat, regardless of whether it bears a male or female name, takes a maiden voyage... another connection to the female gender!

Like grammatical gender, no one really knows why boats are referred to as ‘she’ and are given female names but there are a couple of theories, and one of them ties in with the concept of grammatical gender!

And what do boats have to do with anything related to this topic other than their grammatical gender?

Łódź is an exception to the rules of grammatical gender. It is exceptional in other ways, too; one of them being that, although it is named ‘boat’ the city is completely landlocked.

Łódź lies inland, quite nearly at the geographic center of the country and as far away from a body of water as any boat could be.

Łódź seems to be an inside joke; one you wouldn't get unless you knew a bit about Polish grammar...

Armed with that knowledge, it is time to plan a new adventure...