Words about sex and gender, part 12: Eng. feminine ~ Sp. femenino/a

 [This entry is taken from a chapter of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]

[Go to Part 1 of Words about sex and gender]

Eng. feminine ~ Sp. femenino/a

Let us end this section by discussing the cognates Eng. feminine ~ Sp. femenino/a. These adjectives are the antonyms of the adjectives Eng. masculine ~ Sp. masculino that we discussed in the preceding section. They are loanwords from Lat. fēmĭnīnus/a, a term used in grammar with the sense ‘of the feminine gender, feminine’ (L&S). This adjective is derived from the noun femina we have seen and the adjective-forming suffix ‑īn‑ (see above).

fēmĭn-(a)			‘noun woman, female’
fēmĭn-	+‑īn‑(us/a)	fēmĭnīnus/a	‘adj. womanly, feminine’

English borrowed feminine from French, which borrowed it from Latin first, in the 12th century, mostly with the grammatical sense but also with the sense ‘womanly’, ‘having the character of a woman’. Eng. feminine [ˈfɛmənən] is first attested in English in the late 14th century. Originally it only had the grammar sense but by the 15th century it is attested with the sense ‘belonging to the female sex; female’, which is nowadays conveyed mostly by the adjective female (OED). Its main current senses are (1) ‘of or relating to women or girls’ and (2) ‘characterized by or possessing qualities traditionally attributed to women, such as demureness’ (AHD). These senses were acquired later, in the 17th century, and they were borrowed from French, which developed them first. The second of these senses, which refers to female behavior stereotypes, the ‘stereotypically female’ sense, is arguably the main sense of this English word in most contexts, with there being far fewer contexts in which the word is used with the ‘female’ sense.

Sp. femenino is first attested in the 15th century, originally as feminino/a, with an i in the second syllable, as in the Latin original, also with the grammatical sense. Later, no doubt under the influence of French, it replaced more native words such as femenil and mujeril with the non-grammatical, ‘feminine’ senses it has today. These senses were borrowed from its French cognate, much as in the case of its English cognate feminine. Although, Spanish femenino/a also has the same two main senses as Eng. feminine discussed in the previous paragraph, it would seem that Spanish uses this word which the ‘female’ sense than English does with its cognate. So, for instance, in Spanish we talk of fútbol femenino to refer to women’s soccer. Note that a literal translation into English as feminine soccer would be quite odd and would probably be interpreted as ‘soccer played in a stereotypically female way’, perhaps as soccer played daintily. In other words, Sp. femenino/a is not used in exactly the same way as Eng. feminine and thus the two cognates are only partial semantic ‘friends’. After all, we have learned that cognates rarely have totally identical meanings, and thus we find a full range from ‘good friends’ (close to identical meaning and usage) to ‘false friends’ (misleading cognates since the meanings differ a great deal; cf. Part I, Chapter 1).

THE END

Words about sex and gender, part 11: Excursus: Eng. male and Eng. female

[This entry is taken from a chapter of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]

[Go to Part 1 of Words about sex and gender]

Excursus: Eng. male and Eng. female

Introduction

As we saw in an earlier section, the appearance of the new sense of the word gender, namely gender₄, has resulted in those who subscribe to that sense of the word redefining a number of other words, such as man/woman and boy/girl. These words used to be sex-based (biological) categories but are now being reinterpreted as being defined in terms of personal or individual identity, not biology. This has led to other words, such as the words male and female, which traditionally focus on sex, though not only, in contexts in which the former words were used.

The English words male and female were originally adjectives but they can now be used as nouns as well for the two biological options in question. They are much more general in their application than the terms man and woman ever were, of course, since they apply to most biological organisms that reproduce sexually.[1] In this section we are going to look at these two words and their Spanish equivalents. Some of these words are cognates or quasi cognates, and some are unrelated.

Eng. male

The English word male, today pronounced [ˈmeɪ̯ɫ], homophonous with the word mail, was borrowed from French in the 14th century, more specifically from the Anglo-Norman dialect of Old French. Eng. male is first attested in writing in in the late 14th century. In Old French, this word is attested in writing as either male, masle, or mascle (cf. Modern French mâle). The French word is first attested in the 12th century and it is a patrimonial word in that language. It descends by patrimonial (uninterrupted, oral) transmission from Lat. mascŭlus (mas‑cŭl‑us), with word-initial (antepenultimate) stress, which is the Latin diminutive form of the noun mās ‘man, male’, which could also be used as an adjective meaning ‘male, masculine, manly’. Lat. mascŭlus could also be used as a noun or an as an adjective, with meanings very similar to those of the base word mās.

The genitive wordform of this Latin lexeme was mar‑is, which reveals that the word’s regular stem is mar‑. This same root is found in other Latin words, such as Lat. marītus ‘adj. marital, matrimonial, conjugal; noun husband, married man’ (mar‑īt‑us), the source of Eng. marital (as in marital status = Sp. estado civil) and Sp. marido ‘husband’, for example. (Another word that has been suggested to contain the word mās is Lat. masturbārī ‘to masturbate’, though that is questionable.) Derived from Lat. mascŭlus is the Latin adjective mascŭlīnus/a (mas‑cŭl‑īn‑us/a) derived by means of the derivational suffix ‑īn‑ (cf. Part I, Chapter 8), which has been borrowed by English and Spanish as Eng. masculine ~ Sp. masculino/a (see below).

mās (gen.: mar‑is)		‘noun man, male’
mās	+ ‑cŭl‑us/a	mascŭlus/a ‘adj. male, masculine; manly, virile’
mās	+cŭl+‑īn‑us/a	mascŭlīnus/a ‘adj. masculine; manly’

Eng. male is, as we said, primarily an adjective. Dictionaries differ as to how they break up the senses of this adjective. In COED, the primary meaning refers to biology, namely: ‘of or denoting the sex that can fertilize or inseminate the female to produce offspring’. Derived from that sense is a subsense: ‘relating to or characteristic of men or male animals’ (COED). Of course, if the word male is defined in terms of the word man and man is defined in terms of identity and not biology, that makes the word male will not refer exclusively to biological males, unless a modifier such as biological is used along with it. Also derived from this primary sense is, according to COED, a sense in which the adjective male is used for plants or flowers.[2]

The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (10e, 2020) gives five senses for the adjective male. Interestingly, the first one of these senses is not necessarily a biological category: ‘being a man or boy’ (OALD), as in a male friend/colleague/partner. Thus, if we define man and boy in terms of identity and not biology, then male could also an identity-based term, not a biology-based one. The second sense of the adjective male is a biological one, namely ‘belonging to the sex that does not lay eggs or give birth to babies’ (OALD), as used in expressions such as male bird or male hormones. The third sense is also not necessarily about biology: ‘of men; typical of men; affecting men’ (OALD), as in traditionally male interests. The fourth sense is the one about plants and the fifth one is about plugs and other connectors in which the male connector goes into the female. Note that the first and third senses may result in speakers using the word male as an identity category, not as a biological one.

As we said, the adjective male can also be used as a noun to refer to ‘a male person, animal, or plant’ (COED), as in the sentence The male of the species has a white tail (OALD), or as often seen in police reports, as in The body is that of a white male aged about 40 (OALD). The noun use of Eng. male does seem to be more closely associated with biology than identity, at least in common usage.

Sp. macho and Sp. varón

Spanish has a cognate of Eng. male, namely Sp. macho, a patrimonial word that also descends from Lat. mascŭlus, the same word that Eng. male ultimate comes from, which is why we call them cognates (cf. Part I, Chapter 1). The sound changes involved in the development from Lat. mascŭlus to Sp. macho are the expected ones in this language (cf. Part I, Chapter 10). First, the intertonic vowel ŭ was lost, an extremely common sound change, resulting in masclus. Secondly, the scl [skl] consonant cluster was reduced to ch [ʧ]. This is not a very common sound change, since this consonant cluster itself was not common and always resulted from the loss of a vowel in a Latin word, but it is definitely attested in Spanish: cl [k’l] > ch [ʧ] when preceded by a consonant (cf. Part I, Chapter 10, §10.4.7.2, ). Another example is Late Lat. cŏncŭla (diminutive of Lat. conc(h)a ‘mussle shell, etc.’) > Sp. concha ‘shell’. Note that the wordforms maslo and masclo for this word are also attested in writing in Old Spanish (DCEH), though the variant macho ended up displacing them.[3]

Although the cognates Eng. male ~ Sp. macho share a core meaning, the two words are not used the same way in each of these languages, even though bilingual dictionaries often give the impression that the two words are equivalent. First of all, Sp. macho is used primarily for animals (other than humans) only, much like preñada ‘pregnant’ is used for animals (other than humans), unlike its English cognate pregnant (cf. Part II, Chapter 7). Sp. macho is used as a modifier in a number of non-noun compounds such as liebre macho ‘buck hare’, gato macho ‘tomcat’, ballena macho ‘bull whale’, and elefante macho ‘bull elephant’. The word macho in these phrases is still a noun, however, and thus it is invariant in these noun-noun compounds and thus, for example, the plural of ballena macho is ballenas macho, not *ballenas machos (cf. Part I, Chapter 5, §5.8.3.3). Note that in the expression macho cabrío ‘he-goat, billy goat’, macho is the main noun and cabrío is an adjective derived from cabra ‘goat’, and so its plural is machos cabríos.[4]

To the extent that Sp. macho is used for (male) humans, this only happens in a few dialectal, informal, and figurative contexts. María Moliner gives the following as the fifth sense (of 14) for this word: ‘having the qualities that are considered typical of the male sex, such as strength and courage’ (MM).[5] This definition obviously revolves around stereotypes of maleness and not around male identity. The Spanish language academies’ (ASALE) dictionary (Diccionario de la lengua española, or DLE) gives 17 senses for Sp. macho but none of them is like the sense of Eng. male that refers to human males. Actually, most of the senses of Sp. macho in the DLE are archaic or even obsolete.

An example of macho being used in the context of human males is found in parts of central Spain where the word macho is used as an appellative among men, much like man or dude is used in parts of the English-speaking world, cf. sense 7: ‘masculine, colloquial, used to address a person of the male sex, e.g., ¡Déjame en paz, macho! ‘Leave me alone, man!’.[6]

Of course, we cannot ignore the fact that English has borrowed the word macho from Spanish, with the sense ‘masculine or vigorous’, ‘tough guy’, something that happened in the 1920s. LDCE defines Eng. macho as ‘behaving in a way that is traditionally typical of men, for example being strong or brave, or not showing your feelings – used humorously or in order to show disapproval’ (LDCE). Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate defines it as ‘characterized by machismo: aggressively virile’ (MWC). The (English) phrase macho man, first attested in 1959, is a ‘colloquial (freq. depreciative)’ way to refer to ‘a man characterized by (esp. exaggeratedly) assertive masculinity’ (OED). Some deride such use of Spanish words in English, labeling it mock Spanish.[i]

As you can see in this last definition, a word derived from macho in Spanish by means of the suffix ‑ismo ‘-ism’, Sp. machismo, has also been borrowed by English. COED defines Eng. machismo as ‘strong or aggressive masculine pride’ (COED). The DLE defines machismo as ‘arrogant attitude of men towards women’ and ‘type of sexism characterized by male prevalence’.[7]

In Spanish, for every word ending in ‑ismo there is a related word ending in ‑ista, derived with the also Greek suffix ‑ista ‘‑ist’. Thus, from Sp. machismo we have the word machista ‘adj./n. sexist; n. male chauvinist’, a word that is even more common than machismo, but one that has not been borrowed by English. It is used in phrases such as una sociedad machista ‘a sexist society’ (Clave), Tiene una ideología machista ‘He has a male chauvinist ideology’ (Larousse), Tu amigo es un machista descarado ‘Your friend is a blatant male chauvinist’ (Larousse), or una concepción machista de la sociedad ‘a sexist approach to society’ (Vox).

The noun macho is often used by itself to refer to certain animals, in particular the billy goat and, in eastern Cuba, the male pig. Sp. macho is used in some dialects of Spanish to refer to a ‘(male) mule’ too (Sp. mulo). According to the DLE this word macho is the same word as the macho that we have just been discussing, but other sources claim that this is an unrelated homonym, one that probably comes from Portuguese macho (same meaning), earlier muacho, derived from muo (Modern Port. mu), a word that descends from Lat. mūlus, the source of Sp. mulo and Eng. mule (DCEH).[8]

The word macho is obviously not the best option for translating Eng. male into Spanish. So, how should we translate this word’s most basic and common sense used for describing humans, as opposed to animals. English-Spanish dictionaries give us a couple of options, as we can see in Table 209. The main one is varón, though there are other minor options used in some contexts, such as masculino/a when referring to certain things such as hormones or organs. The English adjective male can also be translated by the adjectives varonil (derived, in Spanish, from varón by means of the adjectival suffix Lat. -īl‑is that formed adjectives from nouns) and viril ‘virile, manly’ (a learned descendant from Lat. vĭrīlis ‘male; virile, manly’, an adjective derived from vĭr ‘man, male human’ and‎ Lat. -īl‑is).

male  adjective 1 (animal, plant) macho; (person, child) varón; (sex, hormone, character, organ) masculino,-a 2 (manly) varonil, viril 3 TECHNICAL (screw, plug) macho  noun 1 (man, boy) varón nombre masculino; (animal, plant) macho

Table 209: The word male into Spanish in Vox English-Spanish dictionary

We should note that as an adjective, Eng. male often needs no translation when the Spanish word has masculine gender. Thus, for example, a male nurse is an enfermero, just like a female nurse is an enfermera. But even when the word does not reflect any gender, it may not be necessary to indicate its gender by means of an adjective if other words, such as articles and demonstrative adjectives do the job. So, for example, and a male model is un modelo and a female model is una modelo.[9] Here the indefinite article un/una is enough to indicate the individual’s gender.

The word varón is an interesting one since its origin is not clear. In Latin, we find what may two different words that could have been its source. One is classical vāro (genitive: vārōnis; regular stem: vārōn‑) ‘a stupid, boorish fellow, a clodpate’ (L&S). This word is also found with the following alternative spellings: varrō, barrō, and bārō. The origin of this word is unknown, though it is most likely a loanword. Another possible source of Sp. varón is Lat. barō (genitive: barōnis; regular stem: barōn‑). An alternative spelling is barrō (genitive: barrōnis). It is not clear if the a in this word was long or short, hence sometimes we encounter the word written as bā̆rō in academic texts. This word was clearly a loan from a Germanic language, perhaps from Frankish. In Late Latin, this word meant ‘man, freeman’, as well as ‘mercenary soldier’ (according to Isidore of Seville), but in Medieval Latin it came to be used as a nobility title with the meaning that its descendants Eng. baron and Sp. barón have. The title is most commonly used in the French and English traditions. In Spain, it was used in the Catalan nobility tradition which, like the English one, was influenced by the French tradition. In English, a baron is ‘a member of the lowest order of the British nobility’ (COED). In Spanish, a barón is a ‘person who has a title of nobility immediately below that of viscount’ (Clave).[10]

Again, it is not clear to etymologists which one of these words is the source of Sp. varón. Most sources, such as DCEH, think that Sp. varón probably has the same origin as the word barón ‘baron’, the nobility title, even though it is spelled with a v, a minor matter since the two letters are pronounced the same way in Spanish (cf. Part I, Chapter 7) and thus was not uncommon for Old Spanish words to be spelled with the wrong letter. Other sources prefer to be non-commital about the word’s source. The DLE, for example, tells us that Sp. varón comes from Lat. vāro (gen. varōnis), but do not specify which of the two Latin words they imply. It is not clear if the DLE refers here to the classical word vāro or the Frankish barō, for according to this dictionary the original Latin word’s meaning was ‘strong, energetic, hard-working’ (‘fuerte, esforzado’), which would make it an adjective and not a noun and, besides, there is no record of such a Latin adjective in other sources.

Eng. female & Sp. hembra

The antonym of Eng. male is Eng. female [ˈfi.ˌmeɪ̯ɫ]. At first sight, one would think that the word female is related to and derived from the word male, by the addition of a mysterious ‘prefix’ fe‑, just like the word woman is actually based on and derived from the word man,[11] but this would be an incorrect etymological analysis. The word woman is indeed derived from the word man. It was an Old English compound word formed with the words wif (the source of Modern English wife), which at the time meant just ‘woman’ (not just ‘married woman’), and man, which at the time meant just ‘person’ (of either sex).

Eng. female, on the other hand, is not historically or etymologically related to the word male. It is a loanword from an Anglo-Norman (Old French) word variously spelled female, femaile, or femell, which descended from classical Latin fēmella ‘girl, young woman’, which is a somewhat irregular diminutive of the word fēmĭna (with word-initial, or antepenultimate stress) ‘woman, wife; female (of animals)’, which is itself an ancient word, a descendant from a Proto-Indo-European word meaning something like ‘breastfeeder’, derived from a verb meaning ‘to suck, to suckle’. The ending ‑ell‑a was a common diminutive suffix in Latin (the masculine form was ‑ell‑us), which had other variants, such as ‑ul‑us/a and ‑cul‑us/a, originally ‑l‑us/a.[12] Another variant of this diminutive suffix is ‑ill‑us/a/um, the source of the Spanish diminutive suffix ‑illo/a.

In some Romance languages, such as French, descendants of the Latin diminutive fēmella took on the meaning—and replaced the descendants of—Lat. fēmĭna. This did not happen in Spanish, however. Lat. fēmella never made it into Spanish, but the word that it is derived from, fēmĭna, did.[13] It was a patrimonial word that underwent a number of sound changes along the way, resulting in the Modern Spanish word hembra (the derivation is explained in Part I, Chapter 10, §10.4.2.1 and §10.4.7.3, and Part II, Chapter 16, §16.3.2).

Actually, the Spanish equivalent for Eng. female is indeed the noun hembra, but nowadays mostly only when referring to animals and plants. So, for example the Oxford English-Spanish gives us the following example: a female elephant — un elefante hembra, una hembra de elefante (OSD). (As in the case of macho, seen in the preceding section, hembra here is used as a modifying noun and it is invariant.) Some dialects of Spanish use hembra to refer to human females and that was probably the norm in earlier forms of Spanish. In technical language, referring to plugs and other connectors, female also translates mostly as hembra, e.g., female connector translates as conector hembra, which is the opposite of conector macho ‘male connector’.

Most Spanish dialects today, however, do not translate Eng. female as hembra, just like they do not use the adjective preñada ‘pregnant’ for women, only for animals. The preferred translation of female when talking about human females involves the noun mujer ‘lit. woman’ or, if it is about a young female, niña or some synonym of this word. So, for instance, the Oxford English-Spanish dictionary gives us the following example: the victim was female — la víctima era una mujer. Another example is seen in the preferred translation of female impersonator, namely persona disfrazada de mujer. When female is used as a modifier (‘adjective’), it often translates as femenino/a, so that female circumcision translates as circuncisión femenina or ablación del clitoris (Harraps), female condom as preservative/condón femenino (Harraps), female (sexual) organs as órganos (sexuales) femeninos, female instinct as instinto femenino, female sexual dysfunction as disfunción sexual de la mujer or disfunción sexual femenina, and female genitalia translates as genitales femeninos or genitales de mujer. Still, as we mentioned earlier in the case of male, this English word may not need to be translated at all if the word itself has gender marking, as in the word enfermera, which means ‘female nurse’, or the word bibliotecaria, which means ‘female librarian’ (bibliotecario is ‘male librarian’).

[GO TO PART 12]

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[1] In sentences such as Their child is male or It’s a male child, the word male is being used as an adjective. However, now one can also say things like Their child is a male where the word male is used as a noun, as the preceding article and the accompanying noun child indicate. Other examples of the word male being used as a noun are: The males are bigger or Males need not apply.

[2] Another sense, already found in post-classical Latin as a calque from its Greek equivalent ᾰ̓́ρσην (ársēn), is ‘(of a plant or flower) bearing stamens but lacking functional pistils’ (COED).

[3] A doublet of Sp. concha in which the change has not happened still remains in the language, namely cuenca ‘basin, socket’. English does have a related, technical word concha, which comes from the non-diminutive Lat. concha. The ch in this word is not pronounced [ʧ] but rather [k]. That is because this ch is a transliteration of Ancient Greek χ [kh], for the Latin word is a loan from Greek κόγχη (kónkhē) ‘mussel or cockle; shell-like cavity’.

[4] Sp. cabrón, masculine augmentative of Sp. cabra ‘goat’, was originally a noun, synonym of macho cabrio. Today it is merely used as an insult and term of abuse, though dictionaries still give ‘billy goat’ as one of the word’s meanings, even the first meaning sometimes. The two main meanings of the noun/adjective cabrón are ‘(person) who plays dirty tricks or is annoying’ (‘Que hace malas pasadas o resulta molesto’, DLE) and ‘man whose wife is unfaithful, especially if he consents to it’ (‘Se dice del hombre al que su mujer es infiel, y en especial si lo consiente’, DLE).

[5] Original: ‘Con las cualidades que se consideran propias del sexo masculino, como la fuerza y la valentía’ (MM).

[6] Original: ‘7. m. coloq. U. para dirigirse a una persona de sexo masculino. ¡Déjame en paz, macho!’

[7] Original: ‘1. m. Actitud de prepotencia de los varones respecto de las mujeres.  2. m. Forma de sexismo caracterizada por la prevalencia del varón. En la designación de directivos de la empresa hay un claro machismo.’

[8] Do note that there is yet a third word macho in Spanish, homonymous with the other two, whose two main meanings are ‘big mallet that is in the blacksmiths to forge iron’ (‘mazo grande que hay en las herrerías para forjar el hierro’) and ‘bench in which blacksmiths have a small anvil’ (‘banco en que los herreros tienen el yunque pequeño’) (DLE). This word is of uncertain origin, but it probably it comes from Mozarabic.

[9] The noun modelo has common gender (Sp. género común), so that its ending does not change according to gender, even though it ends in ‑o. This word is a late 16th century loanword from Italian modello, a descendant from Vulgar Latin *modĕllus, diminutive and synonym of Lat. modulus ‘a small measure or interval, etc.’, itself a diminutive of Lat. modus ‘measure; manner, way’.

[10] Original: ‘Persona que tiene un título nobiliario inmediatamente inferior al de vizconde’ (Clave). Note that another sense has developed for barón in Spanish political discourse, for example, namely ‘In a political party, a person who has an important position and is a candidate for prominent positions’ (original: ‘En un partido político, persona que tiene una posición importante y es candidata a puestos destacados’, Clave).

[11] The word for ‘male person’ in Old English was wer, as in werewolf ‘male wolf’, but this word became obsolete when the word man came to be used to mean ‘male person’ and replaced it. Old Eng. wer is cognate of Lat. vir ‘man’, whose root vir is still found in word such as Eng. virile ~ Sp. viril and Eng. virtue ~ Sp. virtud.

[12] When the base to which the suffix ‑l‑us/a was added ended in ‑ra‑/‑ro‑, ‑na‑/‑no‑, or ‑la‑/‑lo‑, this resulted in some interesting sound changes, e.g. ‎cerebrum ‘brain’ → ‎cerebellum ‘a small brain’, ‎corōna ‘garland, wreath, crown’ → ‎corōlla ‘little crown, garland’, ‎porcus ‘pig’ → ‎porculus ‘young pig, little pig, piglet’ → ‎porcellus ‘little pig, piglet’ (WT), cf. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-lus#Latin.

[13] Catalan is another language that did receive the Latin diminutive fēmella resulting in Cat. femella, meaning ‘female’, but only when applied to non-human animals (the antonym of Cat. mascle, cognate of Sp. macho). Cat. femella also means ‘nut’ (fastener with a threaded hole).

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[i] Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mock_Spanish

Words about sex and gender, part 10: Eng. genus and Eng. genre

[This entry is taken from a chapter of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]

[Go to Part 1 of Words about sex and gender]

Eng. genus and Eng. genre

English has borrowed the Latin word gĕnus two more times since it borrowed it in through French in the form of gender. This happened at different times and from different sources. Once the source was written Latin, from which we get the English word genus, and the other is from Modern French, from which we get the English word genre.

The English word genus, pronounced [ˈʤinəs] or [ˈʤɛnəs], refers first of all to ‘a principal taxonomic category [in biology] that ranks above species and below family, denoted by a capitalized Latin name, e.g., Leo’ (COED). This biological sense dates from around the year 1600. Actually, the word genus was borrowed into English from Latin a few decades earlier with a more general sense, one which the English word still has, namely ‘a class of things which have common characteristics and which can be divided into subordinate kinds’ (COED). This sense was at first used in logic. Though that early sense is not obsolete, it remains a technical term not familiar to most speakers of English, whereas the biological sense is much more widely known, although it is also rather technical. Eng. genus translates into Spanish as género, just like Eng. gender and all descendants of Lat. genus do.

English	Spanish
gender	género
genus
genre

As we saw, in French, the Latin word gĕnus, whose regular stem was gener‑, evolved into the Old French word spelled either genre or gendre, the source of Eng. gender, which in Modern French is spelled just genre, without the d, and is pronounced [ˈʒɑ̃ʀ]. In the mid-17th century, Fr. genre acquired a new sense in the context of literature and literary styles, namely ‘category of works defined by tradition (according to subject, tone, style) - The genre of prose, poetry,…’ (Le Grand Robert).[1] English borrowed this word genre from French in the second half of the 18th century with just this meaning, which it still has. (See more on the word’s meaning below.)

Originally, Eng. genre was pronounced with the initial French sound [ʒ], a voiced palatal fricative sound, which is not found in native English words in word-initial position. It is the sound of the letter j in French and it is found in word-medial position in English words such as measure [ˈmɛʒəɹ] and leisure [ˈliʒəɹ] (Part I, Chapter 7, §7.3.8.4). By the middle of the 19th century, however many speakers had ‘nativized’ this word’s initial sound to the more common sound [ʤ], the affricate version of this a voiced palatal sound, a mixture of stop and fricative, which is found word-initially in English if words like juice [ˈʤus] or gene [ˈʤin]. The word can still be pronounced either way in English, i.e., either [ˈʒɒn.ɹə] or [ˈʤɒn.ɹə]. Note that the word has two syllables in English, since in this language, a word, or syllable, cannot end in the consonants [nɹ], the way it can in French. The OED defines this sense as ‘a particular style or category of works of art; esp. a type of literary work characterized by a particular form, style, or purpose’ (OED).

Spanish borrowed the meaning from French genre too, but it just added it to the meanings of the word género it already had, for the learned people who borrowed it recognized that the two words shared the same origin. That is why Eng. genre translates into Spanish as género.

Since Sp. género is polysemous (has many meanings), in order to express the ‘(literary) genre’ sense, sometimes speakers specify what kind of género they refers to, so one may speak of género literario ‘literary genre’, for example, instead of just género, but in context that is hardly necessary.

Eng. genre is sometimes used for art forms, rather than literary styles, such as in music, and then, English typically specifies the artform too, as in music genre, which would translate into Spanish as género musical. English derived the word subgenre from genre in the early 20th century, which Spanish has calqued as subgénero (literario).

There is yet another sense for Eng. genre that arose in the second half of the 19th century, namely ‘a style of painting in which scenes and subjects of ordinary life are depicted’ (OED). COED gives this as a second sense of the word genre, which is only found when this noun is used as a modifier: ‘[used as modifier] denoting a style of painting depicting scenes from ordinary life’ (COED). Thus, we get expressions such as genre cinema or genre painting, which translate into Spanish as cine de género and pintura de género, which are obvious calques.

[GO TO PART 11]

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[1] The original says: ‘(1654). Littér. Catégorie d’œuvres définie par la tradition (d’après le sujet, le ton, le style). | Le genre de la prose, de la poésie. | Genres en vers, dans la littérature classique : lyrisme, épopée (cit. 1), drame, poésie didactique, bucolique…’ (Le Grand Robert).

Words about sex and gender, part 9: Eng. gender ~ Sp. género - The meaning of Sp. género revisited

[This entry is taken from a chapter of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]

[Go to Part 1 of Words about sex and gender]

The meaning of Sp. género revisited

The evolution of the senses of Eng. gender that we saw in the preceding section has been calqued to a great extent extent by Sp. género, albeit always with some delay. In this, as in so many other things, cultural changes tend to arise in the center of the ‘Empire’ first and then filter out to the periphery. If one looks at English-Spanish dictionaries that are more than ten years old, we are told that Eng. gender translates as género in linguistics, i.e., when speaking of grammatical gender, but as sexo in every other context. More recent dictionaries, however, give género as the main translation of Eng. gender in all contexts, not just the grammatical one, though sexo is also given as a second option for the non-grammatical senses (cf. Collins).[i]

As for the way to translate Sp. género into English, things are somewhat more complicated since Sp. género traditionally has more senses than Eng. gender. In Table 5, you can see the entry for género in the Advanced Español-Inglés VOX dictionary of 2005, which has not been changed in the current (2022) online version. Note that this entry does not have a ‘sex’ sense for Sp. género at all.

género nombre masculino 1 (clase) kind, sort      no me gustó ese género de vida I didn't like that sort of life 2 (tela) cloth 3 (mercancía) article, piece of merchandise 4 GRAMÁTICA gender 5 BIOLOGÍA genus 6 (literario) genre nombre masculino plural géneros 1 (mercancías) goods FRASEOLOGÍA género chico light opera género dramático drama género lírico opera género de punto knitwear géneros de punto knitted goods

Table 207: Entry for género in the Advanced Español-Inglés VOX dictionary

Spanish dictionaries display a few senses for Sp. género that Eng. gender does not have. María Moliner’s dictionary (2e, 2004) gives five senses for the word. The previous dictionary of the Academy, Diccionario de la Real Academia Española, DRAE 22 (2001), gives nine senses for the word género: three grammatical senses, the ‘genus’ sense, the ‘type’ sense and ‘genre’ sense already mentioned, plus two additional senses that are perhaps not as common today as they were in the past: a ‘cloth’ sense and a ‘merchandise’ sense. Crucially the socio-cultural or identity ‘sex’ senses are nowhere to be found in these dictionaries that are ten years old or older. The Larousse Spanish dictionary of 2016, which gives 16 senses for the word género, does not mention the sociocultural or identity ‘sex’ senses either, as you can see in the entry, which is reproduced in Table 6.

As we just saw, the Academy’s 2001 dictionary makes no mention of the newer senses of the word género, but if we look at its successor, the current dictionary of the Spanish language academies, the Diccionario de la Lengua Española (DLE), we find that that a new sense has been added, and that the three grammatical senses have been consolidated, for a total of eight senses. The new sense added to the latest dictionary is defined as ‘group to which human beings of each sex belong, understood from a sociocultural point of view instead of exclusively biological’.[1]

género (Del lat. genus, -eris , linaje, especie < gignere) 1   s. m.  Conjunto de seres o cosas con caracteres comunes.     SINÓNIMO: especie 2   Grupo al que pertenecen una persona, un animal o una cosa según sus cualidades o características .     EJEMPLO: tenemos el mismo género de dudas. [‘we have the same kind of doubts’]     SINÓNIMO: clase 3   COMERCIO  Producto que es objeto de comercio .     EJEMPLO: el género está en los estantes. [‘the goods are on the shelves’]     SINÓNIMO: mercancía 4   TEXTIL  Cualquier clase de tela .     EJEMPLO: necesito tres metros de género. [‘I need three meters of cloth/material’] 5   BIOLOGÍA  Conjunto de especies animales o vegetales con ciertas características en común. 6   ARTE, LITERATURA  Categoría literaria o artística que agrupa obras semejantes en estructura, intención, índole del asunto tratado y otras características configuradas por la tradición .     EJEMPLO: cultiva el género narrativo. [‘S/he practices the narrative genre’] 7   GRAMÁTICA  Accidente gramatical que indica el sexo de las personas y animales y el que desde un punto de vista gramatical se atribuye a las cosas. 8   género ambiguo  GRAMÁTICA  Género gramatical de algunas palabras que admiten tanto la forma masculina como la femenina sin cambio de significado .     EJEMPLO: mar tiene género ambiguo. [‘(The word) mar has ambiguous gender’] 9   género chico  TEATRO  Tipo de obras teatrales de estructura sencilla, carácter popular y con partes cantadas, en especial las de finales del siglo xix y principios del xx . 10 género de punto TEXTIL, INDUMENTARIA Y MODA  Tejidos y prendas de vestir realizados con una determinada técnica de confección. 11 género epiceno  GRAMÁTICA  El de los nombres de animales cuya terminación y artículo correspondiente son los mismos para ambos sexos .     EJEMPLO: hormiga y ciervo son nombres de género epiceno. [‘(The words) hormiga and ciervo are nouns with epicene gender’] 12 género femenino  GRAMÁTICA  El que desde un punto de vista gramatical se adjudica a las personas y los animales de este sexo, y el que se atribuye de forma arbitraria a las cosas que sugieren esta distinción. 13 género lírico  ESPECTÁCULOS, TEATRO  Aquel al que pertenecen las obras teatrales cantadas. 14 género masculino  GRAMÁTICA  El que desde un punto de vista gramatical se adjudica a las personas y los animales de este sexo, y el que se atribuye de forma arbitraria a las cosas que sugieren esta distinción. 15 género neutro  GRAMÁTICA  El que desde un punto de vista gramatical no indica ningún tipo de distinción genérica entre lo masculino y lo femenino. 16 de género  loc. adj.  ARTE  Se aplica a la obra escultórica o pictórica que representa escenas costumbristas o de la vida cotidiana.

Table 208: Entry for género in Larousse’s online Spanish dictionary (2016)

(with English translations of example sentences added)[ii]

This sense is clearly equivalent to gender₂ in Stock’s classification above. Note that, crucially, the identity sense, gender₄, is not mentioned yet in this dictionary’s definitions, though that may change, for there is a tendency in progressive circles in the Spanish-speaking world to use the word género that way, calquing the way the word gender is being used in English nowadays.

Actually, the Academy’s 2005 Dicionario Panhispánico de Dudas (DPD) already foresaw some of the changes in the horizon. The DPD has a long entry on the word género which mentions the socio-cultural sense (gender₂), though strongly discourages us from using género as equivalent or euphemism for sexo (gender₁). Note, however, that there is no mention of gender₃ or (identity-based) gender₄ in the DPD. The following is what the DPD has to say about the ‘socio-cultural sex’ sense of género and its relationship with the term sexo:

To designate the organic, biological condition, by which living beings are male or female, the term sexo should be used... Therefore, words have género (and not sexo), while living beings have sexo (and not género). However, in the 1970s, with the rise of feminist studies, the term género (Eng. gender) began to be used in the Anglo-Saxon world with a specific technical meaning [my italics], which has spread to other languages, including Spanish. Thus, in feminist theory, while the word sexo designates a merely organic, biological category, the term género refers to a sociocultural category that implies differences or inequalities of a social, economic, political, labor nature, etc. It is in this sense that expressions such as estudios de género [‘gender studies’], discriminación de género [‘gender discrimination’], violencia de género [‘gender violence, gender-based violence, gender-related violence’], etc. can be interpreted. Within the specific field of sociological studies, this distinction can be useful and even necessary. It is inadmissible [my italics], however, to use the word género without this precise technical meaning, as a mere synonym of sexo, as seen in the following examples… (DLE, 2005)[2]

[GO TO PART 10]

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[1] Original: ‘3. m. Grupo al que pertenecen los seres humanos de cada sexo, entendido este desde un punto de vista sociocultural en lugar de exclusivamente biológico’ (DLE, 2022.07.04).

[2] Original: ‘Para designar la condición orgánica, biológica, por la cual los seres vivos son masculinos o femeninos, debe emplearse el término sexo: «En el mismo estudio, las personas de sexo femenino adoptaban una conducta diferente» (Barrera/Kerdel Adolescente [Ven. 1976]). Por tanto, las palabras tienen género (y no sexo), mientras que los seres vivos tienen sexo (y no género). No obstante, en los años setenta del siglo XX, con el auge de los estudios feministas, se comenzó a utilizar en el mundo anglosajón el término género (ingl. gender) con un sentido técnico específico, que se ha extendido a otras lenguas, entre ellas el español. Así pues, en la teoría feminista, mientras con la voz sexo se designa una categoría meramente orgánica, biológica, con el término género se alude a una categoría sociocultural que implica diferencias o desigualdades de índole social, económica, política, laboral, etc. Es en este sentido en el que cabe interpretar expresiones como estudios de género, discriminación de género, violencia de género, etc. Dentro del ámbito específico de los estudios sociológicos, esta distinción puede resultar útil e, incluso, necesaria. Es inadmisible, sin embargo, el empleo de la palabra género sin este sentido técnico preciso, como mero sinónimo de sexo, según se ve en los ejemplos siguientes: «El sistema justo sería aquel que no asigna premios ni castigos en razón de criterios moralmente irrelevantes (la raza, la clase social, el género de cada persona)» (País [Esp.] 28.11.02); «Los mandos medios de las compañías suelen ver como sus propios ingresos dependen en gran medida de la diversidad étnica y de género que se da en su plantilla» (Mundo [Esp.] 15.1.95); en ambos casos debió decirse sexo, y no género. Para las expresiones discriminación de género y violencia de género existen alternativas como discriminación o violencia por razón de sexo, discriminación o violencia contra las mujeres, violencia doméstica, violencia de pareja o similares’ (DPD, 2005).

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[i] Cf. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english-spanish/gender (2022.07.04)

[ii] Source: https://www.diccionarios.com/diccionario/espanol/g%C3%A9nero (2022.07.04)